naturalists have followed truth much more faithfully than the poets.
And I believe that in educating our young people we had better follow
them to the same point. My novelist friend is right in holding to his
theory that Judith O’Grady and the Colonel’s lady are much the same
beneath the skin.”
“Bah!” cried Cornelia. “If you say that again, I shall hate you.”
“And I shall ask to be forgiven,” I said, “and you will forgive me so
graciously that I shall sin again. But I’m very serious about this.
Judith and the lady are very much the same—beneath the skin.”
“I hate you!” Cornelia cried. “I could stick you full of pins.”
“Beneath the skin,” I continued, “Judith and the lady consist of
closely similar metabolic apparatus and so forth, and a certain
amount of vacant space—and nothing else. And since the apparatus
is the same, there is every reason to believe that it functions in
essentially the same way in performing the duties assigned to it by
biological destiny.”
“You are disgusting,” said Cornelia.
“If I dwelt too long on the point, I should be,” I agreed. “Viscera
and vacancy: that is what Judith and the lady have beneath the skin.
And that is why I think the naturalistic novelists are foolish if
they dwell too long there.”
“Is this your nice theory?”
“No,” I said, “it isn’t; but it is a sort of basis for my theory.
First, we establish the fact that the interesting and precious and
desirable self isn’t ‘inside.’ Then, don’t you see, it must be
outside. Well, it is outside. It doesn’t exist till it gets outside.
All the differentiation, the distinction, the qualities, which
you and I value, are outside and are created by means analogous
to the means of art. In so far as people—any people, married or
otherwise—really give themselves adequately to each other in love or
in friendship, and impart happiness with the gift, they give a self
that is externalized, objectified, and tangible—so to speak—in some
form of useful or beautiful activity, which occasions no insatiable
and consuming fever, but the real joy of benefits given and received
and the delight of a loveliness that descends on the contemplative
eye like the free grace of God.”
“Your theory improves,” said Cornelia; “I don’t wholly understand it;
but it improves.”
VI
A THEORY OF HAPPINESS
The foam was now running high up the beach. I splashed straight
through it, in spite of my shoes. But Cornelia, lighter footed,
danced with it like a partner in some fantastic minuet, returning to
my side and my argument only when the creamy gliding meander ebbed.
“A man’s power to impart his best self,” I said, “depends on the
woman’s power to receive it.”
“Of course,” said Cornelia, “all that any man, even a genius, asks of
his wife is intelligence enough to appreciate him.”
“No,” I said, “that isn’t true. That is going by. There was a time
when a husband thought of himself as the pianist, and of his wife
as standing behind him to turn the pages of his music. But nowadays
we begin to think that the ideal concert is by two performers on
perfectly synchronized independent instruments—not soloist and
accompanist but, say, organist and pianist, each as important as the
other.”
“Nonsense!” said Cornelia, “We shall never expect that. But we
do like our accompaniment to be applauded when we play well—and
especially when we don’t.”
“If there is one subject in the world,” I said, veering a point,
“about which I am more densely ignorant than another, it is women,
and what they really like.”
“That’s quite true,” she lilted.
“But I knew a lady once—”
“Still another lady?”
“A most exquisite lady. And I often wondered why, whenever ‘the idea
of her life’ came into my ‘study of imagination’, I invariably saw
her in a setting, as if the setting were an organic part of herself.”
“Well it is, isn’t it—if one puts a little effort into it to make it
right? It is in the setting—isn’t it—that one has one’s opportunity
to express what you call the self. It is in one’s husband, children,
friends, and one’s home and habits and things and so on.”
“Yes, but in the case of this lady there was a curious point about
the setting. Wherever she was, seemed to be the centre of the
picture. She always seemed to frame.”
“What an attitudinizer she must have been!”
“She was not. It was only, I think, that she seemed to bring out and
accentuate everything near her that harmonized with her own vibrant
and articulate life. When I saw her in her drawing-room, it framed
her; and she appeared as fine and finished as if she had stepped from
a canvas of Watteau’s. Her books and pictures and tapestries became
as intimately hers as her garments, so that I have felt her almost
visibly present in that room, even when she was not there. Sometimes,
in a perverse mood, I have said, ‘This is all a pose’; and, trying to
go behind the elaborate expressiveness of her artificial surroundings
and to tease her out of perfection, I have gone on rough walks with
her in woods and in the open, half hoping that she might revert to
the inarticulate pathos of Nature. But the instant she stepped from
the frame of art she stepped into the frame of the landscape; the
greensward spread itself before her like Raleigh’s cloak; groves
offered themselves for a background; and I finally concluded that if
she came up out of the sea, like Botticelli’s Cytherea, the sea would
clothe her and her pearly radiance appear but an extension of the
lustrous nacre of some deep-sea shell.”
“You are fanciful,” said Cornelia.
“I am not fanciful,” I replied. “I express just as simply as I can
with words my sense of the quite blessed outwardness and availability
of this lady’s self. I don’t think she knew it, but—”
“But that shows how ignorant you are of women,” she said, and swept
me again sidelong with her gray eyes.
“But whether she knew it or not,” I reasoned, “she possesses a secret
of communicating happiness—a kind of happiness which I can only
describe as pure serenity at concert pitch. Perhaps she was merely
born in tune with some fine instrument which the rest of us rarely
hear. Perhaps she is right, after all, in thinking of the art and
discipline of the traditional lady and the traditional gentleman as
the technique by which the true and precious selves of our fellow
creatures are most likely to get themselves expressed.”
“I believe,” said Cornelia, “that your theory is coming out rather
well, and in time for tea.”
“My only reason for elaborating my theory is, that it is based upon
the practice of a lady whose theory is infinitely surpassed by her
art.”
“Is it, indeed?” she said.
“When I got the theory built, I was planning to say that I should
wish a daughter to choose for her husband neither one of the
sheik-monsters who of late have been devouring our damsels, nor yet
the inexpressive and unmodified vestryman whom you commended to our
admiration this morning, but rather a youth who should have a bit of
the old bachelor’s conception of what might be in the relation—an old
bachelor, I mean, who had known in his own youth, an exquisite lady.”
“Why lug in the old bachelor?” Cornelia asked—a little cruelly; for
we were already at her door.
“Because,” I said, as she waited on the step for my leave-taking,
“because time and meditation and the naturalistic novelists have
convinced him that, almost without a pang, he may resign to Mr.
O’Grady and the Colonel the similarities of Judith and the lady,
provided only that, from time to time, he may refresh his memory and
his senses with the lady’s differences.”
“Meaning—”
“Why, meaning that the kind of man whom a girl like Dorothy should
choose should know that the passion hymned by the naturalists is
naught, sheer naught—”
“You really mean that?”
“—in comparison with the quality of love to be had in its high
moments of general joyous awareness of the entire radiant life
of a fellow being—meeting his perceptions and recorded in his
imagination, clothed in color and motion and talk and laughter and
fresh air, the head turning with frank gay light in the eyes, the
lips parted in speech, while the springing step goes rhythmically
over the wide-stretching earth under sunlight and blue heavens.”
“It will be a long time,” said Cornelia, “before Dorothy needs to
trouble her head with that. Meanwhile, we shall occupy ourselves with
the rudiments. Shall we see you at mail-time to-morrow?”
“Yes,” I said, “and we’ll take up Oliver’s case, perhaps. There’s
going to be a fine sunset. _’Voir!_”
VII
THE REAL THING
As I entered the wood path through the birches that run down to my
own cottage, I thought I saw a boyish youngish figure slipping among
the trees to the eastward. A moment later, I met Dorothy walking
demurely up the path, with a book in her hand, closed upon one finger.
“Watching the sun set?” I asked, diplomatically.
“No,” she said, “watching him disappear.”
“Watching whom disappear?” I inquired, being invited.
“Oh, a boy that I like. We’ve been reading one of mother’s new books.
It’s about a girl, Deirdre, who didn’t want to marry a king, because
there was a boy that she liked very much better—in all ways. And so
they ran away and lived in the woods—and died happily.”
“Oho!” I exclaimed. “I suspect the happiness of their death has been
greatly exaggerated. It seemed to me rather dreadful. It’s James
Stephens’s version, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Dorothy, and turning the golden dusk of her eyes with a
sweet young gravity full upon mine, she added: “How old was my mother
when you first knew her?”
“About your age, Dorothy. Why do you ask?”
“Was she very different then—from the way she is now?”
“She was quite a bit like you, then,” I said, “if I remember. But why
do you ask?”
“Because,” she said, “she has marked the loveliest passage in this
book. And I can’t understand why, because she isn’t like that now—not
at all like that now.”
“Isn’t like what?”
“I mean,” said Dorothy with perfect lucidity, “that this passage
expresses just the way this boy and I feel. Shall I read it to you?”
“That wouldn’t be quite nice,” I suggested, “would it, Dorothy?
Good-bye!”
“Perhaps not,” she agreed; but as she moved toward the house, she
turned and called after me: “But if you want to read it, you can find
it on page one-hundred-and-forty.”
In my own copy of James Stephens’s _Deirdre_, I have marked, on page
one-hundred-and-forty, this passage:—
“Lacking him, what could be returned to her? Her hands went cold and
her mouth dry as she faced such a prospect.
“The youth who was hers. Who had no terrors for her! Who was her
equal in years and frolic! She could laugh with him and at him. She
could chide him and love him. She could give to him and withhold.
She could be his mother as well as his wife. She could annoy him and
forgive him. For between them there was such an equality of time and
rights that neither could dream of mastery or feel a grief against
the other. He was her beloved, her comrade, the very red of her
heart, and her choice choice.”
BOOK THREE
TREATING OF MODERN GIRLS
I
THE EDUCATION OF DAUGHTERS
I have always looked with admiring astonishment on parents who
have daughters on their minds, and yet are not broken by the
responsibility; and next to the weight of immediate responsibility
for a daughter I should place the burden, which some mothers still
take upon themselves, of choosing a daughter-in-law. In my callous
moods, I say that the ordinary run of children make as good matches
for themselves as they deserve, and that they had better be left
to their own devices. But if I were a parent and had successfully
brought up to the “magnetic age” two such delightful children as
Cornelia’s, I suspect that I myself shouldn’t be able to resist
attempting to be a Providence to them. Over a daughter, especially, I
suppose I should make a particular fool of myself. I should probably
try to keep her for the most part like a bird-of-paradise in a cage,
and when I let her out, should endeavor to control her flight by “a
thread of my own heart’s weaving.” And I am positive that any youth
who presented himself as a candidate for her hand would, unless
he were the possessor of incredible perfections, have desperate
difficulty in winning mine.
I did feel reasonably competent, nevertheless, to discuss eligible
sons-in-law with Cornelia. The young men of to-day are not notably
better or worse than the young men of twenty years ago, nor is the
problem of choice among them essentially altered. I know a good man
when I see him, as well as Cornelia does. But what is a good daughter
or a good daughter-in-law nowadays? It is a horrid question. It leads
one into the hot air of clashing ideals.
With respect to girls, I admit at once that I am in a state of
confusion and uncertainty, and that I may appear to be in a place
where the light is dim, not merely because girls, between the period
of George Sand and the period of Miss Amy Lowell, are said to have
changed rapidly and essentially, but also because in the vast and
engrossing literature of this subject I have remained _homo unius
libri_, a man of one book—of strictly limited experience. As I
remarked to Cornelia in all humility, only a day or two ago, if there
is one thing of which I am more densely ignorant than another, it is
women, including girls. If I were suddenly called upon to indicate
to a son my notion of the ideal woman for a lifelong companion, I
fear that I should not get beyond faltering forth a vague and most
likely quite unpersuasive description of the virtues of Cornelia;
and he, if he were as acute as I should like a son of my own to be,
would doubtless inform me that it isn’t the virtues of Cornelia that
take me, but her charm, which I don’t understand. At any rate, my
personal curiosity was so happily and completely arrested by my first
discovery of perfection that, in the twenty years which have elapsed
since that time, I have never felt impelled to explore any further.
I recall, for example, that when a few years ago I visited England in
order to look up the baptismal record of an Elizabethan lawyer, I met
on shipboard a vivacious young Frenchwoman who had compassion on my
obviously lonely state and proposed one day that we make a couple of
constitutional turns around the deck. At the end of the first turn,
during which I had dallied a bit with the weather in my ingenious
American fashion, she shrugged her shoulders—that is, I suppose she
did, for she was very French—and exclaimed, “_Allons donc, causons de
la femme_ (Well, now, let’s talk about women)!” I had read somewhere
or other that Frenchwomen excel in the light discussion of serious
themes and general ideas; and if she had proposed that we discuss
palæography or epigraphy, I should have been delighted to observe how
French feminine wit handles such subjects. But in the face of the
topic proposed, I was aghast. I had no intention of talking Cornelia
over with a perfect stranger; and feigning dizziness from the motion
of the ship, I rather abruptly “saved myself,” as the French say, and
went below.
It is, curiously enough, Cornelia herself who in these later years is
driving me to reopen the subject, investigate it, and “take a stand.”
I haven’t, till lately, felt myself to be in an uncertain position
or in a dim light, but rather in a very certain position and at the
radiant centre of light. I don’t wish to change my stand. Neither,
of course, does she wish me to change it. Yet, if I alter, her own
inflexibility will have been the prime mover.
It comes about in this way: she goes into the country as religious
people go into a retreat—to escape from dusty contacts with the
bustling democratic world, to collect her soul, to fortify her
principles, and to renew her vows of allegiance to the conceptions
of the good and the beautiful which she inherits from several
generations of ancestors accustomed to giving the tone to the society
in which they lived. It is utterly impossible to think of Cornelia
at present as a _grande dame_—she is too young, there is too much
of the morning clinging to her; and I cannot bear to dwell on the
possibility of its ever deserting her; yet in the treasonable hours
of the imagination I do occasionally steal forward on the straight
highway of time, and I can see that, thirty years hence, if she holds
her course, if she fulfills her destiny, she will be a beautiful
and proud old lady, still giving the law to her children and to her
grandchildren—what people call a _grande dame_.
But the tide of democratic vulgarity is running into the country
havens and stealing insidiously into the securest retreats. One’s own
friends and neighbors are tainted with it. One’s own husband brings
a whiff of it up from the city at the week-end. One’s own children,
in spite of all segregation and antiseptic precautions, show a mild
infection with it in their speech, in their manners, and even in
their tastes. One doesn’t compromise with it. One “stands firm”; but
one stands ever more and more alone.
I admire Cornelia’s ability to stand alone against the world, against
her own times, and against the practice of the city and the tyrannies
of fashion; and, when she is wholly right, as I think she often is,
it is the pleasantest thing imaginable for me to stand with her. But
I am beginning, at an advanced age, to develop skepticism, and to
look with an uneasy skeptical eye upon a rectitude of taste which
isolates one too sharply from one’s own flesh and blood—such “pure
and eloquent blood” as speaks in the faces of Cornelia’s children.
When she expects me to side instantaneously with her against the
budding ferment of her own son and daughter, I hesitate. I reluct,
like a man called from the roadside to leave the sweet intoxication
of an orchard in May. I become curious and loath to close the windows
of apprehension to the rumors and fragrance of another springtime.
On the morning—Friday it was—after our windy walk by the lake,
Cornelia, contrary to my expectation, did not appear at mail time
under the big elm which shades our little grove of R.F.D. boxes.
This was a surprise, because she had virtually agreed to be there
and she habitually performs with precision whatever she has agreed
to do. Later in the day, however, I learned that her husband had
unexpectedly arrived in a hydroplane, with an officer in the naval
flying corps, and that he would stay over Sunday, which was Dorothy’s
birthday. We seldom make calls in our summer community, except, as we
say, “on intimation.” Accordingly I waited for an intimation. All day
Saturday, to my increasing wonder, there was nothing but silence from
His Excellency’s household, and, in the phrase which high usage has
now made classic, “damned little of that.” But I quite anticipated
a birthday party on Sunday—for Oliver Senior makes much of these
occasions—and probably a fire on the beach in the evening, with the
latest gossip and best stories of the city. There was no party, and
there was no fire.
On Monday I went down my path to the mail boxes with acute curiosity.
The carrier’s Ford had apparently broken down on the mountain, for
he was nowhere in sight. I found Cornelia sitting alone on the bench
under the elm; the other pilgrims, weary of waiting, had scattered
along the marshy lakeside in search of lady’s-slippers, which were
abundant this year. She was all in white, and she sat with her
bronze-gold head leaning against the gray trunk, and with one hand,
lying listlessly across her knee, holding her soft white hat. If I
were not afraid of being called bookish and pedantic, I should admit
that as I approached she reminded me of Ariadne in Naxos; as it is, I
content myself with remarking that she seemed a little languid. She
did not rise.
I observed the point, because listlessness is not her “note.”
“I hoped you would come,” she said.
“It’s a lovely morning, isn’t it,” I exclaimed, in a sudden awareness
of the truth of what I was saying.
“No, it isn’t a lovely morning,” she replied. “It’s a horrid morning.
Come and sit down. I want to be comforted.” Looking into her cool
gray eyes, I saw that I had been mistaken. It wasn’t a lovely
morning; there was a cloud in the sky.
“You, comforted?” I said incredulously, and seated myself at the
other end of the bench, for I felt my hopeless inexperience with
Ariadnes. “I thought you were always happy. Where is Oliver? I heard
he came Friday night, but I haven’t seen hoof or horn of him.”
Cornelia looked out for a moment silently over the deep, still,
intense blueness of our lake, mirroring the blueness of the morning
sky. I suppose in that rapt moment—I haven’t seen her look more
purely poetic in years—she was deciding whether it was her duty to
tell me a loyal lie or whether she might relax and tell the simple
truth. As she was in one of her rare moments of languor, she decided
for the truth.
“I am vexed with Oliver. I sent him back to town on Saturday. I told
him that I didn’t wish to see him again this summer.”
“Why, Cornelia!” I cried, “What in the world has Oliver done? Is it
proper for me to hear? Has he been flirting with his secretary? Or
has he been beating you? Or what?”
“He has been beating me.” Cornelia dabbed at the corner of one
eye with her handkerchief; and I imagine there may have been some
occasion for it, though I did not see it. She held her lower lip for
an instant compressed under her perfect teeth. I noticed these things
because in twenty years’ acquaintance I had never witnessed them
before—but once, and that was in the dark backward and abysm of time.
Then she smiled faintly and repeated:—
“Yes, he has beaten me. Dreadfully.”
“The monster! What have you done to merit blows? You don’t look
bruised, Cornelia. Now that you have wept, you look like a calla lily
after rain.”
“What have I done? I have done nothing but try to bring up my
children as children should be brought up. And I am bruised and
beaten. Oliver has betrayed me. I am fond of Oliver. I am his best
friend. Oliver is—Oliver is a good deal of a dear—in his way. But
it does seem as if, when it comes to the children, he acted like
an irresponsible boy. Oliver is fifty-two. He acts as if he were
fifteen, or as if he wished that he were.”
“I don’t doubt that he does,” I said, “and I have always thought that
his boyish gusto was a positive element in his charm, and the quality
especially which makes his children so fond of him. But tell me, now,
what he has done, and I’ll try to judge him as he deserves.”
Cornelia began doubtfully and far away from the main point, in
accordance with the manual of tactics for women.
“Well, first of all,” she said, “he came up here in an aeroplane. I
have forbidden him to fly. At his age and with his family, he has no
right to take such hazards merely to amuse himself.”
“Perhaps not,” I said, “but you know that you like Oliver because he
is the sort of person who does take hazards. If he weren’t, you would
despise him.”
“Of course,” she replied. “If there were real occasion for it, I
should despise him if he were not the first to risk his life. But he
does it now—and these other things, I am convinced—mainly because he
knows how much I dislike them. I don’t see what possesses him.”
“What other things does he do, Cornelia? Oliver is at one of the
‘dangerous ages.’ And perhaps his children are beginning to influence
him. You mustn’t forget that Dorothy and Oliver Junior have reached
an age at which offspring frequently have a very unsettling effect
upon their parents.”
“Well, listen. You know how much I dislike what people call ‘the
modern girl’ and all her works and ways?”
“Yes.”
“And you know how hard I have tried to keep Dorothy in her
old-fashioned sweetness and innocence?”
“I don’t see what there is old-fashioned in Dorothy,” I said. “But
she is sweet. I supposed God had made her so, and that the work
couldn’t easily be changed, and that all you had to do was to stand
aside and watch her blossoming. But since you say that has been a
trial, I must believe that you have been tried by it.”
“Yes, and so does Oliver—I mean, he knows perfectly that it isn’t
easy for me to keep the right influences here and the wrong
ones away. But what do you suppose occurred to him as the most
appropriate birthday present that he could send up here by express
to his daughter, the day before he came last week? An expensive
knicker-outfit, a handsome cigarette-case, and a big package of his
own cigarettes.”
“Oliver has to have his little jest.”