needless to say that I went. How I went, may interest the curious.
Members of the poor-professor class have, as they have frequently
explained to the public, many tastes in common with respectable
well-to-do-people—tastes which of course they are unable to gratify.
But they have one expensive taste, which, with a little craft, they
can indulge almost as fully as people with something to live on. I
refer to their inclination for running about the country. I shall
always remain in the teaching profession because, no matter whither a
poor professor wishes to travel, there is always some group of kindly
Americans ready to pay his expenses to and from his base, provided he
will speak to them on any side of any subject he pleases—loudly and
for not more than fifty minutes. There was, in July, a pretty warm
educational convention in Los Angeles, designed to keep the State
of California educationally well in the lead of Massachusetts. I
spoke on three successive mornings, expanding an ancient club-paper
into a three-day serial by presenting its platitudes more slowly
and impressively than club custom permits. However, we are not now
concerned with that.
As I left the auditorium platform on the third morning, and, in the
anteroom, was receiving my fee, Dorothy and Oliver Junior, bareheaded
and browned by southern sunshine, burst in. “Hello!” cried Oliver,
“car’s outside. This your dunnage?” Dorothy, on the impulse of the
moment, kissed me, which made me think well of myself, and even
better of her than ever, for twenty-four hours afterwards. I was
wondering how Oliver felt about driving, when Dorothy jumped in and,
taking the wheel, sent me to the rear seat with her brother.
We worked our way cautiously out of the congested somnolent city,
which expands its amorphous immensity while it sleeps. Then the
efficient young pilot whirled us along at high speed over the four-
or five-hour trip, through orange groves and highways lined with
palms, by sea and sandy waste, through pines and pale-gold grass,
past San Juan Capistrano, gorgeous with flowers, across the mesa
by the old Mission road, to the outskirts of La Jolla, then, with a
sharp turn up a little valley, into a cool sea-freshened wilderness
of green walnut trees among which, cream-yellow, flat-roofed, Santo
Espiritu emerges, couched against the foothills of Mount Soledad.
II
OLIVER JUNIOR DISCUSSES HIS PARENTS, THEIR RELIGION, AND HIS OWN
I did not see these things which I have just mentioned; I only
remembered them vaguely afterward. Almost as soon as we had seated
ourselves in the car, we began to talk about a subject which put
landscape quite out of my head. Young Oliver, I might say in passing,
is a ready talker with something of the startling candor of his
father. I should perhaps add that his preparation for college along
with his sister, who is two years younger, is due to the irregularity
of his preparatory-school work—interrupted by a period of nearly two
years’ service as His Excellency’s private secretary in Europe.
Ruminating on the possible length of my visit at Santo Espiritu, I
had remarked, “I suppose your father will come out later in the year.”
“I suppose he won’t,” said Oliver. “I suspect he intends to live in
Paris.”
“Intends to do what?” I exclaimed.
“To live abroad somewhere. I suppose you know that my father and
mother have separated.”
“Nonsense, Ollie,” Dorothy shouted back over her shoulder. “You know
you don’t believe that! They always separate in the summer.”
“That’s true,” said her brother. “Dad always had to have a vacation
from the family. He always took one whenever, as he used to say to
us, ‘Your mother is growing too good to be true. I’ve got to have a
rest.’ But other summers they have agreed to separate—peaceably—by
collusion. This time father went off in a flaming huff. And I don’t
think my mother is in a mood to ask him back again. Their relations
have been severely strained.”
“Oliver,” I said, “you are your father over again for diabolical
badinage. Cut it out, please. Tell me seriously what you are talking
about.”
“I’m as serious,” he replied, “as a great horned owl. Dolly and I
have reasoned earnestly with them both. But our parents are hard
people to deal with on a rational basis. My mother has principles,
you know; and it’s no use talking to people with principles. And my
father, when he gets in a huff, is as obstinate as a mule.”
“Come now,” I urged with a little irritation, “is there anything in
this, at all? What was the huff about?”
“Well—a huff, you know,” instructed the wise youth, “is just the
kettle boiling over, after it has been heated a long time. I’m afraid
it all goes back to my New Year’s scrape; but it goes back of that
to other sins of mine—and maybe Dorothy’s—that father knew about and
she didn’t; and it goes back of that to the big quarrel between the
ancients and the moderns. Father is on the modern side—at least he
wants to be. My mother is all for the good old ways. So, you see,
there’s a fundamental incompatibility.”
“Yes,” I said, “I understand all that; but tell me about the huff.”
Oliver leaned forward and spoke in his sister’s ear. She nodded. Then
he said:—
“Well, the fact is that he and mother hadn’t been hitting it off
at all this spring. Dolly and I both noticed it months ago. We
were all more or less strung up; and they got on each other’s
nerves—noticeably. My mother is—well you know how my mother is,
ordinarily.”
“Yes, I do,” I said; “your mother has the most perfect temper in the
world. Go on.”
“Ordinarily, yes,” testified her son; “but when she gets a thing on
her mind, or her conscience, or wherever it is, she never lets it
rest. She is that way. She gets sort of keyed up or wound up or
whatever it is, and then she goes off like an alarm clock. When she
gets excited, father begins to jest, and he keeps his head for a
while. But she sticks at him till he stops jesting; and then he gets
more excited than she is; and then—it’s all up.”
“Well?”
“Well, all spring mother had been dinning at him—”
“Oh, get out!” I exclaimed, “Your mother doesn’t ‘din.’”
“Oh, doesn’t she! Doesn’t she! Very well. All spring, mother had been
gently speaking to dad at rather frequent intervals about his not
backing her up in her ideas for Dolly’s and my salvation. Of course
you understand that young people of our age are always in danger of
heading for the City of Destruction.”
“Yes, that’s obvious enough,” I said.
“Well, one day I overheard them at it—overheard my mother gently
reminding my father about me. She said to him: ‘I warned you and
warned you and warned you, that if you didn’t take a father’s part
and back me up, Oliver would get into trouble; but you just laughed
and encouraged him. Now see what you have brought on us.’ That
subject wasn’t very pleasant to any of us in the first place; and my
father had got sick of it in the form of cold hash. Dad said: ‘Here
beginneth the ninety-ninth lesson!’ Mother said: ‘But you have got
to take a father’s part.’ Dad said: ‘As it was in the beginning: I
don’t want to hear any more about that.’ Mother repeated precisely
the same thing in different words. He said: ‘Look here! I thought we
had agreed to let that subject rest.’ Mother varied the phrase and
presented her thought again. Father exclaimed: ‘Don’t repeat that!
Are you crazy?’ Mother instantly replied: ‘You never, never, back me
up. You never do a father’s part. And now see this horrible, horrible
thing you have got us into!’ Father began to lose his temper; and as
soon as he does that, she seems possessed with a desire to see how
far she can make him go.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“All right, you needn’t. But you wouldn’t forget if you had ever
heard it. Mother said it again—the same thing identically, only with
a little more sting in it. Then dad began to swear; but he always
hates himself for a week afterward when he does, so he pulled himself
up, and told her to stop or he didn’t know what he’d do. Well, I sat
still and counted, and my mother jabbed him in the wound nine times
in all by actual count with that identical taunt. Then poor old dad,
who had been stalking back and forth like the tiger over in Balboa
Park, bolted without a word. He went down to Washington for a couple
of days. When he came back, he just quietly announced that he was
going to Paris. ‘You may say, to work on my book—for an indefinite
period.’ Mother said in her most impervious manner: ‘Very well, then:
go.’ Father replied,—as frosty as a wedding cake,—‘Thank you, I
will.’ Then they both bowed. It was like a play. Dorothy and I came
in from the wings and offered friendly mediation; in vain. Father
packed up and went. Dolly and I don’t think either of them is quite
sensible.”
“H-m,” I said reflectively, “h-m-m—What is your mother doing now?”
“Why she’s done—we’ve all done—California from Mount Shasta to Tia
Juana, specializing on the Missions and the juniper trees from
Palestine that the padres planted. But now we’re doing religion.
We’ve settled down in Santo Espiritu with Aunt Alice and our
tutor,—Dolly and I call him Father Blakewell to his face and the
Holy Father behind his back; he’s going to be an Anglican monk,
you know,—we’ve settled down to do religion, mainly, and get ready
for college, incidentally. Mother is really ‘doing’ it; Dolly and
I—well, we ‘assist,’ in the French sense. We study a little, and go
to church a lot, and swim in the afternoon, and play mah jongg after
dinner; and the Holy Father reads prayers in the morning on week
days and twice on Sundays; and Mother is reading Newman’s _Idea of
a University_ aloud, and she goes to early communion, and fasts on
saints’ days, and is a member of the altar guild—and she is taking in
laundry.”
“Taking in what?” I ejaculated.
“Taking in laundry. She has consecrated her hands to the Church. She
washes the rector’s vestments and things. You know she always had
a kind of passion for keeping things clean—souls and bodies and so
on. So this job just hits her fancy now, and ‘fills her life,’ you
know. When we started for Los Angeles this morning, she was ironing
the vestments, and, believe me, when I saw her bending over the
ironing-board, she looked so perfectly blissful that I—I pitied her.
It seems kind of daffy to me.”
Though the painter was satirical, the picture, to my fond
imagination, was delightful. I saw her—herself all in white—bending
her golden head over the snowy linen, her hands moving smoothly;
it would be a very special iron, silver perhaps. She would do it
beautifully, adorably. I should be reminded of some early Italian
saint; and all the æsthetic Christianity in me would enjoy a kind of
Pre-Raphaelite resurrection.
“H-m,” I repeated helplessly. I hadn’t the faintest notion how to
treat the idea with any profit to a young fellow of Oliver’s age
and point of view. It simply wasn’t in his experience, and I didn’t
see how to put it there. His fondness for his mother, his complete
detachment from her religious interests, his absolute incomprehension
of her position appalled me. One can reason with an earnest young
intellectual rebel, occasionally to some effect. But an amused young
seraph in Oliver’s state, contemplating his mother with kindly
compassion from his pinnacle of intellectual certitude and religious
inexperience—one can’t even draw such a person to the portals of
argument.
“I hope,” I said, “you and Dorothy are behaving yourselves at home,
as well as you know how.”
“Oh yes,” he replied, “we are being good, aren’t we, Dolly? Wait
till you hear us after dinner discussing with the Holy Father
about the existence of angels, and the Apostolic Succession, and
the priority of Persons in the Blessed Trinity. Dorothy and I got
together and decided it was up to us to mortify our sinful flesh by
holding our tongues this summer. Even father used to do that, most of
the time, so far as religion is concerned; and it was harder for him
than it is for us.”
“How was that?”
“Oh, father, you know, doesn’t believe in anything. He calls himself
an ‘old Voltairean,’ and he reads Herbert Spencer and Nietzsche and
Henry Adams. But he really doesn’t believe in anything but chaos
and the ‘struggle for survival’ and the ‘degradation of energy.’ We
believe in plenty of things.”
“Do you really!” I exclaimed, genuinely delighted. “That’s good. Tell
me what they are.”
“Well, in religious matters we agree with father as little as with
mother. He is always talking about ‘jungle ethics’ and ‘the law of
survival.’ He thinks he is the only realist. But that is old stuff,
and it doesn’t sound good to us. We don’t fall for the cave-man line
of aristocracy that Dreiser and Mencken and Lawrence and those
fellows are trying to bring in.”
“Where do you get your line?”
“Oh, out of books and talk and out of the air; some of it we think
out ourselves, and a little of it we get from Hoover and Lane and
what father calls the ‘Western roughneck crowd.’ Since January, we’re
teetotalers; and father, of course, is only a prohibitionist. Then
we’re sick of war—we don’t think it’s sensible; and we’re sick of
supermen; and we’re sick of belonging to the ‘privileged class.’ We
believe in the real square deal and good sportsmanship and common
sense and common decency and health and hygiene and science and
beauty—and a lot of things like that. Of course, father and mother
pretend that they do, too—in a way. But we are radical democrats, I
guess; and father and mother are both snobs.”
Dorothy, listening to as much as she could catch from the steering
wheel, called back:—
“Father isn’t a snob—mother is.”
“You are wrong, Dolly,” said her brother; “they are both snobs. We
are really interested in the People. Neither of them cares two straws
for anyone outside their own class—except, of course, that father
has a personal friend here and there among the cab-drivers and the
police. He thinks that he is being like Roosevelt. And that he’s like
Roosevelt when he goes around among the ‘peasantry,’ as he calls
them, whooping it up for big families, and patting them on the back
for having eighteen little morons, and making it a crime to tell them
how to get a chance to live like civilized beings.”
“I’ve heard your father say very sensible things about that. You do
him an injustice.”
“No, I don’t. We believe in telling people the truth; and in
finding out first what it is. Father believes in making a Federal
statute first, to keep the peasantry peasants, and busy propagating
mill-hands and soldiers; and then in violating it himself as he sees
fit. Father is personally interested in the truth, and he really
knows a lot about it; but he wouldn’t dream of telling it to anyone
but an intimate friend—he doesn’t think it’s safe. And mother doesn’t
think it’s decent. Besides, she hates like sin to admit even to
herself the existence of any fact that doesn’t fit into her vision of
a ‘nice’ world. She likes to sit on the shore and order the sea back.
She really enjoys deceiving herself, and is pretty good at it. Father
isn’t like that.”
“So you side with him there?”
“Yes, except that father is a sort of double personality. Privately,
you know, dad is a cynical cosmopolitan, and he thinks America is
a hick joint except for half a dozen of his own cronies. But you
know how he stands in public, wrapping the flag around him, and
doing the big bowwow at Japan and Mexico, and standing pat with the
pattest element of the Grand Old Party’s patriots. Dad knows who
cuts the melons. Dolly and I are sick of that. We want to come in
on the ground floor and on the square. We want to have careers that
we have made for ourselves, and not be handed something on a silver
plate by one of father’s friends. Then we are sort of sick of this
‘cosmopolitan’ stuff—which means only that you hate your own things
and can’t even smoke American tobacco unless it’s been imported from
England. We’ve got so tired of it that we are going to organize a new
party with Flapjacks and Ham and Eggs for our slogan. The fact is,
we get a sort of kick out of our feeling for the country—as our own,
you know, a poor thing but our own; and we want to try and see if we
can’t be honest-to-goodness Americans before we die—if you understand
what I mean.”
“Bully for you!” I cried, in spite of my neutral intentions.
“But mother,” he continued, “has been reading the Barsetshire novels
all summer, and Trollope always makes her homesick for the ‘old
home.’ She is crazy anyway over the English cathedral towns, and
hopes to be buried in one when she dies. And just now she’s got a
kind of Golden-Age complex. She hopes to save me from the democracy
by sending me to one of the old Eastern colleges, where I shall
associate with ‘young gentlemen’ from Anglicized prep schools, and
live in a Gothic dormitory, and be tutored by Rhodes scholars, who
are mostly nuts. Dorothy and I have decided that we want to go to a
State University and get acquainted with the Plain People. And so
mother carries us off to Santo Espiritu and segregates us with the
Holy Father, in the hope that the seeds of grace and exclusiveness
will take root in our unsanctified hearts.”
“She is ‘getting results’!” I said to myself; and then aloud: “But
don’t you like California?”
“Sure!” he said, with his father’s flickering smile. “Who wouldn’t?
It’s just the place to go to Heaven in. But it doesn’t seem like our
own old Yankee Land out here. No one hurries. No one but the Japanese
farmer does a lick of work—that’s why they hate him so. The white
people just sit around and wait for the Mid-Westerners to bring them
their savings. Unless you are descended from a Forty-niner, no one
cares who your grandfather was, or whether you are a Mormon or a
Christian Scientist or a Presbyterian or a Seventh Day Adventist. All
the best things in the State are public property and are out of doors
where everyone can get at them. There isn’t any ‘Main Street.’ A few
of them keep office hours, but they picnic going to and fro; and up
in San Francisco the business men take a sea trip every morning and
evening. It all feels like a late afternoon in Arcadia.”
I glanced at my watch and remarked that we must be near Santo
Espiritu.
“Yes,” said Oliver; “but let me tell you a little more about the
Native Sons. They are having an influence on Dolly’s and my religious
beliefs. They get so much harmless pleasure out of the world. They
sit around eating apricots and looking at the poppy fields most of
the time. When they are very energetic, they get up and recite their
own verses, or they go into the redwoods and stage a forest play, or,
maybe, do some Greek dances in the almost-altogether, interpreting
the Song of Solomon or the Eden story. When they weary of improving
their minds with art and song, the whole white population goes
camping up around Tahoe or hiking in the high Sierras or motoring
down to Coronado or sword-fishing over at Catalina. Easterners and
Midlanders who come here late in life easily get mixed up, they
tell me, in these new religions, the way Cousin Ethelwyn did; but
the real Californian doesn’t take interest in the future life. The
present is good enough for him. ‘Wasn’t it too bad,’ I heard one
of them say, ‘that Saint John didn’t see Santa Barbara before he
wrote _Revelation_’! And Dorothy and I have sort of reasoned it out
that the so-called decay of religion in our generation is rather
complimentary to Providence, indicating that we haven’t got such a
grouch as some of those old boys had against the land that the Lord
gave to our fathers.”
“That is a discussible point of view,” I admitted.
“But here,” he said, “is where we turn off from the main road. It’s
only a little way now. You’ll see, before you’ve been five minutes
in Santo Espiritu, what a colony of aliens we are, practising our
austerities in our august retreat on the outskirts of these careless
worldlings.”
III
TABLE TALK AT SANTO ESPIRITU
I had been having a curiously disquieting premonition—primarily
the result of Oliver’s indiscreet betrayal of intimate family
matters—that Cornelia must have been gravely altered by the shocks
and strains of the preceding seven months. She might seem almost a
stranger, I thought; and as we plunged into the walnut grove and I
caught a glimpse in the distance of the broad yellowish-white front
of the villa, and knew that in a few seconds I should see her, I
was conscious of a caved-in feeling, together with a tension of the
nerves, such as Enoch Arden experienced on turning into his garden
walk after a protracted absence. But so far as the eye could see,
there was absolutely nothing in my premonition.
As we drew up before the door of Santo Espiritu, she waved to us
from an open window and flew out to meet us, with her incredible,
indescribable air of a young girl, and in a certain very simple blue
gown, or the replica of a blue gown in which I had remarked last
summer that she looked like a bluebird. Cornelia, as I had known
her, had at least three principal moods: her winter mood, in which
she was His Excellency’s hostess, and the note was a quite mature
graciousness; her summer mood, in which she was the children’s
mother, and the note was high ethical solicitude; and her country
walking mood, in which she reverted to the appearance of seventeen,
and the note approached caprice. When I saw the blue gown,—maybe it
was a ‘frock,’—I said to myself, “She is in her country walking-mood!”
She greeted me with bright gayety, untinged, so far as I could
perceive, by suppressed feeling. Then she led me through a spacious
hall and across a magnificent area of Navajo rugs into a pleasant
dusky living-room, where I made the acquaintance of her sister Alice,
an agreeably quiet woman with peaceful eyes, and the children’s
tutor, Mr. Blakewell, a young fellow with extraordinarily courteous
manner and easy conversation, but with the ascetic pallor and the
faded iris which one associates with “spirituality.”
I shall not dwell on these minor figures in the scene. They
interested me only as notes of the background in which Cornelia had
developed a fourth mood, which was new to me.
As soon as the travelers had removed their dust, we all met for an
early dinner. This was served in the suave air under the sky canopy
of the patio or inner court—a delightful place, equipped with a
fireplace against chilly evenings, and partly tiled and spread with
Indian rugs; on three sides there was a narrow strip of lawn fringed
with roses and sweet-smelling shrubs; wistaria and myrtle and some
flaming-blossomed vine tapestried the walls and rambled over the
roof and festooned the wide archway on the west, which opened into
a walled garden, green beneath a spraying fountain—the removal of
the fountain from the patio to the garden being one of the “American
improvements.”
“Father” Blakewell murmured a Latin grace upon the repast and, in
the course of the meal, quoted us some of the rules of an English
Benedictine monastery in which he had sojourned. This, I assume, was
less to asperse us with the odor of sanctity than with the elements
of Latin, which the young people maintained was an unnecessary
burden. “Every man,” said Oliver, “should know American; then, if he
feels the need of a ‘second language,’ let him study English.” But
the children rather took the lead in the conversation announcing
that, in honor of Saint Mary of the Sea, the family had adopted a
fish diet, and that they had made a penitential hymn, which they at
once proceeded to chant. It ran something like this:—
To-day’s Monday,
To-day’s Monday,
Monday, barracuda,
Tuesday, mackerel,
Wednesday, flounder—
and so forth. The only other scraps of the table talk which I retain
are connected with Cornelia’s amused and amusing summary of a letter
from Ethelwyn, who had visited her “Arabian saint” and reported that
the leader of her party, an ex-Evangelical clergyman from Nebraska,
who spoke only English and had never before been outside the United
States, had, on being addressed by the saint in Arabic, understood
perfectly everything that was said to him.
“My Lord!” Oliver exclaimed,—“I beg your pardon,—By Pollux! I wish
I could get up my Vergil that way!” Dorothy said that she didn’t
understand why her mother and the rest of them made so much fun of
Cousin Ethelwyn: it seemed to her, she said demurely, “very much like
Pentecost.” Father Blakewell explained the distinction, but I have
forgotten just what it was. I infer that the children were cutting
up a little on my account; for Oliver followed his sister with a
grave-faced remonstrance against their “bigotry” toward the new
mystical Oriental cults: they had something, he said, which people
seemed to want; and, for his part, though he didn’t care for the
style of their prophets, he thought there was a lot of common-sense
in some of the Bahaist notions about world peace and about bringing
forward the common ethical basis of all the great first-class
religions.