had to discipline him, I don’t wish to be a queen.”
“You have no choice,” I murmured.
“But here comes the mail,” she exclaimed, rising suddenly and putting
on her hat. “Come! Let’s go and meet it.”
My secret hope sank like a stone into cold depths of resignation.
“All right,” I assented sadly; “but why such eagerness for the mail
this morning?”
“Why, I am hoping,” she lilted, “I am hoping, of course, for a letter
from Oliver, you idiot!”
BOOK FOUR
CORNELIA AND DIONYSUS
I
ENNUI IN THE PROVINCES
The smooth order of Cornelia’s life was interrupted on New Year’s Eve
by a distressing occurrence which I—which all of us who possess a
rudimentary sense of tact—insist on calling an accident. It was not
the sort of thing that I had ever thought of as likely to intrude
upon the felicity of that household. My own convulsive unuttered
response to the shock was: “That it should have happened to them!”
But as it, or something very like it, actually happens every
day,—once, twice, three times a day all through the year in every
big city,—there was really no reason for assuming that they would
remain indefinitely immune. The circumstance which seemed at the
moment to point the accident with a piercing significance, a chilling
personal meaning for us, was, I suppose, the mere coincidence that
we were arguing in the abstract about just such occurrences when the
brutal reality of the thing burst in among us with the effrontery
of a bandit in a Pullman car. Of course it admits of the natural
explanation which I shall give, leading up to the mishap in the
order of my own approach.
Cornelia spends the winter months in the city, in a desirable
apartment near the lower end of the Park—an apartment so spacious
and so desirable that an old New Yorker once amused himself at
my small-town ideas by asking me to guess the annual rental. As
her children, Dorothy and Oliver Junior,—the centre of her summer
solicitude,—are at their preparatory schools except during the
holidays, she devotes this season to her women friends, to her
husband, and to her husband’s friends. I group in this way the people
whom she entertains, first, because she has no men friends who are
not her husband’s friends, and, second, because her husband has an
endless string of interesting official and unofficial personages
whom he gets up—or brings up—from Washington for conferences or for
exhibitionary or other mysterious diplomatic purposes.
As an ancient admirer—to put it discreetly—who has sunk through
the incalculable accidents of life to the level of an educational
counselor or referee, I confess that I find Cornelia just a shade
more perfectly herself in the country, where she is comparatively
alone with the children and nature and her books, than in the city,
where, on my occasional expeditions, I see her but seldom and then
usually so beset with husband, friends, and personages that there
is little opportunity for the long educational tête-à-têtes of
the summer. Of these conversations, be it admitted once for all,
the secret excitement is in listening for the occasional lilt of
Cornelia’s lyric youth amid the finished certainty and assurance of
her later manner. Her own mature authoritativeness I can deal with in
a fashion and even relish; but in the winter, in the daily proximity
of her husband, she has an intolerable habit of throwing out flying
buttresses, of quoting Oliver—“Oliver says,” and so forth—as if she
were referring a country lawyer to a decision of the Supreme Court.
It is a little painful.
Still, in the winter holidays I like to call on the two of them in
their own characteristic setting, for a variety of reasons which
will be obvious enough to all those provincials who spend the gray
season quietly sitting in silent, snowbound prairie towns and
villages, dreaming, like waifs in a Scandinavian fairy tale, of the
bright commotion of crowded streets and thronged foyers and Duse and
Pavlowa and grand opera and Conrad and Lloyd George and Swinnerton
and windows full of new books and golden gowns and cut flowers. I
remember once remarking to them, after they had taken me into one of
their theatre parties in the grand style: “Art for the upper classes;
morality for men of moderate incomes; religion for the poor.” “No”;
retorted Oliver, with his instantaneous eye for the weak spot in my
armor: “Art for the cities; morality for the towns; religion for the
villages.”
We provincials are, it is true, fairly well disciplined to the
stoic “apathy”—a kind of cultivated hardening of the heart towards
everything beyond the reach of our hands and the range of our eyes.
Through month after month the rosy knuckles of temptation may knock
on our hardened hearts in vain. But recent investigation proves that
under constant percussion and strain the hardest substances yield:
steel girders buckle, flywheels burst, and bridges wear out and give
way to a malady known to science as “the fatigue of metals.” An
analogous malady, attacking even the most firmly tempered of hearts,
accounts for the popularity of Charles Lamb’s “moral holiday,” that
excursion from the moral macadam which nowadays we call a detour. It
explains, too, in my own case, the sharp nostalgia for the city which
afflicts me annually on the depressing morning after Christmas. On
that spiritless day-after, I feel like a camel that has ruminated
on its last cud and can no longer batten on the desert and the west
wind. I feel like a wretched silkworm in a glass jar, which will
swiftly perish of inanition if not supplied with fresh mulberry
leaves. That explains why I pack my bag and, by the first Limited
train, creep to the city, under the pretext of reading a paper before
one of the learned associations.
What I am coming to is the rather curious fact that the attraction of
Cornelia’s winter establishment is perhaps due less directly to her
than to her husband, and to the refreshing and—for me—delightfully
relaxing air of worldliness which circulates around him. Cornelia
wonderfully incarnates the Eternal Feminine, which is supposed to
draw us upward. But in the interim between Christmas and the New
Year’s Resolutions one doesn’t desire to be drawn upward. All one
wants is to escape from ennui and suffocation. In the colloquial
idiom of our section, one “wants out.” And Oliver, in the negligee
of old acquaintance, is a most agreeable, realistic, and sometimes
rather witty Mephistopheles, letting one out of conventional and
cloistral habits of thought, and leading one by sharp detours into
the heart of things as they are. Clearly, I don’t dislike Oliver:
I envy him, and, like his other familiars, call him “Excellency,”
a title which I believe few persons except the Governor of
Massachusetts have any right to use officially. Nor do I think that
Oliver really dislikes me: he pities me, and calls me “Professor,” a
title which he has also conferred, in my presence, upon the learned
Greek who polishes his shoes. I tell him that both the Greek and
I have a better right to our titles than he, for Oliver is now
writing his reminiscences of the war, and has at present no official
Washington connection whatever, busy as he seems to be there.
I envy him the variety of his life, the interest and importance of
his personal relations, his position inside the façade of public
affairs, his understanding of the huge subterranean dynamos which
operate the puppet-show of politics, his familiarity with the little
hairsprings which govern the dynamos, his chatter of Wall Street and
the Departments and the Legations, and his inexhaustible stock of
unpublished anecdote. In public he has had the reputation of a strong
team-worker, a sound administrative man; and in the newspapers he
passes as a champion of the common people, friend of the farmer and
the laboring man, and the rest.
But twenty-five years of more or less public life have not
stereotyped his mind. In private, indiscretions bubble from him like
water from a spring. He utters the most profane and contemptuous
condemnation of major enterprises of his party. In a friendly circle
he will even repudiate, with perfect recklessness, the “asininities”
to which he has been constrained by various public considerations
to subscribe. I twit him on the essential duplicity of the official
character. I call him what he seems to my academic sense to be—“a
tough little Yankee crab apple, coated with the wax of European
diplomacy”; “a hard-shelled individualist steeped in Nietzschean
philosophy and merely dipped in democratic shellac.” I insist that
there is no more milk in him than there is in a billiard ball; and
that he values the plain people as a professional golf-player values
his caddies.
In revenge, Oliver blandly replies: “The only trouble with you
professors is that you know absolutely nothing about life”—a
charge which I always admit; and then pump him for information.
He responds with the—I think—sincere conviction, shared by many
Eastern statesmen, that we Mid-Westerners are of an unsubjugated
alien race, ominously multiplying within the borders of the
otherwise United States, and mainly occupied with the propagation
of miscellaneous fanaticisms. He has not yet forgiven me “the
pacifism of the Mississippi Valley when the seaboard was aflame.”
He ascribes to me the “bolshevism” of North Dakota, and is always
inquiring solicitously: “By the way, how did you come out with your
investments in the Dakota bonds?” Sometimes he pretends that, as I am
from “Puritan Kansas,” I may have scruples against breakfasting with
them “on the Sabbath”; if I accept, he turns to Cornelia and gravely
warns her not to forget “the Nebraskan’s grape-juice.” Or he will
ask my permission to light a cigarette, remarking, “As you are from
Utah, I feared it might be offensive to you.” His mocking compassion
is often excited by my provincial residence and by my profession. I
don’t mind his designating me as “Pascal,” nor his reference to my
correspondence with Cornelia as _Les lettres provinciales_. But, in
one of his sharper moods, I remember his saluting me as “Calpurnia.”
I asked him to enlarge a little on the idea. “Oh, it’s nothing,” he
replied, “only I hear that nowadays they are dismissing all the men
from university faculties and manning them with Cæsar’s wives—with
persons ‘above suspicion.’ I always think of you professors as
Cæsar’s wives.”
Cæsar’s wives? Oliver’s immediate implication, I suppose, was merely
that the public expects on the part of instructors of youth a
quasi-priestly character, a many-sided and inhuman exemplariness of
opinion and conduct such as neither the youth in our charge nor their
parents require of themselves. But Oliver meant more than that. He
meant to suggest the absurdity to the realistic mind—the practical
invalidity—of the entire professional and schoolmasterly point of
view, and the Utopian insubstantiality of our ethical and social
vision. Cæsar’s wives! The sting of that quip, which he planted in me
last summer, was still rankling a bit on a gray hungry morning a few
days after Christmas, the poison of it being its truth; and a doubt
was stealing insidiously into my mind, like the snake into the Garden
of Eden, whether perhaps the influence of the secular priesthood
over the democracy might not be greater if the priesthood abandoned
its attempts to appear so supremely untouched by the gross human
infirmities of the democracy, when I received a note from Cornelia,
and, half an hour later, a telegram from Oliver. Like all government
officials and even private citizens who have much breathed the air of
official Washington, Oliver scorns the post office, even for personal
correspondence. For brevity’s sake, I give the telegram:—
CORNELIA NOTICES YOU SPEAK HERE SATURDAY STOP DINE WITH US MONDAY
AT EIGHT THIRTY STOP NOBODY ELSE BUT YOUR NOVELIST FRIEND VERNON
WILLYS STOP WATCH THE YEAR OUT DISCUSS FUNDAMENTALISM AND BURY
BACCHUS STOP SEMIOFFICIAL STOP WE WANT MIDWESTERN POINT OF VIEW
STOP REGARD AS IMPERATIVE
I packed my old suit into my old suit-case, slipped into my inside
pocket the old club-paper which was to pay my expenses, snatched
a book of Gilbert Murray’s to read on the train, and crept slowly
eastward on the Limited. My diary shows that my occupations during my
first forty-eight hours in the city were about as follows:—
Read my paper, “A Much Higher Education,” before the Saturday
Afternoon Club. Cornelia was present and I spoke with her for two
minutes afterward. Saw _Cyrano_ Saturday night and college friends
in the stockbroking business for three hours following. Slept
Sunday morning till cathedral service. Lunched with a poet in the
baking-powder business who read me his free verse on an affair
between a Jewess and a Chinese laundryman. Spent the afternoon
looking at the pseudo-Rembrandts in the Metropolitan, and the
evening at a concert. Saw journalistic friends downtown Monday
morning. Afternoon; at rehearsal of a Little Theatre play called
“Self-Realization”—lively. Publishing friend at his club till six:
showed me manuscript of “Petronius Enamored” and put his collection
of suppressed novels at my disposal. Walked in Riverside Park till
seven, then went to hotel and dressed for dinner. As I was leaving
for the West on the 2.37 in the morning, I packed my bag, and checked
out. Oliver and Willys might want to talk till daybreak.
II
NEW YEAR’S EVE IN NEW YORK
Mulberry leaves! These details I include in order to indicate briefly
how I reduced the unmannerliness of my provincial appetite before I
put in my appearance at Oliver’s, and, leaving my bag at the office,
went up one flight to their apartment. I don’t like to seem too eager.
As I stepped into the clear soft blueness of the candlelit apartment,
Cornelia rose, a silvery shimmer, from the settee where she had been
chatting with Oliver Junior, and, approaching with Artemisian stride,
greeted me with her finished graciousness. The artistic perfection of
it might subtly pain a sensitive heart, were it not for the intimate
reassurance imparted by the rippling overtones of her voice, which
resolves art into intoxication and curiously persuades a man in
evening dress, in the heart of the city, that he is standing in the
midst of a garden full of flowers. I muse.
Cornelia swiftly explained that Oliver Junior, though festively
attired, would not dine with us. That spirited and well-groomed youth
would, in a few minutes, drive his sister and two of their friends
to a young people’s party in Scarborough. After I had asked him a
few banal questions about his school, a topic which did not appear
greatly to “intrigue” him, he edged into the adjoining room and
diddled with the piano till his sister Dorothy skipped in, looking
like an adolescent Bacchante,—she is a little over seventeen,—and
they disappeared together.
Cornelia in the meantime had also explained that Oliver Senior was in
the library with Vernon Willys. “I don’t like him much,” she added,
“in fact, I think him rather horrid. He is very happy to-night over
his separation from his wife. He could hardly wait to get inside the
door to tell us about it. But I believe you have discovered something
precious in his books, and Oliver seems infatuated with him. They
have been running around together all the fall. He is doing a
political novel now, and I accuse Oliver of sitting for the portrait
of the hero. But here they are.”
The two men came in from the library with red buds in their
buttonholes. Oliver as usual saluted me with a volley of questions,
which he gave me no time to answer, and with an animating smile,
in which I always feel a slightly satirical edge. Willys, whom I
had met once or twice before, nipped my arm, smacked his lips, and
murmured with a communicative flicker in his eyes that I must be sure
to see His Excellency’s library before I left. As we moved toward
the dining-room, Oliver’s quick fire continued: “Did you get my
telegram? Get the point about Bacchus? I’m feeling the pulse of the
country on this prohibition business. Willys here has convictions, I
find—just as many convictions as you have, but different. I got you
two together in the hope of hearing you beat each other’s brains out.
I hope you’ll do it in good style. Give him the Mid-Western gospel.
I’ll hold the coats. I’ve arranged the proper setting. But be human,
Professor! Be human—just for to-night!”
It is not my intention to describe the dinner in detail. The
excellence of a dinner _à quatre_, for any but a quartet of
gourmands, is merely to provide a soft-footed ministration of
successive felicities to the appetitive nature while the higher
faculties, stimulated by the æsthetic accessories of the feast,
nimbly engage in the discourse of reason. Of the material details,
my memory is as indistinct as an impressionist poet’s. I recall only
the tall silver of candlesticks on an immaculate whiteness which was
doubtless linen; and a soothing greenness which may have been holly;
and a dark rich redness which was certainly roses; and a fragrance,
mingled, various, which was partly roses and partly, well, I sat at
Cornelia’s right hand, and in that dazzling proximity—she carries her
head so proudly that Time has hardly ventured to touch a wisp of her
bronze-gold hair or to breathe near her shoulder—in that proximity I
did not notice, honestly did not notice till some seconds after we
were seated, that in front of each plate was a half-moon formed of
three delicate glasses, glowing with candlelight reflected from the
varicolored souls of old vineyards.
Vernon Willys quite audibly drew in his breath, which after the
visit to His Excellency’s library was a discreet enough thing to do
with it. Oliver, glancing at me, repeated: “Remember, Professor—be
human.” Then he raised his ruby-colored glass toward the novelist and
said: “Let us drink to the death of Bacchus.” The two men clinked
and instantly drained their glasses. Cornelia lifted hers in my
direction, just touched it with her lips, and then replaced it in the
semicircle. I was thinking of Ben Jonson’s old song, that Anacreontic
thing about the thirst that rises from the soul. But what I did with
my glass, since whatever I did would grievously offend many persons’
notion of the right thing to have done, I absolutely refuse to
disclose. That point is of quite subsidiary relevance.
The thing which engaged my attention as a Mid-Western ethicist and
one of “Cæsar’s wives” was not the content of the glasses nor the
number of times they were filled by the chocolate-colored Caribbean
cupbearer. A person of my long practice in the ascetic philosophy
actually doesn’t much attend to these matters. I merely—let us
say—became aware of Oliver’s Machiavellian plot to seduce me. Then
what leaped to my sense as worthy of exploration was just the
personal feeling, the intimate private attitude of my friends, of
precisely this sort of people, toward the ethical question, or
complex group of questions, which the alleged death of Dionysus and
his active posthumous life have forced into the foreground of our
consciousness. In my own circle at home no one ever says anything of
the faintest interest on the subject. When it is mentioned, there
may be some talk of law-enforcement; but the heart of the matter is
regarded as perfectly dead. Here, there was willingness and desire to
discuss the original question.
His Excellency, I knew, had publicly advocated the passage of the
obnoxious measure, and had recently given to the press a “strong”
statement on the necessity of enforcing the law. In the intimacy of
friendship, however, and in the circumstances which he himself had
arranged, that was only a provocation to my remarking, as he set down
his glass:—
“It is obvious that you support the Eighteenth Amendment with
reservations.”
“With a diplomatic reserve,” he corrected, chuckling. Willys, who had
penetrated the “reserve,” laughed. And Cornelia, crushing a smile
between her lips, entered into a rather needless explanation, of
which the intention, I perceived, was to dissipate any uneasiness
which a Mid-Western Puritan might be conceived to feel on his abrupt
introduction to a wet New Year’s Eve.
“Monsieur”—meaning Oliver—“is a little naughty,” she said, “and he
likes to make himself appear worse than he is. You must remember that
he is practically a European.”
“Oh, nonsense!” I exclaimed. “Oliver a European! Then so was Andy
Jackson.”
“Yes,” Cornelia insisted, “his tastes and habits were formed in
the earlier part of his life, when he was almost constantly abroad.
His best friends in Washington are men in the legations who aren’t
obliged to adopt our reforms. Naturally, when he entertains them
here, he doesn’t wish to seem inhospitable or absurd, like poor
dear Mr. Bryan. We don’t ordinarily have wine on the table for our
own guests—I mean outside the semiofficial connection. But just for
to-night, as it’s a holiday, and one of you is a pilgrim from the
Mid-West, Oliver thought—we thought—that you would appreciate it if
ambassadorial privileges were extended to you.”
“I get the point perfectly,” I said; “that’s Oliver’s point of
view—or one of his points of view. But please let Janus defend
himself. He will need practice before we Puritans are done with him.
But now that the theme is before us, Cornelia, won’t you give us the
benefit of your own point of view?”
“My point of view?” Cornelia smiled her Mona Lisa smile. “I—oh, I am
Oliver’s wife!”
“I have often regretted that,” I replied with a consciously
provincial affectation of urban daring; “but knowing your strict
old-fashioned convictions about marriage, I stifle my regrets. I
can’t quite reconcile your indulgent humor this evening with your
rigorously prohibitive principles regarding—well, the moral fluidity
of such novels as Willys writes. I had hoped that your conservatism,
your Puritanism, as they call it, on the marriage question would
bring you around to our position on prohibition, and so, in that
respect at least, detach you from Oliver.”
“You are dead wrong, Professor,” Willys interjected, “you are
muddled. Prohibition isn’t conservatism. It is radical innovation. It
isn’t Puritanism. As you yourself have admirably demonstrated, the
Puritans drank like fishes. I am a Puritan. So is His Excellency. We
are Conservatives. So is our hostess.”
“Your don’t read my articles, Willys,” I said, “as carefully as I
read your novels. What I demonstrated was, that the Puritan is a
radical innovator. The Puritan of our day says, ‘Let the dry land
appear.’ You are not a Puritan; you are a Fundamentalist. You wish to
return to the Flood. You are a Diluvian.”
“Now you are at it!” cried Oliver gleefully. “Go to it!”
“Excuse me,” I objected; “we haven’t heard Cornelia’s point of view
yet. I was about to say, when Willys broke in, that we educators
don’t attach any great importance to the opinions of disillusioned
politicians and satirical novelists—cynics like you and Willys.
The national culture is in process of fundamental change and
regeneration; and you belong to an order that will soon be obsolete,
with none to mourn its extinction. The future of the country is in
the hands of the young people and such of the rest of us as keep up
with them. I am totally indifferent, Cornelia, to what you think of
prohibition as His Excellency’s wife. In that capacity I doubt if
you think at all; you merely accept the situation. I am curious only
about your attitude as a parent of the new order, as Oliver Junior’s
mother. Won’t you, for example, psychologize—analyze your feelings
and tell us just why you kissed the glass and set it down untasted?”