10. His Mother’s Girlhood and Marriage

Ira and Ursula Duff, Alwyn’s maternal grandparents, were unhappily

married; moral fanaticism and the extraordinary strength of both their

characters had made of this common situation a bizarre tragedy. He was

despotic and malicious, but she had succeeded, by intelligent malice

and courage, in living in harmony with him, if not in peace. He was

consistently insincere; she was too haughty to hide her resentment or

explain it, and in general bore all the blame. Even their two sons,

when as adolescents they ran away from home, muttered that it was their

mother who was a demon.

She was a woman of singular beauty; her regular features wore a

scarcely perceptible grimace of disdain; her protuberant eyes were

piercing and sad. As she uttered the most cruel opinions very audibly,

very mildly, there was never a trace of emotion in her melodious

voice. All those who had anything to hide, even from themselves, had

reason to fear or detest her; and her husband made friends with them

on that basis. Accused by resentful neighbors and relatives of being

unworthy of affection, she was too candid in her own defense; which

not only offended the few admirers of her virtue and intelligence who

accused her of nothing, but exposed her anew to her husband’s skillful

vindictiveness.

So it was in an atmosphere of anger and idealism that Alwyn’s mother

grew up, devoutly sheltered from immorality and irreligion, cruelly

exposed to still more cruel passions: a lonely little girl singing old

hymns and memorizing long rhymed prayers in the shadow of a woman’s

disaster, watching intently with large, gray-green eyes, but asking no

questions.

As a child of eight Marianne saw that her mother had no friends, clung

to her as if to hide the fact that no one else had the courage to love

her, and began to receive in consequence all the tenderness of which

that supposedly hard heart was capable.

At the age of twelve she had to admit that her mother was in fact proud

and mercilessly outspoken, and had to learn not to try to defend her,

even against schoolmates who had heard that she was a sort of witch.

When her brothers left home, Marianne would have hated them for their

injustice and lack of respect, had not the Gospels which her mother

read aloud to her every afternoon expressly forbidden hate. Before

she was fourteen she realized that her father had fostered their

resentment; that her mother’s unpopularity as a whole was his work;

that he was a sort of sorcerer, unctuous and loquacious, who had shut

her up behind an impenetrable wall of his deceit, his pathos, his

private unkindness and public saintliness, where she was growing old

angrily, like an innocent prisoner in a mysterious jail.

Then, as ignorant people fear death and happy people, pain, Marianne

feared the further effects of his malice. What was to protect her when

her turn to be its victim came? At fifteen she prayed every night and

morning that he might grow gentle by a sudden disenchantment; but later

she imagined that there were pure spirits who may not change, and

thereafter pitied him, more or less as the devil has always been pitied

by devout women.

His hypocrisy put her on her guard against life’s prevailing hypocrisy.

Her mother’s utter loneliness suggested the solitude of the soul which

only living for others could alleviate. Continually on trial before

those whom she knew, her mother was like all men and women before God

sitting in judgment. It was easy to conceive a half-divine Spirit, all

malice, in the image of her father; and to love so cold and enigmatic

a mother confidently was in itself a sort of mysticism. It was but

a short step to that of the Protestant faith: the lonely effort to

distinguish every false appearance from its hidden reality and the

entire world of this world from the immortal universe; the hopeless

effort to discover how to be free of the one and serve only the other.

In the month of June of her sixteenth year, in the presence of everyone

she knew, she was baptized by immersion in the Anne River during a Free

Will Baptist revival.

Her father offered a long, vain prayer at the water’s edge. The people

of the congregation, otherwise merely those who detested her mother,

drew closer like a crowd of saints--hard, loving faces all scarred

with shadows under the willows, in the summer sunshine. She took three

steps forward on the spongy bank. Then the first touch of the cold

current seemed to burn her bare feet, and the minister’s arms hurt her

a little as they bent her backward. For a moment she believed that she

was drowning, infinitely far beneath the suffocating, bitter, heavy,

noisy water, though the Anne River was shallow.

Later she cried uncontrollably in her mother’s arms; but when she

recovered from the shock of the ceremony, she found that she was happy

and felt that she needed her mother less than before. By the river

water, by the pure shame and excitement, an ignorant girl had been made

responsible to God--lonesomely so, without an intermediary--for a grown

woman’s life. She was as jealous of that responsibility as if it were

pure love; not even her mother should share it. This was formally the

end of childhood. But she believed that she could keep its happiness

as long as she kept its purity. Happiness was a duty as well as a

miracle....

Meanwhile her mother’s melancholy increased, and after her baptism

Marianne regarded it with a new, anxious independence. Her mother was

as pure as a child. But did not virtue lead to happiness? What was it,

then, which ruled her, and took away her illusions, and led her on from

one defiance to another, the days of her life leading nowhere? If she

imitated her mother, where would she be led? She was afraid to follow

further, even in imagination.

In her nineteenth year she had a strange dream. There was a tall hedge

of exceedingly dark foliage, and suddenly the thick leaves were drawn

apart like a curtain. Her mother entered between them, very quick

and stately, as if upon a stage or into a circus (though Marianne had

never been to the theater and had seen only the outside of a circus

tent). The dream went on; she grew more and more frightened. Her mother

rode an iron-gray horse, seated upon a woman’s saddle, her full skirts

folded and wrinkled in a great heap behind her, wearing a small hat

with a red veil, holding in her hands a bow and arrow. She rode out of

the woods and down along the river in which Marianne had been baptized,

and splashed into the water; and wherever she went, all those who were

not pure of heart fell down and disappeared--not because she wished

them harm, but because neither their joy nor their sadness could be

compared with her sadness. And although she came out of the forest

as a sort of Diana--Diana dressed as women did dress in Marianne’s

girlhood--Marianne understood that she had been driven there like a

hunted animal, and had merely disguised herself as a huntress in order

to escape.

That dream so minutely painted, that hour of sleep drawn tight like a

piece of canvas, hung for months, a bright, heavy picture, over the

bed in which she slept. It drifted out of itself into other dreams,

mingling with their lack of meaning, and troubled her for days at a

time.

Thereafter she loved her mother without trying to draw any conclusions.

Virtue did lead to happiness.... In her mother’s life, childlike

purity had led only to an old woman’s despair (for she was already

growing old); but that life was exceptional and not for her to try to

understand. Such an extremity of sadness was a wild thing, dangerous

even to see. It was as if God had permitted a heathen disaster to

take place, perhaps merely to show His mystery, perhaps to teach His

angels a lesson; there was nothing in it for human beings, at least for

Marianne, to learn....

And thereafter she would no sooner have thought of going to her mother

for advice than of kneeling in the woods before an Indian mound, or

whispering her troubles to a spring of cold water, like a savage. Thus,

uneasily, her thought ran ahead of her from day to day toward the

future, very softly, very fatally, coming between her and her mother,

until her twentieth year, when she met with the accident of love.

One evening in the spring of that year, outside the Hope’s Corner

schoolhouse, Ralph Tower, without warning, lifted both her hands and

took her lips between his lips--for one second that was long. They were

standing in the dark on the trodden ground under a honey locust in

bloom which poured its fragrance down upon their heads. Marianne felt a

painful astonishment--a strange emotion, because the astonishment was

recognition and the pain seemed to be a privilege.

“I’m sorry,” Ralph muttered, and ran and stumbled back to the bright

schoolhouse, where a party was in progress.

He had left her all alone. Luxuriously the locust shook out its flowers

in dead-white clusters. There was no warmth in the blood which ran up

and down her veins. She stood there, trembling, and did not cry.

Then she realized that even as a little girl she had been pleased

by this boy who was now a man, and that suddenly she had been made

a woman. Her modesty had prevented her from counting the number

of recollections which had linked her to him with that prolonged

attentiveness which is the innocent heart’s way of hoping. If she had

counted them, she would have been afraid to come out alone with him in

the dark. Now it was too late, but she could not keep from doing so,

nevertheless.

The people in the schoolhouse (her mother, her father, perhaps even

Ralph--all that family sang) began an old song, _Farmer in the Dell_.

As automatically as an echo, her mind repeated the words after them,

though she could hear only the tune. But instead of going inside, she

crept into her father’s carriage in the shed until her mother came out

to find her and they went home.

No one had ever touched her before. Her mother had taught her that she

should never be kissed except by the man who loved her, whom she loved,

and whom she would be permitted by marriage to love as long as she

lived; to her sober spirit this had seemed very natural. For another

month she was confident in the future--that is, in their eventual love,

betrothal, and marriage; but her confidence steadily diminished.

But Ralph said nothing about it, indeed avoided every opportunity to

see her alone; and whenever they happened to meet, some sort of fear

was evident from his expression. She read its meaning: fear of what she

had been led to expect, fear of consequences.... She tried to believe

that she misunderstood it; she tried to endure her final conviction

that she had not. She did not complain to her mother; she tried not to

do so even in whispers to herself.

She could make no effort, neither ask for an explanation nor undertake

even the humblest tentative of intimacy. This was a woman’s weakness;

but by protecting her from further humiliation, it counted as strength,

and she resented it as strength; for she thought that she would like to

pay her humiliation the compliment of illness or even death.

She had nothing to look forward to, so she looked back at her lost

innocence, the reverse of a promised land, exaggerating its perfection

and its peace. So swiftly, so gently, so thoroughly, her happiness

had been undone.... As a flying seed will debauch a whole meadow with

flowers, one kiss, one caress not even wished for, had spoiled her

peace of mind, even her good health. For there were rhythms in her body

to which she stumbled impatiently when she went out to walk alone.

There was fever in her forehead, and an abnormal snowy freshness on

her lips and tongue. Her pillow was full of faces which were terribly

alike, and when finally she fell asleep, her own hands touched her and

woke her up, seeming to be the young farmer’s hand which had taken them

that night against her will, and locked them both easily in its palm,

and let them go again too soon, also against her will. Her will was

weak and wasted itself upon opposite wishes....

When she had explained why she had hid in the carriage outside the

schoolhouse, her mother had said, “Now you must forget all about it.”

She envied the simplicity of this attitude, ready now to pay its price

in sorrow, since there was sorrow in any case. But if the episode

had actually been repeated, as it was in several misty dreams during

the summer, she would have kept her own counsel. She was no longer a

young girl over whom a mother may watch, but more a woman than her

mother, who had left a part of womanhood behind her when she lost her

confidence in others, her readiness to weep, her hope. Marianne had

hope, though nothing to hope for; and tears often refreshed her as her

mother was never refreshed by anything.

Meanwhile, the midsummer peonies broke into bloom, and their stems

broke down under the weight upon the shabby lawns. Her mother’s little

peacock opened its feathers and fanned itself nervously, and before it

rained fluttered upon the gables, whimpering in a clear, disagreeable

voice. The sun rose in what had been the dead of night, wearing upon

the horizon a bright humidity like a mask of hot iron and pearls....

And perpetually she saw in imagination the strong, homely young

farmer’s face, visibly, invisibly, beside everything which her small

world contained, as if it were a tear in the corner of her eye.

What had she done to deserve this misery--sickness and magic mixed? Had

she ever wished for love? Never--not in a single daydream, not for one

lonely moment of unwilling aloofness among other girls in love. Ralph

alone was to blame.

She thought that it was her Christian training which enabled her

to forgive him, but found forgiveness all too easy, being merely a

disguise of love. Until she stopped forgiving him--that is, stopped

loving him--he would continue to hurt her; there would be continually

more for which he would have to be forgiven. So, because she loved him,

she ought to do penance for the wrong he had done, by hating him....

She could not even keep clear in her mind these duties of disappointed

love, much less accomplish any of them.

There were other sources of bewilderment. For one whose eyelids

droop and whose eyes ache, the world itself seems to be shrunken and

inflamed; so the atmosphere of her home grew even more sinister than it

had been when, but for its unhappiness, she would have been happy. It

would not be difficult, now that she knew the sickness love produced,

to keep her virtue perfect; but with her heart so stripped of its

indifference, so stimulated as if by a drug, she began to fear for her

faith, dreading the influence upon it of her mother’s loveless irony,

her father’s piety and lies.

So she resolved to leave home as soon as possible. In the autumn she

went away to a teachers’ college, and soon after Christmas accepted

a vacant position in a Sheboygan school. She should have been happy

there. Her slight beauty ripened with a delicate solemnity; she had

inherited her mother’s good taste in dress and gestures and ways of

speech, which emphasized her gentle virtues; and she was loved by

everyone. Loneliness had been a child’s palace and stronghold, but

since it had been broken into by the young farmer, the image of whose

briefly passionate face she could not put out, she was afraid to stay

in it. So she made friends with Evangeline Gay, a woman ten years older

than she who had a small independent income and lived with a brother

and his wife; and later accepted the attentions of a suitor named Paul

Fairchild, the son of the Episcopalian bishop of Sheboygan.

Having prepared himself for the law and then lived in England with his

mother’s relatives, Paul Fairchild had come back to Wisconsin to rest

after an illness. He was idle, romantic, and not quite candid; the sort

of young man who seems to be a bachelor as soon as boyhood is over,

very likely to be passionately in love, but unlikely to attach much

importance to the fact.

Marianne took pleasure in his politeness and his culture. Hoping it

was true, she wrote to her mother that if he continued to deserve

her respect, she might learn to love him and be willing to consider

becoming his wife.

Her father got up in the night, took the letter from the pocket inside

her mother’s skirt as he often did, read it, replaced it, and the next

morning began to announce to his friends and his enemies, “My daughter

is engaged to the Episcopalian bishop’s son.”

Bishop Fairchild was a famous man; his son, who had lived in his

father’s diocese only a few months at a time, had aroused everyone’s

curiosity. Emphasized by Ira Duff’s extravagant way of speech, the news

traveled quickly and widely.

Late one afternoon Paul Fairchild came into Marianne’s schoolroom and

said, “Your father says that we’re engaged. So much the better. I love

you.”

Shocked and confused, ashamed of having written anything to her mother

before he had spoken, Marianne did not deny it, did not protest, and

was scarcely aware of his discourtesy. But, pressing her hands against

his shoulders, she did avoid his kiss.

“Please go now. I have work to do. I must--” She lost her voice. She

sat down at the desk. Her cold fingers fluttered the sheets of paper on

which her pupils had written themes; on the first page she read, in a

small boy’s determined hand, “The Stars.” She saw, far off at the left,

the winter sun going down, divided into squares by the window.

“Please go. I must work,” she repeated; and then her body sagged

against the table--she had fainted away. Her head fell forward and lay

on the pile of themes as if it were a pillow.

The young man caught her shoulders so that she did not slip out of the

chair, and stood there in stupid astonishment, unable for a moment to

rouse himself from his emotions of a lover. Out of a great white jug

marked _Water_ drops fell in threes to the pail below with the rhythm

of a waltz. But he could not move to put water on her face without

letting her fall....

In the school yard several pupils drew near; one of them was crying;

one spoke loudly in a sneering voice. The young man was embarrassed;

if they should come in.... He judged by the sound of their voices that

they were old enough to understand, to misunderstand.

He lifted Marianne in his arms and put her down on a bench. Then he

took one of her hands to kiss it, but at that moment her heavy, weak

eyelids opened. “The Stars,” she said. “Oh, what is it? What has

happened?”

The young man smiled and looked ashamed.

“I am all right now.” She drank a glass of water eagerly, as if it were

from thirst that she was suffering. “Please go.”

But he did not move. Then she saw his troubled eyes running to the

windows and the door, and understood him better; so she added: “You

must. I asked Evangeline Gay to come here for me.”

He left her alone, seeming glad of an excuse.

It was a poor excuse, for she had asked no one to come. She dragged

herself back through the snow to the house where she lived, and with

ice-cold hands laid herself in her bed as if she were a dead body.

She felt little resentment toward her father or either of her lovers.

What had happened was more odious than human conduct could be; it was

like an illness, like the progress of an illness from the forefinger to

the ring finger, from the arm to the breast, and so on.... An illness

which would not even kill her; but her self-respect was dead--worn out,

suffocated, filthily bandaged, and still sore, though it was dead.

If life was like this, was she duty bound to live? If her soul was

immortal and could be so compromised, would it do any good to die?

Marriage sprung like a trap beneath her driven feet; God the father as

dishonest as her father, tricking her with accidents....

For a moment, in her sorrow, she destroyed her God. Horrified by the

involuntary evil of her thought, she beat her forehead with her fists,

closed her eyes, and wished that she might never have to open the

latter again as long as she should be obliged to live. For a moment she

had destroyed God; but because she loved Him, she created Him again.

So she determined to accept it all: the consequences of her mother’s

betrayal, her father’s lying, Ralph’s neglect, and Paul Fairchild’s

love. Crumpled up on the bed, stone-cold in the cold, red light of

the sunset which poured through the window, she fought intelligently

to keep her soul from falling down to hell. For if she rejected what

God permitted, she believed, it would fall and change as it fell, as

certain angels had done, into a dead-alive thing whose eternity was all

one such afternoon....

But could she, with courage and intelligence, hold herself at a certain

altitude above all evil, including death--as the wings of a bird hold

it for a moment in the air after a bullet has lodged in its heart,

opened its heart? Could such a moment last as long as her life? She

spread out in imagination her youth and her bravery as if they were

wings. Suddenly she felt that she was ready--that is, ready to marry

Paul Fairchild. And he should not discover what was in her heart;

Ralph should not either, nor, perhaps, should God.... She would lie

to them faithfully by the way she would live; she would love them all

three equally.

Something like a soothing drug was running in her veins where the blood

had seemed to cease to run. Her landlady knocked at the door and called

her to supper; she did not answer.

She lay there without answering until she heard a familiar whistling.

Then she rose and slipped carefully along the wall toward the window

until she could see into the street where Paul Fairchild was gazing up

over the hedge with a bunch of yellow roses in his hand. Hiding behind

a half-closed shutter, Marianne tried to like his vague, intelligent

face and at this distance, unknown to him, to enjoy the roses. He

whistled again; she did not show herself at the window. To-morrow she

would be ready for him.... She studied his anxiety and discontent, and

watched him go away.

That night she wrote a letter to her mother to announce her engagement

definitely, phrasing it in such a way as to put her father in the right

without asking what had happened to betray her.

The night was as long as a lifetime. In effect, so strong was her

imagination, it was a lifetime--that of Paul Fairchild’s wife. She

was by nature and training too just to think that the future would

be uniformly unhappy; but a definite distaste was occasioned by her

anticipation of certain pleasures and rewards which ought to fulfill,

but would surely fail to fulfill, her dearest hopes....

Nevertheless, she was content with her decision--above all, proud of

it. Her loneliness, if she did not marry, would be a perpetual reproach

to Ralph for the wrong he had done her; and altogether womanly in her

passion, she believed that she did not want him to have to give it a

moment’s thought. Now that she had given him up, she could say proudly

to herself as often as she liked that she loved him, which helped her

endure the humiliating fact that he had never loved her. And when, just

before the dawn, she said her prayers, bowing before God’s pride, she

gave thanks as well for her own, saying that it was the spirit of God

in her heart. Her mother, under different circumstances, had said as

much.

Marianne’s engagement to Paul Fairchild lasted all that summer. She

became the governess of a banker’s children in order not to have to

return to Hope’s Corner. Her mother believed that she wanted to be with

her future husband, and referred to her happiness in every letter with

an unhappy woman’s skepticism and envy.

But by autumn Marianne had given up hope of every sort of happiness.

Her thought was all anger, and it trembled upon her lips in sentences

already formed; so she began to have to look forward shamefully to the

time when she would be saying things as spiteful as those for which her

mother was famous. All her life she had seen what marriage could be at

its worst--hers would be as bad; even her good qualities would play an

evil rôle, as her mother’s had done. Her life, more and more like her

mother’s, more and more thoroughly spoiled.... An unkind fate having

set to work to spoil it, she herself had added the finishing touch by

promising to marry.

Every day she told herself that she ought formally to break her

promise. But Paul loved her; he would be crafty as he had been in the

beginning; she was tired--increasingly tired since that night in the

spring when with such difficulty she had made up her mind to do what

was still undone. So tired that the events of the past and finally

those of the present merely haunted her, as life haunts one upon a sick

bed who may be alive and may be dead, who cannot tell.... Day by day

the future tiptoed carefully across the present into the past without

waking her from this nightmare of being about to marry a man whom she

did not love in the least.

Often she did not think of him as her future husband, and he did

not always try to usurp a husband’s privileges. Then she found him

an agreeable companion, distracting her attention even from their

relationship, consoling her even for distress which he alone had caused.

But by the autumn she was entirely disillusioned as to his character.

He was weak, indolent, naturally irreligious, naturally libertine. He

gave her no opportunity to know his father, the bishop, never spoke of

his mother, and expressed no desire to visit her parents. He seemed

unwilling to wait for God’s blessing upon their union, and meanwhile

did not help her to fix a date for the marriage.

Patiently, tactfully, with that deliberate pretense of innocence which

is the youngest and purest form of cynicism, she avoided his caresses.

Often she tried to persuade herself of an emotion which even then it

was her duty to feel, or tried to believe that she would love him in

time, in due time. On these occasions she realized that she would never

marry him, and was bitterly ashamed of herself for not telling him so.

During the summer he found two gaited horses which he could rent, and

taught Marianne to ride. On a gray horse, in a broadcloth dress turned

into a riding habit, she looked exactly as her mother had looked in

the dream two years before, and often thought of the resemblance. One

afternoon late in October they rode out along the bluffs over Lake

Michigan, and came to a wooded hill surrounded by a fence, and could

not find a gate. So they dismounted, tied the horses, and made their

way up through the woods toward a little cliff which they had seen from

the road, in order to look down from it upon the lake.

The ironwoods made a pallid, artificial evening, in which Marianne

observed an ugly expression on Paul’s face: a repeated look sideways,

a crude, unspoken syllable in one corner of his mouth, a stiff wrinkle

from one temple to the other across his forehead.... He walked a step

or two behind, stared hard at her, and stumbled. Glancing back over her

shoulder, Marianne watched this expression with eager, unsympathetic

interest, seeing suddenly that his love, if it were provoked, might

provoke her hate, and so set her free. They came out under the harder

stare of the whole sky in the clearing on top of the hill.

Among the rocks they found a grassy hollow shaped like a large

armchair. They were above the horizon like a thin-lipped shell and

above a dripping cloud which lay in it; above the lake covered with

tight indentations and ribbons of foam which were continually being

tied and torn; above a fish hawk which continually went down and made

mistakes at the surface of the water.

But suddenly Paul cried, “This is nonsense!” and began to pleat her

skirt with his nervous hands.

She frowned and shrank away from him. “Don’t. I don’t understand--”

“I love you,” he stammered. “I want you to love me. Of course you

don’t.” He was panting between his words. “You sit there like an old

woman. Sit and admire nature!”

The fish hawk dropped again, plunging into one of the indentations and

breaking a great cord of foam. Paul’s hands were fighting with her left

hand. “Paul,” she said, “you do not wish to offend me. You don’t know

what you are doing. I am afraid of you. Get up. We must go back. If you

love me, you don’t want to hurt me. Wait--”

“Wait.... No. If you love me--now. Don’t talk religion to me. I’ve

heard nothing else all my life and it hasn’t made me any happier or

better. Now. We are engaged. It is enough.”

Marianne knew then that she had a right to hate him. “We were engaged.

We were, until to-day. I break my engagement now. Let me go. I tell

you, I will not marry you.” She hated him because he smiled.

“You’d better not,” he said. “You’d better not. Listen. Two girls

promised to marry me before. They weren’t so good as you are. Everybody

knew; nobody has paid any attention to them since. I hated them. If you

don’t marry me, people will think--they always do, anyway. You can’t

always do what you like--I love you too much.” He was smiling, but his

eyes were full of tears.

The sweat sprang in the palms of Marianne’s hands. He had come closer

and closer to her. She tried to say to herself that he was out of his

mind and not to blame. She struck him full in the face. At that moment

she was glad, for she knew that they were done with each other at last;

having had to defend herself, she would not even be able to pity him

again.

He sprang to his feet and stumbled a little way off under the trees.

He was pacing up and down and beating the ground with a stick like a

desperate child.

Then Marianne got up and ran down through the woods. He did not see

her in time, and she reached the fence before he did. When she untied

her horse, its panic told her what to do: she struck it across its

nose with the reins; it galloped away. Then she mounted Paul’s horse

fearlessly, shamelessly as well--having to sit astride because of the

saddle, her skirts pulled up almost to her knee. He tried to follow her

a little way on foot; she left him behind. At the edge of the town she

tied the horse to another fence. No one who knew her saw her come home.

She lay across the bed with her feet and one hand hanging toward the

floor; a sort of sick paralysis held her there. When Paul Fairchild had

tried to hold her on the hilltop, she had said to herself, “This kiss

will not hurt me as much as the other did.” She had been mistaken; she

was going to be ill.

Her landlady came up to her room. “I am not well,” she explained. “I

felt bad; I fainted away.”

“Shall I send for the doctor?”

“No. I feel better. I got too tired riding. It will be over in a few

minutes. Ask Evangeline Gay to come.”

Evangeline Gay stood at the foot of the bed. The girl’s eyes and mouth

were empty of emotion--they told her anxious friend nothing; but her

nervous hands, along the ruffle of the pillow and up and down the

pleats of her riding habit, like those of a deaf mute, spelled out an

extreme distress. She had a slight fever and a greatly accelerated

pulse.

“You poor child,” Evangeline said, “whatever is the matter, it has gone

on long enough. You’re going to give up your school. I’m going to take

you home. If you’re not strong enough to talk me out of it, you’re weak

enough to do as I think best.”

Marianne obeyed orders in order not to have to talk. Furthermore, she

was ill and would not dare to get well in Sheboygan, for Paul Fairchild

would be there at the foot of the bed as soon as she could be seen. He

came the next morning, but Evangeline had instructed the people of the

house to send him away. At noon they set out together for Marianne’s

home.

Mrs. Duff met them with a horse and buggy at the Aaronsville station.

As they passed the Hope’s Corner schoolhouse, Marianne slipped out of

the seat and hid her drawn face in Evangeline’s lap. The mother, who

was driving, scarcely glanced at her, but stared fiercely over the

playground, among the monuments and trees of the cemetery, and across

the withered cornfields, as if to discover there who or what it was

that had made her daughter ill.

It was a false illness, a mere excuse for her distress of which she

could give no other explanation. So except for that moment under the

honey locusts which leaned out from the school grounds, Marianne was

able to control it until they reached home. But when at last she lay in

her own bed, a fever declared itself with great force. It seemed to be

a breathing, solid body like that of a human being; it curled up beside

her on the same pillow, and slipped over and rested on her breast. She

slept under its weight, and there, weeping softly even in her sleep,

she was as happy as she expected ever to be again.

Evangeline was introduced to the father, a handsome man with curls in

his beard and large eyes that resembled lumps of some kind of blue

stone. “I hope our girl hasn’t been led into temptation off there away

from her folks and home influences,” he said. “People’s tongues will be

wagging--”

“You would do well,” his wife interrupted, “not to speak evil of her

yourself.”

The two women waited for him to leave them alone. Then the mother

cried, “What ever has happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it the fault of that man she means to marry?”

“She said nothing against him.” There was a pause, neither knowing

what the other expected of her. “I must go back to Sheboygan in the

morning,” Evangeline added. “She will be all right. She needed rest.”

The proud woman begged her to stay. “Marianne enjoys perfect health--it

is one of the few things I am proud of. There is some mystery about

this. And I am afraid that she will never tell me what the matter is.

She had grounds for believing that I would disapprove of any man she

meant to marry. You see, my own marriage, though my husband and I are

God-fearing and resigned, is not all that it should be.” She made this

confession without a sign of embarrassment. “But Marianne will not be

afraid to tell you her romantic notions, because you have never been

married.”

Ira Duff came into the room. “You understand,” he said mournfully,

“my wife is fittingly upset, for it was she who encouraged Marianne

to leave home against my will, and hid from me this engagement to the

bishop’s son as long as she could.”

His wife laughed softly. “As long as I could wasn’t very long, for

you’re as good as any pickpocket to ferret out my letters, and better

than a town crier to make our secrets the talk of the whole country.”

Evangeline was afraid to leave her friend alone in such a house.

The village doctor came, failed to identify an actual illness or

to find a satisfactory explanation of the symptoms there were, and

prescribed rest and one or two innocuous remedies, glancing meanwhile

with dull suspicion at Mrs. Duff, as if she were the cause of it all.

Evangeline established herself in the bedroom to watch. Marianne slept

and pretended to sleep. Often her face was languid and haughty--the

face of a middle-aged woman strong enough to die of an exceptional

weakness, without explanations, mutely. Evangeline said to Mrs. Duff:

“It is a sickness. I am not a doctor. She has nothing to tell. I had

better go back to Sheboygan and ask no questions.”

But Marianne smiled half-heartedly one morning, and asked to have some

flowers and one of her mother’s potted plants brought up to her room.

She said that she was hungry, though she scarcely touched the tray when

it came.

The next day was the Sabbath. The Free Will Baptists of Hope’s Corner

had united with the Presbyterians of Aaronsville, and the minister had

another congregation to preach to in the morning; so services were held

at three o’clock. Marianne’s cousin, Clara Peters, a grim woman who had

married beneath her, came to spend the afternoon, and Evangeline went

to church with Mr. and Mrs. Duff. They got home just before supper and

found Marianne alone. “Poor Clara discouraged me,” she explained, “and

I sent her off to her mean husband.”

After the evening meal she asked for the Bible with the largest print,

and held it up resolutely toward the lamp until her mother left the

room. Then she said to her friend, “You were late coming back from

church. Whom did you see? Where did you go?”

“We went home with the Towers. Your mother wanted to visit that old

bachelor who has been sick, Mr. Leander. He was all wrapped up in crazy

quilts. He said--”

But Marianne had turned pale; it was as if a heavy white net had been

thrown suddenly over her face, in which her bright eyes seemed to

have been caught and lay burning, lay very still; in which her mouth

struggled and finally lay still.

And her friend remembered how, in the uncomfortable pew, Mrs. Duff had

lifted the cape of her coat and whispered behind it: “Do you see the

young man sitting with his folks in the first row by the window? They

are the Towers, the finest people in the country. I thought a few years

back that Marianne had lost her heart to that young Ralph, the one

of their sons who is here. Nothing came of it, of course, and anyway

I guess the Towers wouldn’t care to be connected by marriage with my

husband....”

Now, at the mention of them, Marianne’s face turned white and lay still

as if it had been caught in a net. A net of misery, excitement, and

hopelessness and hope interwoven.... The spinster put out her hand

quickly as if to catch hold of a thread by which it might be undone,

and said at once, conscious of her cruelty: “Marianne, I must go back

home. And you know, I shall have to see Paul Fairchild. What shall I

tell him?”

The girl lifted her head from the pillow. “I have nothing to say to

him. I shall not see him again.”

“What did he do to you?”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t care what he does. I never cared what he

did. I’m sorry,” the girl whispered.

The older woman whispered as well: “Then there is another--some

other--then that other one is ... The one you do love.”

Marianne turned scarlet. “No, I--haven’t any right.... How do you....

He--”

Then for a few minutes there was nothing for her friend to do but

watch a pitiful spectacle: the girl tossing on the bed in a sort of

infant agony, and stuffing the bedclothes in her mouth, and beating the

pillows.

Evangeline heard Mrs. Duff come swiftly up the staircase. But she

stopped in the corridor, where she must have been able to hear the

girl’s stifled weeping. She stood still outside the door, and then

tiptoed downstairs again, intelligently obliging Evangeline to be a

mother to her child--because she was a spinster and did not know too

much about marriage.

The girl grew quiet. Evangeline bathed her flushed face and said:

“You’d better talk to me. Now, before you stop crying. Before you get

mysterious and desperate again.”

Then she stopped crying. Suddenly she sat up in bed, and in a

monotonous tone of voice, slowly but without faltering, as if she were

remembering not the facts, but words and phrases with which she had

often told it before--to herself alone--recited, painstakingly recited,

the story of her disappointment. The sentences began with “Even when I

was a child, when we were in school together, though I didn’t know,” or

“Mother brought me up so innocently, I thought,” or “I was ashamed,”

or “It broke my heart....” They ended with “It was too late,” or “He

didn’t care and I had no right to think he did,” or “He didn’t mean

anything by it--it was all in my imagination.”

Evangeline muttered to herself: “It wasn’t. It won’t be. Not if--” She

was astonished; for suddenly there had come together in her mind all

Ralph Tower’s gestures, phrases, and expressions, that afternoon. She

examined them and compared them with what she was being told; at last

she had no doubt about their meaning. Inquiries about her happiness,

her health, her marriage; a resentful silence for several minutes after

every answer; the sound, when he did speak, of a lump in his throat;

embarrassed glances at his parents to be sure they were not listening;

his eyebrows contracted, half hiding his small eyes. Anxiety, wounded

vanity, jealousy....

Meanwhile, as if she were merely telling a story, a story which had to

be told to the end, its bitter end, Marianne went on from her brief,

humiliating encounter with one lover to her humiliating relations with

the other. “I wrote my mother about Paul Fairchild, and she let my

father think I had promised to marry him, and he told everybody.”

“She didn’t, by the way,” Evangeline said. “Your father got the letter

out of her pocket--she told me.”

“Oh,” the girl cried, and was silent for a moment, and seemed to be

staring back at her girlhood compromised, her broken heart rebroken,

her strength worn out--six miserable months which might have been

avoided. Then, less with the patience of a desperate girl than

with that of a story teller, she tried to go on where she had been

interrupted. “You see, Paul Fairchild--”

“Don’t tell me about Paul Fairchild,” Evangeline interrupted again. “He

doesn’t matter--you said so yourself.”

The girl said no more and lay staring humbly at nothing.

Her friend went over to the window. It was late at night. There were

some cattle moving in the dark in the orchard. A great, aged moon was

coming up over the country with a great quantity of amber. The turkeys

in the apple trees were awake.

Evangeline made up her mind what ought to be done for Marianne, what

she could do. Perhaps she was merely going to make a fool of herself,

not even for herself, and accomplish no more. She shed a few tears and

wiped them away.

Then she sat down again, and told Marianne exactly what Ralph Tower had

said, and how he had looked when he said it, and what she thought about

it. At last she used the word love.

Marianne, shivering, held her breath.

“You two need a go-between. Your mother will be of no use. After I’m

gone there won’t be anybody to manage things for you but God, and

whether He will or not is a question. You don’t know what this young

man’s intentions are. So I’m going to see him and find out. Your mother

ought to have done so. According to her, it was your father’s fault

that she couldn’t, because her own marriage is unhappy. I am an old

maid,” she added dryly, “and I believe in love. So to-morrow, bright

and early, I’m going to have another word or two with this young man.”

Marianne clung to her like a child and begged her not to. Evangeline

paid little attention, thinking of the task she had set herself, and

how she had better go about it. At last Marianne whispered, “Don’t tell

mother, if you are going.”

Evangeline slipped out of the house the next morning soon after

sunrise, and an hour and a half later came back, tired, grim, and

satisfied. Mrs. Duff was waiting in the garden. “Where have you been?”

she asked. “I saw you start out, but I thought best not to bother you.”

“I’ve been to the Towers’,” Evangeline said. “It is all right. Will you

drive me to the station this afternoon? For I’m not needed here any

more.”

“So that is it. The Lord preserve us,” the mother said solemnly. “There

is not a human being on this earth I have ever loved but my daughter.

And I have no faith--miserable woman that I am.”

Then Evangeline wept, and turned aside among the currant bushes. Mrs.

Duff hurried indoors, calling, “I-ra! I-ra!”

A little later, going through the hall to the staircase, Evangeline

heard Ira Duff’s resonant, false voice rising and falling in a heavy

rhythm, and saw them, the sharp-tongued wife and her hated husband,

kneeling side by side in front of the sitting-room sofa, their backs

very straight, their eyes closed, like a bride and groom before an

invisible pastor.

“You’ve been crying,” Marianne said, and tears which, according to what

her friend had to say, would be those of joy or of sorrow, came to her

eyes.

“You cry yourself, to your heart’s content,” Evangeline replied. “You

might as well cry now, for if God is good you’ll have no cause to for

many a day.” She spoke with a blunt, mechanical joyousness. “I waited

by the side of the road until he came along on his way to the cheese

factory, and then I waited for him under a tree until he got back and

came there.”

Marianne’s tears ran down across her face, without expression, still

patient; she did not succeed in speaking.

Evangeline went on hurriedly but with difficulty, trying not to

emphasize her words: “I have one question to ask you. Tell me. In so

many words. That man--I mean Paul Fairchild--he never took, he didn’t

take--I don’t want to know, it’s the man you’re going to marry. Nothing

wrong happened? That’s not why you’re so miserable, is it? That’s not

why you’re sick--”

“Stop,” the girl cried huskily. She had lifted herself in the bed upon

her elbows. Her eyes were fixed; her voice was hard, hurt, and full of

joy. “I am a good girl. He kissed me once. They, they both--did, once.”

Evangeline was ashamed of herself, of Ralph Tower, of men; so she went

on with the cruel monologue which had begun as a question. “Men always

ask that--good men, Christians. They are hard, hard. I guess it’s their

right and duty. Don’t blame him. I’ll have to see him again and tell

him, before he asks--”

“Stop, Evangeline,” the girl repeated. “I don’t blame him. I deserve

it, because.... Don’t ever speak of it again.” She closed her eyes and

whispered, “But why didn’t he tell me--all this time? Oh, why, then ...”

Therefore, dutifully, Evangeline gave a circumstantial account of the

meeting. “You know,” she had begun by saying, “you have broken that

girl’s heart.” Because she was a spinster, she had tried to put him

in the wrong. She had failed, because he had always been in love, and

because of Marianne’s engagement to the bishop’s son who had a bad

reputation, and the suspicions it had aroused.

The slight, strong man had spoken laboriously, like a giant for whom

human speech is petty and difficult. He had made up his mind when a

little boy to marry Marianne. He had been ashamed of having kissed her.

They had been too young to marry then. He had been afraid of himself,

of his own nature; self-control had always been hard for him. So he had

avoided her, until the time when, safely and honorably, he could ask

her to be his wife. Then she had gone away; he had believed that she

had forgotten or had never cared. Then she had become engaged.

In his small hazel eyes there had been a look of instinctive suspicion,

the suspicion of ultimate unhappiness which was natural to him. He had

torn up leaves by the handful with his calloused hands, and at last had

blushed under his dull sunburn. Then he had spoken soberly of his other

suspicion and had asked the question which Evangeline had not dared to

answer on her own responsibility. Then he had stood up, turned his back

on her, swung round, asked her pardon, and muttered: “Good-by. I must

get back to work.”

Evangeline, having nothing more to tell, smoothed Marianne’s forehead

with her finger tips. “You had better stop crying now,” she concluded.

“God is good. You will be happy.”

The girl leaped out of bed and fell to her knees. Evangeline left her

alone. When she returned with the mother they found her half dressed,

and with great difficulty persuaded her to go back to bed. After the

noonday meal Evangeline said good-by.

Marianne was glad that her friend was going away. She herself had to go

on to a rendezvous which no friend could keep with her, in a gleaming,

uniform solitude, a sort of wilderness--that of being loved. Innocent

and not ignorant, she trembled a little at the prospect. Not knowing

why, she kept remembering that Ralph was the best hunter in that part

of Wisconsin. She felt a jealousy of no one and a nostalgia for no

particular place. She kept remembering the kiss which had now been

justified. These things embarrassed her in Evangeline’s presence; it

was a blessing, she thought, that her mother did not believe in love

and therefore would not pay any unusual attention to her. She scarcely

paid attention to Evangeline saying good-by.

Mrs. Duff took Evangeline to the station by the road which went past

the Tower farm, and when they saw Ralph plowing in the stubble field,

the spinster got out and trudged across the furrows until she met him.

“I’m going home,” she said. “Go to see her. She is waiting. It is all

right. She is as pure as the snow. What fools we were ... Good-by.”

The young man’s body, like that of a giant, though small, sagged

against the plow handles. He hid his great hands behind his back as if

he ought to be ashamed of them. He said: “Thank you. Good-by.”

“Glory be to God, that’s all right!” Evangeline said as she climbed

back into the buggy.

“The glory of God is made of our troubles,” the older woman answered

resolutely.

Late that afternoon Ralph came to see Marianne. He sat by the bed and

could say nothing; his dark mouth covered with dust quivered instead.

He kissed her hands and hurried away.

There was no courtship. Another man had wooed her for him. God had

wooed her with His errors, His intoxicating tenderness, His intrigue.

Evangeline, who would never have a chance to speak for herself, had

spoken for her; the spirit of God, Marianne thought, in the person of

an old maid....

She grew strong quickly, realizing that she had not actually been ill.

She saw Ralph every day or two, and made friends with his father, who,

to his mother’s astonishment, was pleasant and communicative in her

company. With genuine enthusiasm Mrs. Tower accepted Marianne as her

son’s future wife and the mother of her grandchildren to be born; but

they never knew how to be intimate friends. Marianne’s own mother, in

her pride in the alliance, was happier than she had been for years.

When the tragic news of Leander’s death in Oklahoma came, she said

regretfully, “Now he will never know about the marriage....”

Marianne herself was not impatient for it to take place. Having tasted

the bitterness of man’s passion (its contagious unrest, its deliberate

neglect, its suspicion) before the sweet, she was glad to wait until

she stopped fearing vaguely that it might be altogether bitter.

The passage of time would obliterate the humiliation of her other

engagement and hush the gossip about it. Meanwhile a separate home was

being prepared for them at one end of the Tower house, where Leander

had lived. So the wedding was postponed until the following September.

Evangeline Gay and James Tower were their witnesses. Ralph’s

face--brilliant with intelligence of an unintelligible emotion, tragic

to his elders who were present, humble and sunburned--was like that of

a young wild animal being baptized. They stood up in one corner of the

parlor before a mass of asters and autumn leaves. In the midst of the

ceremony Marianne remembered her baptism in the Anne River, thinking

that the arms of the man who was at that moment becoming her husband,

those arms close beside her, very tight in the broadcloth sleeves, were

even stronger than the minister’s had been; that the flood in which she

was to be submerged this time was not cold, and would be scented with

straw of the stacks outside the window, with sheepfolds, linen, and

candle wax.

Unlike that of Cana, water was not changed into wine for this marriage.

There was but a frugal supper and little festivity. And swiftly the

wine of passion itself changed for her into the pure water of Christian

married life.

11. His Father. His Uncle Jim’s Later Life. The Religious Faith of the

Family

Alwyn’s father always loved to hunt. When he could afford it and the

farm work was not too pressing, he went north in the autumn during the

deer season. Then his brother Jim, the minister, came from Chicago with

a little armory of guns and cases of expensive fishing tackle; and the

two went off together, to forget, in a tent under the hemlocks, that

one had sacrificed his future to the other, that one was happy and the

other unhappy (though they might not have agreed which was which), and

that an abyss of prosperity and college education lay between them.

After they came back, the farmhouse smelled of hides, and for months

little meat was eaten but venison, which made Alwyn sick. His uncle

Jim’s handsome face glowed with the conventional poetry of recaptured

boyhood, with delight in the photographs which he tinted artistically

with transparent water colors, with pride in the analogies which had

been suggested to him in the north and which would serve him in many

private conversations if not in sermons.

Alwyn’s father, on the other hand, talked by the hour of exaggerated

dangers and mystifying sensations of danger where there was none; of

men who lost their compasses and strayed in circles and were found

half dead; of timber wolves baying up and down the darkness; of stags

marching slowly into clearings to keep a rendezvous with him; and he

spoke very shyly of killing things, as if to kill were a love gesture.

Then there was upon his face a shining expression of tenderness

without pity and violence without fault, which was the equivalent of

beauty--though he was what is called a homely man, with his very long

nose, his low forehead, his delicate, outstanding ears, and small eyes.

When he was first married fox hunts were still held in the

county--cutters and teams of young horses racing around the snowy

fields and marshes, and waiting here and there for the hounds to bring

the fox across the road. Now most of the hunters he knew went to the

woods merely to get drunk together away from their wives. And the

immigrants who were steadily buying up the land were not sportsmen;

they hunted out of season, only for food, and exterminated the game

fish with nets. One year he held the office of game warden, was menaced

and even stoned by loafers along the mill races in little saloon towns,

and arrested many lawbreakers. It was good sport, but very lonely;

indeed, all the sport which was left in that part of the world was

lonely.

So he took his little son with him along woodland paths where

partridges walked, moving their fine throats and crowned heads,

uttering a sort of girlish, insane cry. Or before dawn they drove many

miles--the boy wrapped up in strong-smelling blankets, the horse’s

hoofs ringing under the mist--to small, hidden lakes not yet emptied

of bass and pickerel. Alwyn held his breath as in wet boats they

ventured out from the piers as if on a pane of glass, and shuddered

automatically when a gun was fired or a bleeding bird or animal was

found in the bushes. But the company of the timorous, overwatchful

boy did not satisfy his father, then (as he grew up and his character

crystallized) embarrassed, and finally displeased him. Alwyn was

disappointed when he ceased to be taken along; for the heartbreaking

landscapes, the blue herons like dwarf angels, the stateliness of other

birds and animals just before they were disfigured by their own blood,

his father’s silent, primitive enjoyment, even his own distaste and

fright, had enchanted him.

During the winter months his father earned money as a taxidermist,

having taken lessons from a man who had spent a vacation at Hope’s

Corner when he was a boy, and later having studied it from a book. He

was remarkably skillful, and many sportsmen brought him their dead

trophies to mount, so they might hang permanently in the lodges of

secret societies, in dining rooms and dens. Alwyn invariably felt

sick when he went into the room at one end of the house which was

his workshop. Bodies of birds and small animals bleeding slowly on

newspapers, while his father imitated them with wire, tow, string, and

wet clay; the pelts drying on wooden forms and the bird skins turned

inside out, and dusted with cornmeal and arsenic; scraping-knives in

the skulls of deer; the odor of stale meat and green bone; the rank

odor of water birds’ flesh, almost black with oil....

There one winter he built a life-sized stallion on a frame of slats and

heavy wire, modeling every tendon and vein from photographs of a dead

race horse. It was so large that an opening had to be cut in the wall

to take it out. He said, “I often wonder if what they call sculpture

isn’t a lot like my work.” With the light of the desire to be proud of

himself in his eyes, he reminded one more sharply than most mature men

are able to do, of the waste, wreckage, or abandonment of gifts amid

which youth is turned into maturity.

When at last the birds balanced on curious crotches which he sought

in the woods, he put in black-headed pins, bound their feathers into

place with thread, and painted their beaks, eye sockets, and feet;

and when the raccoons, squirrels, foxes, or lynxes stood on varnished

pedestals which a cabinet maker prepared for him, he caressed and bent

their limbs, to give them back, falsely, what he and his like had taken

away--life, its grace and its agitated peace. He worked as patiently

as if he were bringing them to birth or at least bringing about a

resurrection (though he was only making their death resemble life a

little); and he tried to make Alwyn see the charm of what he was doing.

He tried in vain; the boy stared at him unhappily. There are things

which require not sensibility but the lack of it to be felt, and he was

still too imaginative to understand them. Not until he grew to manhood

was he to be able to bear the thought of his father’s intimacy with so

much agony and death.

Even then he was to remember with dismay a large snow owl caught in

a trap and brought uninjured to his father, who poured chloroform

on a handkerchief and placed it in between the bars of the cage. The

immense bird’s plumage, oyster-white and sand-white, was like velvet

embroidered with a sort of alphabet. It snapped its brutal beak and

stretched its wings as if they were lame with fatigue. It grew drowsy,

straightened its sagging neck with a royal movement, and nodded again.

At last Alwyn’s father dared to reach inside and cover its nostrils

with the cloth; and in the shadow of his large brown hand the milky

eyelids fell finally. For months thereafter Alwyn woke panic-stricken

in the middle of the night, having felt that hand passing gently over

his own face.

His father loved the lives of animals as well as their death; and in

his movements and the tone of his voice there was a charm to which,

like strong slaves, they responded humbly. Old sows let him handle

their litters, and he could make nervous ewes--who will not usually

give suck even to one of twin lambs if, having fallen unnoticed in a

corner of the fold, it does not smell like the other--accept the lambs

he offered them as their own. When the neighbors’ heifers were brought

to the barn door, his great bulls walked forth mildly as if to play

their parts in a ceremony which he had arranged.

The farmers within a radius of fifteen or twenty miles paid him to

break vicious colts. He could tell which ones had been abused; he

petted these and fed them apples and turnips; he whipped others who

had no fear. Then he would hitch one of them to a low, light cart from

which he could fall without risk, and attach to its legs a complicated

set of ropes. It would begin to kick; he would bring it to its knees,

or even throw it deftly on the ground, muttering phrases which seemed

to be hypnotic; for its ears would shiver, its wild, bloodshot eyes

roll, and convulsive sighs go in and out of its nostrils. He would

repeat these exercises with infinite patience, with obvious delight;

and at last one bad young horse would be broken and ready for work, and

another would take its place.

For minor animal diseases and in cases of emergency, he was often

called upon to serve his neighbors as a veterinary surgeon. He could

puncture the bellies of horses and cattle swollen by colic, and knew

how to make delirious stallions take bitter drenches from a bottle.

With his sleeves rolled up over his heavy upper arms, he would go

into the dark stable to deliver a young heifer’s calf by force. Alwyn

wanted to follow him on these occasions; but his father recognizing

his excessive sensibility by the fact that he felt as modest or even

ashamed in his presence as in a woman’s, he was never allowed to watch

either birth or breeding. On the other hand, he was allowed to hold the

legs of young boars and bull calves while his father castrated them,

working so deftly that they did not even scream before the last stroke.

Alwyn’s father himself believed that this was his principal talent.

“If I could have gone away to a veterinary college--” he said again

and again; the sentence never had an end. “It was fate,” he would

add, “and my father had no patience with me.” Fate personified by a

small, dyspeptic man (Alwyn’s grandfather) who had never forgiven

anything, never seemed to remember anything, and who had never changed

his mind.... Alwyn’s father would go on talking about it in a muffled

and dreamy tone of voice, but never blamed his brother. “Jim had his

chance; it was right that he should. But there was only one chance in

our family....” Then, seeking his wife’s eyes and gazing around at his

mysterious children, he would conclude, “Jim has had good luck--but I

guess I wouldn’t change places with him.”

Three or four times every year Alwyn’s uncle, the Rev. James A. Tower,

came lonesomely, complacently, back to his birthplace; and at first

Alwyn could not decide whether even he was satisfied with his lot.

He seemed to return from another world, with his suits of English

material, his thick ties made of scarcely worn ball dresses, his golf

hose, cameras, and watch fobs, his strong sentiment for nature, his

loneliness and optimism; and at first glance seemed to resemble his

poor relatives only by accident, without actual kinship....

His mother, half forgetting that he was her son, never bullied him

or forced him to take her into his confidence, and, in spite of his

cultivated imagination, never tried to explain to him her conception of

life as a great county fair, or her cult of the new moon. His little

nieces adored him because he looked happy and could afford to be

generous. Because he still loved hunting, fishing, and country food,

his brother defended him from the accusation of having changed. His

sister-in-law, Marianne, was genuinely fond of him, but, for reasons

which were obscure at first, did not approve of the life he led.

The minister brooded lovingly upon their lives, the labor, the poverty,

the narrowness of outlook, which were still established where he had

been born, comparing these things with the conditions of his later life

and calling the contrast progress. There he still saw himself as young

and marked by good fortune for the future, as in a certain mirror of

all those in the world, and in it alone, one catches a glimpse of a

face one can be proud of. There he would have denied the least of his

disappointments, and there he counted his blessings, thinking that he

saw life in proportion.

One afternoon Alwyn sat beside his uncle on a hilltop. Spread out

below them lay the farm: the poor house with its wooden coronet around

the chimney, the desperately weeded crops, the faded washing floating

between the trees, the dung heaps steaming with ammonia, the pigpens

and rusty farm machinery. The elder of its two eldest sons (Alwyn born

in the house, his uncle in what was now the woodshed) gazed down upon

it and shook his head. “I am a fortunate man,” Alwyn heard him whisper

to himself.

Three years after the marriage of Alwyn’s parents he had been ordained,

and thereafter had occupied the pulpit of a fashionable church outside

Chicago. He had preached a cheerful, modern faith, and had been

remarkably successful with young people. His resonant voice, his fine

presence, his warm but discreet social relations, had made the deacons

of his church proud, those of other churches envious. Bishops and

devout philanthropists having begun to speak of him, his ambition had

been excited anew by the ministry as a career, and he had forgotten

music and the hopes he had once founded on it.

But meanwhile he had also forgotten Irene Geiger, and had married a

wealthy girl named Caroline Fielding. Her mother and her two sisters

did not relinquish their claims upon her, especially when one of them

was ill; and she herself had always suffered from periodical nervous

pain. So the large house in Chicago and a sick room, otherwise their

nuptial chamber, in which she would crouch alone day after day and

night after night, began at once to divide her time exactly between

them. The young minister might as well have been a bachelor. At last it

seemed wise for him to retire from the active ministry for the present,

in order to live in Chicago with his delicate wife, who was also so

conscientious a sister and daughter.

His family scarcely saw her for years. At last the summer came when

she felt strong enough to be taken to the farm. There, in spite of her

sober elegance, she looked like a young actress in the common daylight:

her beauty already hardened by anxiety and authority, her youth

hampered by a quantity of parasols, smoked glasses, gloves, flowered

hats, and dark blue veils to protect her skin from the dust. With a

certain timid arrogance she seemed to welcome her new relatives on the

threshold of their own home.

She brought a quantity of missionary magazines containing pictures

of laughing, muscular savages; and the country people might have

felt that they had no place in her world, being neither prominent

representatives of Christian wealth and culture like those among whom

it was her privilege to live, nor heathens to whom it might have been

her privilege to have been sent. Alwyn and even his father wanted to

talk to her about their ambitions, but she listened with disapproval

to any expression of discontent. Her mother-in-law wanted to tell her

about the old days, but she believed that the important history of the

West was that of the development of churches, seminaries, and wealthy

families in Chicago. Everyone waited on her while she stayed. She took

pains not to reveal by too much gratitude how uncomfortable she was in

the farmhouse, and ignored its poverty, feeling that they were duty

bound to be satisfied with their station in life, as she was with hers,

and not wanting to remind them of the difference between the two.

She never remodeled her rich, draped, braided frocks no matter how the

fashions of inferior women changed; and later, when Alwyn visited her

home, he saw the kinship between them and its upholstery, its alcoves

of taffeta and plush, and the rigid brocade with which its windows were

symmetrically draped to keep out the light.

That house was a veritable museum of Middle Western luxuries. In the

bathrooms the mahogany closets, wash-bowls, and tubs were lined with

flowered porcelain; and the faucets were the heads of a number of

dogs--dead family pets, copied from the life--out of whose bronze

mouths the water trickled. Rug lay upon rug; brass lamps stood beside

music boxes, under decrepit chandeliers. A tall, stringless harp was

wrapped up like a mummy in the music room, and there was a bust of

Music with Chicago soot on its nose. The ceilings had been decorated

by an Italian professor with a mass of birds, curlicues, butterflies,

and flower beds upside down. Tiers of paintings and steel engravings

portrayed snow scenes, kittens playing with balls of yarn, missionary

dispensaries in foreign lands, and bouquets the color of moss and dried

blood. From a life-sized portrait in oils of the father of the family,

the late merchant prince Cromwell Fielding, one hard, idealistic eye,

over the wavy beard which fell to the middle of his chest, appeared

to govern the ranks of tasseled armchairs and sofas. In the dining

room great services of French china waited to be used; but in these

degenerate days there were not many people worthy of an invitation: a

few doctors of divinity, a few heroic missionaries upon furlough, a

family of cousins in the East, one of whom had been first lady of the

land, a poor cousin who had lost his money by foolish investments and

worked in a clothing store....

There, surrounded by her mother, her sisters, and these infrequent

guests, the retired minister studied, and in general failed to

understand, his wife’s extraordinary character. In it, as in the house

itself, an elaborate worldliness served as a setting for puritan

austerities; and her vanity merely emphasized her virtue. Her opinions,

varying in expression no more than if they had been memorized speeches,

her delicately self-conscious observance of the proprieties, her

chaste beauty, her air of playing a noble rôle before a chosen public,

inspired him with the awe of a child ushered for the first time into a

theater and told that the great actress is a member of his family.

Alwyn Tower, another country boy, equally sensitive to the theater and

whatever resembled it--though without the bias of his uncle’s early

ambitions and romance--was equally impressed by his aunt’s character;

but he felt an obscure fear of it as well.

Having no children of their own, they extended their hospitality to

Alwyn and thought that they were ready to make all the necessary

sacrifices for his future. His aunt’s sisters watched over him

excitably; her mother was suspicious, but found no dignified way of

expressing her displeasure at his presence; his aunt loved him sternly,

his uncle with a childless man’s embarrassment. Then from the streets

of the great city, criminally alive, draped with dirt and gas, full

of bleached and bitten faces, scented with slaughter houses, he came

and went over the threshold of the ugly palace (one of those in which

progress and millionaire civilization had been born) and watched the

events which took place inside it.

They were like the episodes of a long symbolic play at which part of

the audience may laugh, while the rest shudders at the secret meaning.

On Friday afternoon the ladies went with their own carriage and

coachman to the symphony concert, occupying the same seats as long as

they lived. A pet dog sometimes ate one of the new kid gloves which

were laid on each of their beds every Friday before lunch. On one

occasion it caught one of the canaries during its bath; one of the

sisters fainted away, and an old sewing woman sprinkled her face with

lavender water, dropped the bottle, and bandaged the bird with cotton

batting and thread. Finally this dog escaped from the house, was run

over, died, and was buried beside seven others; and the old mother,

pitifully frightened, denounced automobiles. Every Sunday morning she

sought an excuse not to go to church, usually found it, and usually

obliged one of her daughters to stay at home, lest she be lonely. She

was but superficially devout; the church was a great mansion like her

own, and she would have undertaken the menial tasks of God’s house,

as of her own, only if there had been no one to do them for her.

Fortunately her daughters felt their sacred obligation to make her

happy, by comparison with which even divine service was a sort of

self-indulgence.

Caroline Tower genuinely loved her husband, and love often produced a

vague tumult in her emotions; but logically conservative in spite of

it, she dealt with her duties in the order of time--her mother came

before her husband. She wanted him to be a clergyman: God’s house and

work came before everything in the world--except her mother’s house,

which was a sacred establishment as well, a sort of sumptuous private

chapel to the glory of motherhood, which is the source of the glory of

God.

So her husband was ignored whenever his desires conflicted with the

rulings of her conscience as a daughter. He still hoped vaguely to

bring about a change in their way of life, to rouse in her heart, even

by accident, a passion which would set aside her other obligations,

or to profit by some interference of Providence, as for example the

death, in God’s good time, of his mother-in-law, to whom he was

devoted, nevertheless. Meanwhile he believed that his family on the

farm must be satisfied with him, now that he was not merely working

for God’s kingdom of virtue, prosperity, and enlightenment, but was a

part of it himself; and though scarcely a minister of the gospel and

almost a bachelor, he was content with the exceptional dignity of his

deprivations, in a world of poorly dressed, impious, uneducated men.

Then suddenly Caroline died. Dying was just like one of her headaches;

therefore she did not realize what was happening until it was too late

to do more than think of her soul and its metamorphosis. She gazed

at her mother, her sisters, and the opulent room, as if in truth she

were leaving them behind forever and were willing to do so; but gazed

at her husband with the still sharper anguish of a mere separation.

Then her face assumed the first look of humility which he or even her

sisters had seen upon it; it became the childish face of one maddened

by regret--regret for everything believed, everything done, everything

left undone. And before the end she whispered, “In my Father’s house

are many mansions, many ...”

The family sorrow produced such a pandemonium in the house that the

horror and momentary despair of James Tower, in fact not quite a member

of the family, were scarcely observed. He hid in corners of the

drawing-rooms and the long, dim corridors when he was not needed; he

went up to Hope’s Corner and tried to hide among the flocks, trees, and

furrows of his boyhood--hiding from the storm of sorrow and waiting for

it to pass, determined to go then and take up his ministry where he had

put it down.

For a time sorrow added a certain sensuality to the abstract, liberal

doctrines which he had been taught in the seminary and sent forth

to teach; and he felt his vocation more strongly than at any other

period in his life, either before or after. He would idealize his

bereavement and make it public; it would be a consolation to others.

He would direct their eyes upward to the ideal place where--trailing

restlessly up and down, cloud folded about her distinguished head like

one of her veils--she intimidated him by her dead perfection, by the

distance between them, scarcely greater now than it had always been,

and by the gaze upon which her eyes had finally closed. Every day for

almost a year he told himself that presently he would look for a vacant

parish in which to begin the great work which everyone had expected of

him--even she, though she had previously had other things for him to do.

He had been her humble servant from the first. On her deathbed she had

rewarded him with a look which meant, he believed, that no one would

ever love him as she had loved him then, and that she regretted leaving

nothing and no one but himself. This gave him a sort of pride for which

his good fortune in other respects had not prepared him; looking back

upon that moment, making the most of that pride, he was to be even

less impatient than before with abnegation, home life, and servility.

And as the sheer pain of his loss came to an end, her presence in the

vague paradise of his memory grew less and less sufficient. He began to

remember her qualities as if he were in danger of forgetting them, and

therefore drew nearer to her mother and sisters, in whom, even during

her lifetime, her character had been reflected, shadowy aspect by

aspect.

The younger of the surviving Misses Fielding, Anne, was physically

the image of her dead sister; but her beauty had somehow vanished,

though she was still a young woman. Her strength of character, mournful

and reserved--as it were a throbbing of the atmosphere wherever she

was--resembled Caroline’s as much as one note of a great bell resembles

the next.

Miss Ada Fielding was uncannily successful with flowers, birds, and

animals, charmed little children, cheered and influenced missionaries,

invalids, and servants. But there her power ended; for the rest of the

world (in ignorance and compassion, in fear and trembling) she could

only pray. She and Caroline had saintliness in common.

For the ghostly presence of his wife’s loveliness, Jim was dependent

upon her mother, in whom--less ephemeral than the old woman’s youth and

the young woman’s very life--much of it had survived. Mrs. Cromwell

Fielding was a delicate personage in watered silk, satin, and kid,

feathers and chains, baroque pearls and enamel. Like beauty itself,

she feared nothing but death, and would not permit a funeral or a

will to be mentioned in her presence. She loved her possessions,

especially those that she could see and touch, as a naturalist loves

his dead butterflies, an alchemist the liquids in which immortality

may be in solution; and spent her time in self-sacrificing labor among

them--seeming to her son-in-law the personification of beauty, which

picks up and puts down, loses and finds, counts, multiplies, and mixes,

the base materials without which it is never seen.

Naturally these three women were opposed to his leaving them to occupy

a pulpit. For Ada he was a surviving part of her dead sister’s life,

and she wept at the mere thought of his being taken away as well, by

God. Anne suggested briefly that it was mere human vanity which made

him impatient to resume the vocation, for which, furthermore, others

were better fitted than he. Mrs. Fielding maintained that charity

and idealism began at home, which therefore was the proper place to

exercise them and serve God; it ought to be service enough for him to

serve her; and when she spoke of it, her flashing old eyes, like those

of a young temptress, made him look the other way.

There was also wealth. It was an aspect of Caroline’s character--not

merely something she had possessed--because she had always possessed

it and because she had never forgotten it for a moment without ever

having to give it a moment’s thought. In Jim’s imagination it adorned

her departed spirit as a saint’s image in a reliquary is adorned. It

hung heavily; it sparkled; it doubled and faded--bewildering to a

poor farmer’s son--in every room of the house where, like a ghost, she

seemed to stay because it was. So if he had had to leave its sacred

precincts, he would have lost her a second time; her ghost would have

died, in the great deathbed of his memory.

There was also a theological dilemma. By temperament and training

he was inclined to a very liberal interpretation of Protestantism.

Only the most arbitrary orthodoxy was suited to the strong souls of

his relatives by marriage. But if he applied that orthodoxy to their

lives as frankly and earnestly as in other quarters he was accustomed,

indeed was expected, to apply the laws of a looser belief, he would be

obliged to condemn them altogether. In his heart he could not blame

them; but he did not know how, theologically, to justify them. How, for

example, would he go about it to preach a funeral oration for one of

them? At one moment, thinking of their doctrines and listening to their

criticism of others, he would accuse them, in spite of himself, of

hypocrisy, vanity, selfishness, materialism; a moment later, he would

be idealizing them with all the force of his imagination. At last, to

his great relief, the gentleness of his nature triumphed thoroughly

over his unkind judgments.

So for this family’s sake he abandoned his ordained ambitions, as

for his own he had abandoned others. Having a talent for obedience,

naturally endowed with the patience and politeness which family life

requires, he then bent all his efforts to being a perfect son-in-law

and a widower.

When he first arrived in Hope’s Corner for one of his visits to his

brother’s family, his face would be as handsome as ever; but the

contented smile would give way slowly to a look of pleading. He was

afraid that one of those on the farm would accuse him of having given

up the ministry for mere love of luxury and idleness; he was afraid of

discovering by accident what they thought.... Knowing that his nephew

Alwyn had as little taste as he for the life of poor farmers, he would

talk to him by the hour about his melancholy as a widower, about his

problems which were insoluble though already solved; and would be

depressed by the boy’s avid, noncommittal interest, unable to judge

from it what account of his avowals would be given Ralph and Marianne.

Then he would go back gladly to Chicago, to his family by marriage,

his family by death, among whom at any rate he was not blamed, if not

highly appreciated.

In the rich house he passed the rest of his life quietly. He sometimes

thought of himself as a commoner with secret liberal views in the villa

of an old queen, having been married to one of the ladies-in-waiting.

Still in awe of its sluggish and sumptuous power, and wistfully eager

to be admired by the younger generation, such as Alwyn, he thought of

dedicating it to worthy, modern causes; but he was not certain what

they were, and had no authority in any case. For example, he would

rouse his nephew’s interest in the large library: red leather editions,

as large as dictionaries, of the Victorian poets and Shakespeare, uncut

sets of George Eliot, Dr. van Dyke, and John Burroughs, and bound

volumes of the best monthly magazines; but Mrs. Fielding would hide the

keys of the bookcases lest a volume be “mislaid.”

As time passed he rarely spoke of anything but the Fieldings,

rationalizing their prejudices, uneasily explaining and defending them,

defending without explaining himself.... Alwyn saw him give up every

least ambition save to go on being a good man and a gentleman, and

saw a series of senseless duties invented by the ladies to discipline

him, as Alwyn himself, the other farmer boy in the house, was being

disciplined.

The most serious family problem during Mrs. Fielding’s later life was

that of servants. The overfurnished mansion and its mistress both

needed the attention of maids, seamstresses, coachmen, and janitors.

As she grew older, she could not endure the presence of those whom her

daughters could find to employ. Spying upon the face of a new cook, her

fine, three-cornered eyes would discover a sort of modern insolence;

the man who came to wax the floors would anger her by a radical smile.

Present-day help had no respect for her, at least no reverence; worst

of all, they regarded her requirements as the whims of an old lady who

would soon be out of the way. It was as if she saw death making use

of their eyes to intimidate her; and she, having death’s eyes, glared

back at them, at their youth and strength which would not last even as

long as hers had. Miss Anne and Miss Ada spent hours in interviewing

applicants, whom she discharged in the twinkling of an eye; and

finally, with great satisfaction, she reduced the members of her

family to the duties of domestics.

One day a janitor, after helping himself to raspberry cordial,

addressed her by the name of his former employer. Her son-in-law took

his place, temporarily; but he gave satisfaction, and no other janitor

was ever hired. He fed the hens, beat carpets, mowed the lawn, kept the

flower beds clean and gaudy, stoked the furnaces, carried out ashes,

and shoveled snow from the walks, saying that only a farmer’s son could

do these things so well.

He did not seem to grow old. Organic weaknesses made their presence

known by the vague melancholy of indigestion and the irritability

of fatigue, but they did not insist; they were merely waiting until

there should be need of them to complete his discipline. He thought,

when he thought of it at all, that life with a firm, exquisite hand

like that of a loving helpmate (his own) had put him in his place. He

was not happy, but he was content; and when he visited the old farm,

he looked back indulgently upon his ambitions: love, music, and the

ministry--unwise wishes of a selfish boy.

He would have been less at ease in the farmhouse if he had remembered

more clearly the morality and religion of his parents, or if he had

understood his sister-in-law Marianne’s even sterner beliefs which

now ruled where he had been a boy, and there prepared her children to

condemn him--though she expected them to be too courteous ever to show

it.

The religious atmosphere in which Alwyn grew up was inherited in large

part from his grandmother Duff, though fundamentally her piety had been

no more than a public attitude, assumed out of loneliness and defiance.

The few people she admired were Christians, and it could never have

been said that she was not as worthy of the name as they. But without

any respect for the father of her children, her sorrows had grown too

bitter to come under the jurisdiction of God the Father, a God of

resignation and forgiveness. The steadfast refusal to surrender to

either of them had given her spirit, as she had grown old, an infidel

grandeur, a fortitude more stoic than Christian. Young or old, all that

she had had by way of a personal religion had been a sort of poetry;

its arbitrarily fixed rules happened to be Christian doctrine, but

it was not at all the poetry of God--rather that of worldly dignity,

disappointment, and vanity of the spirit, that of conducting herself

properly and proudly.

Under the influence of this unhappy poetry, Marianne Tower’s strong,

happy beliefs had been formulated: the same pattern of belief, but

with peace in place of resentment, confidence instead of desperation,

white where black had been--her mother’s disillusionment reversed. The

very principles on which America was founded were the result; and like

certain of the Pilgrims, she represented them with the competence and

heedless ardor of a woman under an enchantment.

There was also about her religion, as there had been about her mother’s

irreligion, a royal assurance and a slight suggestion of vainglory.

She would have been willing to spread it by force, particularly in

view of its importance to the nation as a whole, meanwhile coercing

the doubtful with contempt and the lukewarm with enthusiasm, for lack

of other sorts of authority. Like a state religion, it could not have

existed without hypocrisy--plaster to hold the edifice together, many

hypocrites around the few men and women of pure rock; a tribute to

its power when faith--the tribute to its charm--was not forthcoming.

But she did not complain of hypocrisy, preferring that people should

pretend to be better than they are (which pretension is a sort of

humility) than that they should acknowledge their failings and cease to

be ashamed of them; and remembering that the only one of her father’s

lies which her mother had never challenged was his prayer when they had

knelt together on the kitchen or sitting-room floor.

Like Catholicism, her religion required adherence and obedience before

faith--mere willingness to believe and reform before the unerring

comprehension of God in detail. She thought that faith was a private,

indeed a selfish experience which took place after a sort of sickness

of curiosity about God, in a lonely bedroom, for example, with sighs

and stammered prayers and many vague tears. She could imagine very

well how it happened, that intellectual prodigy, there in secret.

But secrecy was dangerous; in it temptations as well as God invested

themselves with magic and dazzled the excited soul, the soul as vague

as tears, and in it dangerous sensibilities came out as stars do in the

darkness--which she had learned, indeed, to her sorrow.

So she did not overrate this or any other mystic experience, and

was comparatively indifferent to the puzzles of what to believe and

their theological answers. Giving herself to God meant merely being

responsible for her life, her virtue, her usefulness to others and

to the world as a whole--individually responsible to Him, not to the

schoolmasters of faith, pastors or priests. Therefore she had to

consider and believe only those doctrines which could help her to

recognize her duties and overcome the discouragement which was almost

the only temptation she ever encountered. It was sacrilegious to worry

about the rest; only a bad scholar would turn to the back of the book

to hunt for answers, or to play with problems which he could not

yet profitably solve. Kept busy by divine forces--conjugal passion,

poverty, good health and illness, motherhood--engaged not in fathoming

God’s opinions but in the illustration of those she knew instinctively,

she did not find much time to gaze in the direction of His face, or to

wonder what human face it resembled.

Thus, though Protestantism is a branch of Christianity founded upon

faith, Marianne Tower, like most American Protestants in this respect,

was entirely concerned with works: with severities, kindnesses,

abstinences, successes, which all the world could see; with prayers and

testimonies which all the world could hear and understand; with sin

instead of heresy, reform instead of repentance; with serving more

than with loving God.

Her love of God was principally a sort of grateful admiration, and

admiration for reasons which would have entitled other gods to a share

in it. Doubting as little as poets and children do, she believed

every miracle of virtue she heard about, no matter by what religious

principles, with what sort of divine guidance, it had come to pass.

Therefore she would have honored any god who, to her knowledge, was

arrayed in the esteem of entire races, upon whom as on a corner stone

families were founded, and by whom public morals were regulated. But

her knowledge was limited by church magazines and tracts which libeled

the religions of the countries to which missionaries were sent (the

executives and propagandists of American Christianity having realized,

perhaps, that it harbored the germs of polytheism); and she knew no

other god but God, in whose veins there was Jewish blood--God of clean

and respectable living, innocent thought, and industry.

One day when Alwyn had come back from school, full of what he had

learned about heathen religions from other sources of information

than hers, and was sitting on top of the flour barrel in the pantry

where she was at work, he said that he did not believe in missionaries

going to foreign lands to lead races away from their own deities and

undermine the culture and customs which suited them.

She asked, “Tell me, Alwyn, are you beginning to lose your faith? Don’t

you believe in God?” In the beginning she had hoped that he would

become a minister.

“I do, mother,” he said, with a vague sense of being courageous. “But I

don’t want Him to-- I don’t know, I’m not sure--that He isn’t the same

as the others.”

Gazing into his eyes, she did not need to be told that he spoke of

another god than God. She shed tears, wiped them away, and threw back

her head. “Well, my son,” she said, “we shall see if your God can do

for you what mine has done for me.”

Touched and troubled, Alwyn asked himself if in reality he had a god of

his own, what help he needed, what help she had received; and in his

confusion, he preferred to think of her beliefs....

Her religion--perhaps, Alwyn thought, American Christianity as

a whole--was a religion of ideal prose; all the beauty it had

was the elegance of a perfect law, a Napoleonic code. It deified

Jesus, but deified Him as a social leader and teacher martyred for

His virtue, a compassionate attorney at the right hand of God the

judge, and a fulfillment of the half-political prophecies of the

Old Testament--whose jurisprudence of hygiene, family relations,

patriotism, and commerce, its morality resembled.

Even Alwyn’s mother was confused, in teaching her children, about

the meaning of Christ’s strange parables. Perhaps He had not been a

success as a teacher, not having laid down one precept which did not

require interpretation before it could serve as a basis for conduct,

or given one example whose significance could not be mistaken. But

His ravishing voice was still more persuasive, not only to children

but to herself, than the voices of those indecent, vindictive, but

comprehensible men of genius, the Jews who had come before Him. So when

she closed the Bible and continued in her own words, it was to repeat

the Old Testament moral lesson (subtly modified by more civilized

feeling, by changing customs, by a pure woman’s refinement, and by

her nearly superstitious respect for education), but as if it had

originated upon His lips.

In spite of its complex origins, her morality was not at all ambiguous.

She believed that money was the result of ability, and was in itself

an ability or talent (the money which in Christ’s parable the master

had given his servants to multiply had actually been called talents).

It was power for good; to waste even the smallest piece of it meant

wasting potential charity, educational opportunities, and at its

source, the dignity by which God’s kingdom on earth ought to be

supported, made known, even advertised. More of it than could be spent

painstakingly, painfully, she regarded with suspicion. An ardent desire

for success proved the sincerity of one’s efforts, whatever they

were--but Christ had failed; therefore, once any sort of success had

been achieved, she regarded it suspiciously as well, and judged it by

its fruits, which ought to be very nearly those of failure: humility,

self-denial, pity for others.

She believed the human body to be sacred. Therefore all those

things which disagree with it, or change its reactions and way of

functioning--deforming shoes and clothes, alcohol, excess of other

sorts of food and drink, idleness--were sacrilegious. Good health was

the body’s virtue; and it also was a talent of the capital lent by the

Master.

According to her, love, often as automatic in its influence as a drug,

often wasteful of time, health, and money, existed only to bring men

and women together in marriage. Trees and plants, because they had no

responsible souls, had the right to put forth more flowers than fruit;

but for men and women even one kiss given in vain laid waste the heart

and blighted the fruit of the fruit-bearing kiss of marriage. Marriage

existed to people the continent with witnesses for the Lord, who gave

it--no, who lent it.

When she spoke of the continent of America to her children, it was

as another talent, like the ability to sing or speak fluently, to

tame animals or govern men or children. Alwyn saw it then in his

imagination, a fantastic bird’s-eye view: lying by a miracle between

the disastrous North and the sickening tropics; a vast mass of wood,

fur, grains, metals, flesh, fish, fruit, electricity, and inspiration;

flooded with milk and syrup; smelling of unemployed fertility; stained

with rivers and refuse and the blood of the early settlers; rising into

the sky in the West in young, red, weather-beaten wrinkles and wounds

(and when the first missionaries saw the Rockies they named them the

Blood of Christ Mountains).... A talent that a whole race had, just as

an individual might have a talent for mathematics; and whatever the

others were, it would always be the principal talent of Americans,

as long as it lasted. Lent, not given; to be guarded and risked and

multiplied and used to the glory of God, the owner.

Alwyn, thinking of what he had learned about history and its

classifications, said to himself that his mother, though only a poor

farmer’s wife, might be called an aristocrat. The lowest classes

serving the whole of society (that is, the state) out of hunger and

servility--but these did not count in America, where almost no one was

hungry. The upper classes also serving it, to amuse themselves and to

gain their ends of vanity and glory, usually bound up with the destiny

of the state; prodigal enough to give away their sons, therefore

making soldiers, priests, men of letters, orators, figureheads of

them. The middle classes serving only themselves, bringing up sons in

the interest of the family fortunes, seducing the sons of others if

they had none of their own--the Fieldings were people of that sort.

He thought of his uncle Jim among them, as timid as the last heir of

a branch of deposed royalty--ashamed of its poverty and fanaticism,

himself without either heirs or pretensions--in their grudgingly

hospitable, merchant prince’s palace....

Then Alwyn thought (and it may have been the vanity he had inherited

from his grandmother Duff which suggested it to him) that perhaps

America’s only aristocracy existed--not among millionaires, trying

to earn money and get the most out of money as if they were still

poor--but in poor homes in the country, in the strong, ignorant

imaginations of such women as his mother and grandmothers, who had

a sense of responsibility to God before the nation, to the nation

(though they had little to gain by its glory, little to lose by

its ignominy) before the family, and to the family only before

themselves; aristocratic because of a vague sense of having had

actually aristocratic grandparents, many times removed, and because

their religion happened to be public rather than private, putting

good behavior above the joys and pains of faith, judging private

virtue by the public good.... Thus Alwyn began to make his peace with

the tormenting sense of having come down in the world, which was his

birthright as a Tower.

It was true in any case that his grandmother Tower had been proud to

give to the world her most gifted son, Jim, all that she could afford

to give, and that his mother wanted to give all her children. The

latter would say, “I sometimes think that I am like a stalk bearing a

great many flowers, almost more than it can bear; when they get ready

to open, perhaps it will break--I shall be willing. All your father and

I will need in our old age will be a place to lie down to rest forever.

I am giving my life for you children in order that you may give your

lives to others....” She spoke as if she herself and her children had

royal obligations to some sort of kingdom, and did so not merely out of

maternal vanity, but because of her religion.

Perhaps, properly speaking, it was not a religion at all, but the

jurisprudence of a moral commonwealth. She had no need for anything

else after her marriage. Intimate emotions which seemed to her sacred,

took the place of specifically religious exercises. Thanks to the

former, she was not spiritually impoverished or chilled by a faith

which was all ethics (as those whose lives were more placid, more

prosperous, and less rich, might have been); so she was the perfect

Protestant.

Alwyn’s uncle, the minister, felt this. During one of his visits Alwyn

heard him say to his father: “Ralph, your wife is a saint on earth.

We have been peculiarly blessed. Caroline was, too, while she lived.”

Hearing his dead aunt called a saint as well, Alwyn was jealous for his

mother.

It was in regard to him that her judgment upon spiritual matters

showed itself as most evidently superior to that of her mother-in-law,

who had no patience with hair-splitting, resented disapproval of

Jim, and pronounced him perfect, though his way of life did pass her

understanding. Alwyn’s mother was the more thoughtful of the two, and

her beliefs had crystallized while teaching them to her children;

whereas in the hard early days his grandmother had had little time to

think, and had been able to teach her children only by means of the

old belt without a buckle behind the kitchen door. Their differences

of opinion were more important than profound, being merely those

between taking for granted and knowing logically one and the same

thing, between roughness and refinement in its expression, between one

generation and that which followed it. They were particularly important

to Alwyn, because it was his mother’s reasonable version of the faith

of his fathers--more suitable to his nature because he was above all

his mother’s son--which determined in large part the beliefs for which

eventually he was to desert that faith altogether.

He enjoyed even her injustice toward his uncle Jim, for example,

because at a time in his life when all that was inarticulate seemed

merely stupid, and when opinions had more charm than they were ever to

have again, a certain intolerance proved how faultless her opinions

were. So he soon found himself obliged to agree with her about the

minister, whom, because he was courteous, handsome, wealthy, and well

educated, he instinctively preferred to his other relatives.

In fact, she blamed her brother-in-law less than she pitied him,

blaming him only to point a moral for the children whom she was

going to send out in the world as he had been sent. For their sake

she insisted on the fact that he had wasted his opportunities, and

exchanged the family birthright of anxiety, ambition, and loneliness,

for the comfortable approval of a family that was not even his own. If

music was his true calling, the sort of divine persuasion for which

he was better fitted than for argument and prayer, he should not have

given in to his father’s and brother’s disapproval. Having undertaken

to be a preacher, he should not have ceased for the sake of domestic

convenience. Coming from a poor family as its gift to the world and

having retired from the ministry, he should have found something better

to do than to indulge a rich family’s vanity and serve its petty needs.

In general she preferred the appearance of perfection and unity in the

least distinguished lives to noble qualities--such as the self-control

and self-sacrifice, devotion to the dead, and generosity, which Jim

displayed--haphazardly thrown together in a life which seemed to have

developed along the line of least resistance; and had no doubt that

her husband, without great intelligence or any pretensions, was the

greater man of the two. Furthermore, it was a Christian’s duty to give,

not merely a good example, but one which could not be misinterpreted,

which did not require explanations to be made by those who loved him,

allowances by those who did not. Simple integrity was a duty as well as

a source of happiness....

Alwyn himself, as scrupulous at least as his mother, did not want any

religious faith compromised by devious individual behavior, and did

not want to consent to one himself which he was likely to have to

compromise. Immoderate like other Americans, other adolescents, he

already believed in extreme positions and deliberate apostasy--not in

accidental reaction, nor in vague decadence of the old toward the new.

He was quite ready to reject, for himself, his family’s beliefs, but

not on the basis of any less perfect embodiment than his mother’s life;

it would indeed have been unfair to judge his uncle’s ideals by his

representation of them.

Then the problem of formulating a set of beliefs which would be in

harmony with as many of his instincts as were ineradicable (as his

mother’s beliefs seemed to be with all her instincts) troubled him and

gave him pleasure; and during his adolescence, many religions seemed

to burst vaguely into bloom at once in his imagination.

He had learned that God was one and uniform; he felt that He was

legion. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me....” He believed that

he had seen the others already, under ordinary circumstances, very

slightly disguised by the lives of ordinary men and women such as his

relatives--thorough and shameless, as deaf to interruption, as busy

as death.... They came to his attention also by way of pictures and

books: the splendor of devout savages as he had heard about it, the

bitter-sweet nobility of extinct races, the Greeks, for example, as

it had been written about. “Thou shalt have no other gods....” And he

fancied himself in love with them all.

He had learned that God, who created man, was the lesson man was to

learn long after by his painful experiments, mistakes, misery, and

contentment; the body of knowledge of what for most people in ordinary

walks of life is likely to result from this or that course of action;

God handed down from father to son, mother to son; God the law. Alwyn

felt that He was also the breaking of the law. At any rate he had

already formed a vague resolution to break it; could he break it as

well as his mother had kept it?

Naturally timid, he realized that even to be an outlaw, a more or less

effective exception, would require more strength than, by himself, he

would have. “We shall see, my son, if your God can help you....” And

if his God were gods? Would not his life, if he committed himself to

them all, be a sort of Tower of Babel in which the divine workmen would

merely dispute among themselves in all their tongues, and accomplish

nothing? Each had power; had they any power in common? Could they,

together, do what one of them could do--what, for his mother, one of

them had done?

For her religion had indeed brought about a miracle of energy and

peace; it was also true that marriage had made her religion what it

was then. As mere doctrine it had been a birthright and a dowry; her

husband, who had no talent for thought, had added nothing to it. But

the evenly passionate years had changed its bearing upon experience,

and as a method of living, it had been a sort of marriage settlement.

She not only believed, but felt, as by a physical instinct, that the

curtain of death would not go down upon her drama of love; a drama of

two characters with their children and their children’s children--by

virtue of heredity and immortality the cast would never be changed.

And when she compared it--its dignity of citizenship, its perfect

and tender monotony, the brightness somehow continually shed upon

its humble scene--with her girlhood, the latter seemed to have been

a melodrama of insubstantial puppets, agitated by a hand which had

trembled for many reasons, and for no reason at all.

The motives of that melodrama had been dread of the future (and now

that she was a mother, each moment was very naturally the child of

the one before); servile dependence upon others, her angry parents,

for example (and now the entire world outside the four walls of her

home might have been destroyed without leaving her in despair);

loneliness (and she had given birth to children enough to begin a new

race, companions for her on earth and in heaven); and the obscure need

of emotions, caresses, pride, pain (and now, day for day, she was

scarcely equal to the feast of feeling which was her daily bread)....

So contented was she that, in retrospect, she regarded the thoughts of

her girlhood as other women regard the dolls whose mothers they have

pretended to be.

And marriage had swept away, with the mist of sadness, her springtime

mysticism, which had been an imaginary communication (as it were

by messages, signals, and amorous glances) with what was beyond

understanding. Now, in the person of her husband, what was beyond

understanding lived in her simple house; she slept within reach of

its strong, however tired arms. Mystery was in God the equivalent of

passion; from time to time it had taken (and would take) possession of

her. But she would no more have thought of trying to rouse or control

it--even by curiosity, speculation, or yearning--than if it had been

a man’s passion; she did not even ask of the moody lover whom she had

married the right to say yes or no. Thus all that was enigmatic in

religion--the bitter effort to fathom God’s apparent indifference, to

accept the evil which He permitted, the amorous effort to have the

truth naked of its disguises, to reach the point where mortal desire

leaves off and serene, immortal satiety begins--gradually wrapped

itself in the same pure shame and darkness which hid away her marriage

bed. Those riddles were for the sorrowful--the disappointed and

disabled and victimized; as such at least she, when merely the Duffs’

daughter and Paul Fairchild’s fiancée, had been faced with them.

Paul Fairchild might never have existed; Ralph’s great hand, at its

first touch, had obliterated the traces of him in her mind. Until she

came to tell that story as a lesson to her grown children, she did

not try to explain even to herself the evil rôle he had played in her

youth; then, disdainfully overlooking his failings, she concluded

that her own subservience had been at fault. Nor did her father, the

diabolic, pitiful old man to whom she was as devoted as she could be,

trouble her otherwise than practically. Thus it happened that out of

her theory of life, as out of a picture (warm white on white against

white) the devil, like a black shadow, had faded.

This was love’s negative work. Positively, it gave her strength and

kept her young. (Indeed, it kept them both, and their love-making,

young; for twenty years the farmhouse was electric with it; and even

the youngest of their children grew up in the fragrant, restless

atmosphere of a new marriage, as if in the heart of the lightning

which cools a midsummer night in Wisconsin.) Repeatedly with child,

a number of illnesses obviously in abeyance, thin and no taller than

her children when they were adolescents, able to afford hired help

only when actually ill--no one understood her vitality. On certain

days, without warning, it would be exhausted; then, her face for the

moment the color of old age, her voice dreamy, her quickened breathing

scarcely to be divided into words, she would find herself unable to

work, and would creep away to rest. Perhaps lying with her eyes closed

all afternoon in the empty bed, she would draw strength there from her

companion, who would be far off in the woods or fields among his little

wild beasts and great domestic animals....

Ralph, a child even in manhood, and a child of nature, drew strength

from those animals, from the land, from heat and cold, from physical

experiences--but drew his spiritual strength from her. If obliged to

think of any complex problem, he suffered from pains in his forehead;

she thought for him. He was timid and conservative; all his abilities

would have been handicapped by a deaf pessimism, but for her thoughtful

speech which charmed him into action--that of being a good father,

farmer, and citizen--charmed him like a sort of cheerful music. His

passions were entangled in and blinded by melancholy; at the end

of a few months of an unhappy marriage, one or the other--desire

or discouragement--would have left him no better than a heavy,

broken-hearted animal. A Christian as it was, without her help he would

have been unable to conceive God except as a father’s tyranny, or as

violent pleasure, or death. The light, steady wave of her character

breaking constantly upon his temperament had worn away its roughness,

given it brightness and another sort of distinction than its own: that

of the wrath and force of instincts mixed with intellectual gentleness,

that of animality the heart of which has been touched and not broken.

Incompatibility of the sort which puts an end to fugitive affections

was the basis of their permanent and essentially religious devotion to

each other. Each, like a portion of a circle, found in the other what

was needed to balance and perfect himself. Trait for trait, each was

strong where the other was weak; each was the opposite of the other--an

opposite as symmetrical as that between man and woman physically. The

good-tempered years, as they passed, brought about an interweaving not

only of their interests and affections, but their characteristics.

Death, to take one of them, would have had to leave a part of that one

behind, or mutilate the other to carry off its momentary share of the

two, inextricably married.

This process, this mystery, constituted at last the family’s one

enduring mysticism. Schooled by the discipline which in Marianne’s

hands Christianity had become, her children were to inherit, as if it

were a religion, a theory of love, which would probably be interpreted

by them in terms of various religions, various kinds of good and bad

behavior, and which, changing its form but keeping its vitality--as in

transmigration a vast, vague soul, typically American--would probably

be heard of for some time to come.

During one of Alwyn’s summer holidays he went with his parents to a

Methodist camp meeting on the other side of the county. He and his

mother drove a single horse, his father following in a carriage with

the little girls; and they stopped for the noonday meal with a family

of friends. There was a newborn baby in the house, and his mother shed

tears as she held it in her arms.

When they were alone again, moving swiftly through the dust between the

cloudy fields of timothy and waves of turning grain, he asked, “Why did

you cry?”

“Because I want another baby.” At that time she knew that for

accidental physical reasons she would not be a mother again. “I shall

be glad when I am a grandmother, with your little ones at my knees.

Before very long, you know....”

It was the first time she had noticed that he was almost a grown man,

and he knew that he should be proud, but was embarrassed. “The people

I pity most on earth,” she added, “are your uncle Jim and old Mrs.

Fielding and her daughters. I don’t see how a woman can be religious

without children.”

They reached their destination. The annual revival took place in a

grove, along the edge of a deep ravine where, it was said, there had

been rattlesnakes. On the camp grounds there were dormitories for men

and for women, hidden from each other by a thicket; the auditorium,

a sort of vast wooden tent; a dingy hall in which meals were served;

and a number of cottages rented by particularly devout and prosperous

families. There were quoits played with horseshoes by the old men, and

exercises of physical prowess for the young in sweaty shirt sleeves

and cloth caps too small for their heads. Between meetings the

speakers, among whom were several bishops, balanced in rocking chairs

beside their wives on the various porches. Certain rough but quite

unexceptionable young couples played in the mossy gorge, the male

faces red with the summer and with excitement, the girls disheveled

and gay. A number of dry, gentle women tried to occupy everyone with

Bible classes and games. This was one of the fountainheads of western

Protestantism, and epitomized its mean amenities, its lack of mystery,

its vast, somewhat emasculate, but primitive power.

Alwyn sat on a bench between his parents during the afternoon service.

His uncle, the minister, had been expected to join them there; he had

not come, presumably for family reasons. The hymns were miserable; he

had heard one of the tunes in Chicago in a cheap theater.

Then a little man limped forward on the platform draped with flags.

He was the founder and director of a school for lumberjacks in the

north woods near Lake Superior, where Alwyn’s father had gone to hunt.

In the simplest words he talked of his students, great brutes of all

races, few of whom could read or write; how they worked by night in the

basement of the little building making cement blocks, both to pay their

individual expenses and to support the school; how their hard hearts

were touched by love of the Lord; how, for lack of room, equipment, and

funds, many had to be turned away. Then, tears shining on his sharp,

lonely, cripple’s face, he recited: “The desert shall rejoice, and

blossom as a rose.... Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and

the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as an

hart; for in the wilderness shall streams break out.... And an highway

shall be there, and it shall be called the way of holiness--wayfaring

men, though fools, shall not err therein.... No lion shall be there,

nor any ravenous beast.... Sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”

Alwyn had never seen nor heard so moving a man. He compared him with

the family minister, his uncle Jim; but almost in shame, he wished that

he were beside the latter in the great, odious city mansion, rather

than where he was; and suddenly thought of him not only with a certain

lack of respect but with profound gratitude--he scarcely knew why....

There followed a testimony meeting. Most of the statements of faith

were made by women and by men of the clergy, men poorly paid to do so,

speaking for others or for others’ sake; most of them had evidently

been made before, the very old, intoxicating, weak words falling into

place as one expected, with a sound of satisfaction. Suddenly Alwyn’s

father stood up beside him.

Alwyn trembled; he never knew what his emotion was--ignoble

embarrassment, or terror of something present and invisible which was

scarcely his friend, or the shock of intimacy with him who had, that

which had, begotten him....

He saw his father gaze at his mother, as if she were all that the

universe contained. His mother had forgotten herself and his father;

she was quite pale, and made somehow homely by her humility. Alwyn saw

her gaze back at his father, and realized that she believed that with

eyes accustomed to fields, horizons, and deep woods, more farsighted

than hers--he was looking at God.

His father’s voice shook. He said, “I know that my Redeemer liveth,”

and sat down.