Orientals, if you had to associate with them. They are so—well,
I suppose some of them may be clean. But for a really well-bred,
intelligent woman, like Ethelwyn, to go trailing around the world
after an ignorant barefooted Arabian peasant seems to me to be almost
disgusting—it’s so—so eccentric.”
“I suppose,” replied her son, “that well-bred Romans of the first
century felt very much as you do when Saint Paul, the humpbacked
tailor of Tarsus, tried to introduce his Levantine fanaticisms into
the Forum.”
“Oliver! That, you know, was very different,” said Cornelia. “Saint
Paul was in the central religious tradition of the world: what Newman
calls the ‘classical’ religion, the formative power in what he calls
our ‘classical’ Western civilization. It means so much to be central
and not eccentric.”
“Was Saint Paul ‘central’ when he appeared in Rome?” asked the
incorrigible youth.
“You answer him, Mr. Blakewell,” said Cornelia.
“I think,” said the young man quietly and seriously, “that Saint Paul
was central wherever he appeared.”
“I see,” said Oliver.
At the same instant he and Dorothy exchanged winks; and all this
arguing abruptly ceased. Then we strolled into the garden, where I
was urged to light my cigar. We examined the water lilies under the
fountain, and the various exotic plants which Ethelwyn’s gardeners
had persuaded to perfume the air. Cornelia put a sprig of heliotrope
in my buttonhole, smilingly quoting a line of _The Winter’s Tale_
about flowers for my “time of day.” Presently the children, with
Father Blakewell and their Aunt Alice, returned to the court, where
the mah jongg outfit had been set out in place of the dinner-table
and a little fire of cedar wood had been lighted, more for its
social fragrance than from any need of it. Soon we heard a pleasant
chatter of “seasons” and “green dragons” and “characters.”
It was a pleasant picture, as we looked in on it through the archway.
We stood there together for a moment, her shoulder just brushing
my sleeve, and we seemed both to be studying the scene, like—I
sentimentalized it long afterward—like a pair of happy parents fondly
watching their children at play. We seemed both to be thinking
of the same thing; but I know that we were not; for I myself was
thinking what a wonderful chatelaine Cornelia was, and what elaborate
properties she really required for the adequate staging of her part
in life, and what an unutterable fool any poor professor would be
who should think that, if he picked up that little exquisite body
by my side, he could carry off Cornelia, and make her his own.
What I loved in her, I said to myself in a kind of bittersweet
paroxysm of realization, was paradoxically _not in her_; it was the
charming world which she had the gift of creating around her; and it
would require a caravan of elephants to provide her with suitable
accessories for the lodging of a single night.
“And now,” said Cornelia, recalling me from my swift revery, “if you
don’t mind walking so soon after dinner, I’m going to take you down
to the sea—for the sunset.” She glanced at me sidewise and upward
from gray eyes which deliciously feigned serious question about the
words which her lips were framing: “Do you mind?”
IV
A SILENCE BY THE SEA
It is a half hour’s walk from Santo Espiritu to the sea.
As we went through the gate of the walled garden into the walnut
grove, Cornelia patted my arm lightly, like a shy, affectionate,
approving child, and said softly: “I’m so glad you came.”
“And I.”
“But let’s not talk about that yet. Let’s walk first. I do hope there
will be a fine sunset. We have them here so seldom. This evening it
looks right.”
We walked on swiftly, chatting of nothings; through the trees; a
short distance along the Santo Espiritu valley road; then up a
steepish path to the tufted gopher-burrowed mesa; and across it and
down it through zigzags among the sagebrush and thorny gray shrubs
toward the ocean, over which hung a dull gray curtain of cloud. There
was nothing bright in the scene but the “bluebird gown” of Cornelia,
flitting down the gray-lichened slope ahead of me. But the dull blue
expanse of the sea brightened a little as we crossed a strip of
level ground at the foot of the mesa and came to a stand on the edge
of a long crescent-shaped bluff. I looked out at the fishing boats
anchored a quarter of a mile from shore.
“Look down!” said Cornelia. “This is one of our show places. And
you’d better sit down, if you are dizzy at all.”
We both sat and peered over the undercut rim of the bluff. Fifty feet
below us was the sea, deep, still, emerald green, transparent and
quivering with waves of pale green light, down into misty recesses
where its depth rendered it opaque. Up through the floating foliage
of the seaweed, goldfish were swimming idly, big ones in the grand
style, tremendously decorative, and thoroughly conscious, I thought,
of the stunning effect of their gold in the green water. I was
fascinated by them. I stretched myself flat, face downward, and
pulled myself to the rim and studied them. A damnable thought was
swimming up to me out of submarine caverns of “the unplumbed salt
estranging sea.”
At first my thought had no shape. It merely stirred in dark
obscurity, like an irritated squid or devilfish. Then it emerged—with
a golden head, like a mermaid’s. I am not ordinarily fanciful or
figurative. I dislike fanciful people. But I have somehow got to
convey the idea that, as I watched those goldfish, the wires in my
mind became crossed and tangled and, for a moment, made some sort
of horrid imaginative connection between goldfish and mermaids
and the enchantingly girlish figure and golden head of the woman
whose gray eyes I felt but could not see, playing over my prostrate
body and working some charm at the back of my neck. Cornelia had
everything—yes, everything: the virtues and the graces, and a beauty
and blitheness which often seemed enough in themselves, they made one
so immediately, unmistakably glad to be alive within their radius.
But wouldn’t she have profited—as Arnold once remarked of the ladies
of the English aristocracy, whom Cornelia admires so much—wouldn’t
she have profited by “a shade more of soul”? Was there much—inside,
under those golden scales? Wasn’t she pretty near the surface? And
was that her fault or her misadventure?
“Do you find them interesting?” asked Cornelia.
“Yes,” I replied, continuing my study.
In spite of her nearly grown children, there was something virginal
in Cornelia. Something curiously undeveloped; was it, perhaps, her
heart? That would be like a mermaiden. She was no Circe, I mused,
guilefully weaving subtle spells. She was an otherwise mature woman
who had somehow remained essentially innocent and child-hearted,
singing still to herself, in her “secret garden,” the songs of
seventeen. She herself did not know, she could not know, what strains
of richer harmony had been lost to her ears—and to mine, because we
had never emerged from the walled garden, had not dared to venture
together into the “dark forest” of experience. She herself was an
undeveloped theme, a divine fragment of melody, which the winds
hummed and the sea sang, and which hovered all days and all nights in
the tenebrous deeps of my enchanted heart.
“Look up now,” said Cornelia softly.
I wriggled back from the verge of the bluff, and sat up, and looked
up.
While I had been lying there in prone contemplation of the goldfish,
the awaited sunset had arrived, and with a magnificence of splendor
unparalleled in my memory. The sun itself was not visible. But the
dull gray curtain, which, as we were descending the mesa, hung from
the zenith to the sea, had vanished before the passionate resurgency
of light. Overhead, extending from north to south, stretched a vast
skyland of royal purple, its lower edge, or shore, tinged with deep
rose color, where the waves of light beat against it. Near the
“shore” was a bright clear crystalline tract, without any cloud; but
elsewhere, farther out in that celestial sea, gleamed, glowed, burned
an immense archipelago of golden islands. It looked like Polynesia
transfigured with fire and praising God on the Day of Judgment.
It took my breath away. I gazed spellbound, like the spellbound
color in the sky, to which Cornelia had called my attention just
as it reached its brief period of seeming fixed and changeless and
eternal. I turned to her. She was quietly watching my response to her
sunset. Our eyes met; and for an instant they clinched. Then her lids
drooped, and she said:—
“You were so good to come!”
“So good? So good?” I repeated gropingly. “I don’t know whether I
am good or not. I am happy that I came. I only know that I am very
happy. Is that a sign of goodness, Cornelia?”
“Yes,” she said, and her eyes met mine again and held them prisoners,
while she went past them looking for something behind them, and I
went past her eyes, also in search. We said nothing. The sea was
still. There was not a sound from the bare brown land between us and
the mesa.
Suddenly, out on the bare brown land, a meadowlark sent up her little
bubbling fountain of song—once, twice. Then she was still. We smiled
at each other as the echoes of the bird’s good-night reverberated
through our nerves and died away. Then the silence fell, deeper
than before. It was delightful at first. Then it became oppressive,
exciting. It clutched at one’s heart and made it thud. Or was it
something else—something that had stolen up, in the silence, between
us?
Cornelia broke the spell. “Did you hear it?” she asked.
“The meadowlark, do you mean?”
“No. Of course you heard that!”
“What else—should I have heard?”
“Well, never mind that just now. I want you to tell me something
else. How much—how much did the children tell you?”
“Everything.”
“I hoped they would; I hoped they would.”
“Then it’s true, Cornelia?”
“What is true?”
“That you and Oliver have separated.”
“Oh—that? That is a minor matter.”
“Minor? How minor?” I exclaimed in some bewilderment.
“Why, compared with other experiences. I wasn’t thinking about Oliver
just now. It’s a horrid thing to say; but I’m not interested in
Oliver just now. We’ve always been separated—in a sense. And just
now, I feel as if he didn’t belong to me, nor I to him; as if he were
someone that I had known once, and didn’t know any more.”
“How did it happen, Cornelia?—I don’t mean what the children told me.
But the rest of it—if you—if you want me to know.”
“Yes,” she said, “I do want you to know, because—well, I want you
to understand. You know that I was not in love with Oliver when I
married him. I liked him very much. I do now, in a way. But I married
him because he offered me the life that I wanted, then, and that my
father and mother thought suitable. And I gave him, at least for
a long time, what he wanted—mainly—of a wife: a woman who would
look well in public with him, and entertain his friends, and be the
mother of his children. When the children were little, we were closer
together, for a few years, than we have ever been since. Still, as
time went on, of course we accumulated ‘things in common’—actual
things and experiences and acquaintances; and as many of them—nearly
all of them—were nice things and pleasant acquaintances and agreeable
experiences, I was not dissatisfied; and I began to believe
there wasn’t much more to be had from life than just the kind of
satisfaction I had found. I believed, or pretended to believe, what
you were saying last summer: that the ‘inner life’ is of small
consequence, and that everything that is precious can be—what did
you call it?—‘externalized,’ ‘objectified.’ Do you really believe it
yourself?”
“I try to keep in mind,” I explained, “all that can be said for that
theory. It is a kind of compromise, a second-best sort of theory,
which many of us have to accept, when we are starving, or when a
death takes place in the inner chamber of our lives. That’s what our
wits are for, isn’t it—to help us put up gracefully with what we have
to put up with—grace or no grace?”
“But the theory is worthless,” cried Cornelia; “it’s absolutely
worthless, when one is in trouble, in serious trouble! I suppose
I have had less of it than anyone I know. As I look over my life
before this year, it seems like a dream, it has been so easy and
so fortunate. But when trouble does come,—illness, death, and that
sort of thing,—one has to have inner resources. Oliver has no inner
resources. Oliver hates trouble, and illness, and pain; and, whenever
he can, he runs away from them. When he is sick himself, he acts like
an untrained child. He is terrified and certain that he is going to
die; he is really dreadfully afraid of death—his own death, or the
death of anyone he is fond of.”
“That is interesting,” I said. “I didn’t suppose that at bottom
Oliver took anything seriously.”
“He doesn’t,” said Cornelia, “except _that_—trouble to himself, I
mean, and to a few others whom he regards as part of himself. As for
anyone else, he is always saying, ‘It is easy to bear the misfortunes
of others.’ Generally speaking, he isn’t serious about anything.
When he isn’t in a fit of being pessimistic and panic-stricken about
himself, he is just cynical and flippant. He doesn’t believe that
goodness is worth trying for. He laughs at all the principles which
I was taught to regard as elementary. He calls them ‘virtues of the
bourgeoisie’ and ‘old maids’ morality.’ When I protest, Oliver says
my humor is ‘thin.’ Sometimes he says I am ‘devoid’ of humor. I am
not! _Am_ I devoid of humor?”
“No, Cornelia,” I said. “But humor isn’t your strong point. In your
lighter vein, you incline rather toward a gleeful gayety. Humor, in
Oliver, results from a skepticism regarding first principles; and you
are not skeptical about first principles.”
“I am not, thank goodness. I do like to see people gay and
light-hearted and happy, and I like to be that way myself. But I
am light-hearted and gay only because I am clear about what you
call ‘first principles.’ Life hasn’t any dignity, any decorum, or
justification, even, if one is constantly questioning or mocking
at everything there is in it that is axiomatic. Oliver has no
axioms except derisive ones that he makes for himself. To me, it
isn’t endurable to be with people who refuse to take serious things
seriously. When one jests at serious things, one not merely destroys
their seriousness, but one takes all the joy out of the joyous and
light-hearted things—all the bloom from life.”
“I suspect,” I said, “there is a good deal of truth in that.”
“And so,” she continued, “when this dreadful accident happened on
New Year’s Eve, I didn’t expect _much_ of Oliver; but I hoped, hoped,
hoped it might make him a little bit serious about the children. It
did nothing for him, nothing. All he wanted was to put it out of his
mind as quickly as possible. Whenever I tried to talk with him about
anything serious—or anything sacred to me—he simply wasn’t there.”
“Many men,” I said, “are shy about those things, and feel more deeply
than they can bear to confess. Perhaps you don’t quite understand
Oliver.” I put in this plea, partly because I thought it was true,
and partly because I was curious to know the depth of Cornelia’s
disillusionment and estrangement.
“Often and often I remembered, this spring,” she replied evasively,
“how my sweet old grandmother used to talk to me, when I was a girl.
‘Marry a man, my dear,’ she would say, ‘who will help you not to be
afraid of death or anything that can happen to you in this world.’
And then again she would say, ‘Marry a man, my dear, who has a sacred
place in his own heart; and then everything that is precious to you
will be safe; and you will not be alone in the great joys and the
great sorrows that life has in store for us all.’ And I would ask,
‘Was grandfather like that?’ And the dear old soul would draw in her
breath and say: ‘Oh, _he_ was high! He was _high_!’ with an accent
of adoration which made one feel that he must have been a beautiful
spirit. ‘I would have gone anywhere with him,’ she always concluded
when we talked about him, ‘and I would have suffered anything with
him gladly, because we were together in a place where nothing in this
world could really touch our companionship.’”
“That is very lovely,” I murmured. “That was such a union as one
reads about in old romances, and dreams about, when one is young.”
“And so,” she continued, “when I was first married, I hoped that it
might be like that with us. Oliver seemed to me then so strong and
self-sufficient, and his personality seemed so various and flexible
and so full of color and high spirits and charm. I thought that, when
I knew him better, and had been taken into the innermost intimacy, I
should find there a still serene place, such as my grandmother had
described, with a kind of mysterious joy and rapture at the heart of
it, because we should be united in loving together everything that
had been almost too lovely and too sacred to speak of to anyone else.
That is what I thought marriage was, the inner meaning of it—and
not a barren desolate place, full of darkness and cynicism and the
terror of death. Do you understand, a little, why I felt so alone,
so helplessly alone early in the year? and why I wanted to talk with
you this summer, and why I have just _had_ to tell you these things
to-night?”
She put out her hand toward mine; mine closed over it.
“Cornelia,” I said, “I loved you twenty years ago, and—in some ways I
haven’t changed much since. Have you?”
“Please—please don’t!” she said, gently withdrawing her hand.
“And when the silence fell around us here, a little while ago,” I
continued, “and the meadowlark sang in it, and then it was still
again, didn’t you feel, didn’t you know—Cornelia, tell me what the
silence said to you, when it grew too intense, and you broke it.”
She lifted her head and seemed for a moment to be following the
flight of a sea gull winging into the darkening West. Then she turned
her cool gray eyes upon mine, steadily, steadily, till their flame
burnt under my ribs and close about my heart.
“The silence said to me,” she replied, “that I had been a very
foolish woman—Isn’t it strange how suddenly the color is leaving the
sky! You can almost see it fade while you watch it—like the glow in
an electric toaster, when you turn it off.” She rose, as if talk were
over, and we were going home. I followed, bent on a continuation.
“Yes,” I said, “I suppose the sun over there behind the cloud bank
has just sunk under the sea. You would think someone had pressed a
button. It reminds me of the _Ancient Mariner_—‘At one stride, came
the dark.’ But how have you been a ‘foolish’ woman?”
“Perhaps,” said Cornelia, “we had better return the long way, by the
road. The dusk does come fast, and I don’t like the short cut over
the mesa then. There are sometimes snakes.”
“I don’t mind snakes,” I replied: “they add a spice. But if the way
by the road is longer, I am for the road.”
V
CORNELIA’S RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
After we had started toward Santo Espiritu, a delicate rosy afterglow
succeeded the abrupt gray interval, but our backs were now turned
upon it, and we only glanced at it now and then over our shoulders.
“The silence said to me,” Cornelia resumed, “that I had been a very
foolish woman, because I had expected of a human companionship
an intimacy of sympathy and understanding which only a Divine
companionship can give.”
“How do you know, Cornelia? How do you know?”
“I don’t know how it is with you—with men. Maybe a man can fill his
life so full of the things he is doing—with work and ambition and
the improvement of the world—that he doesn’t have to have an ‘inner
life.’ For me, for most women, there has to be an inner life. We live
so much in our personal relations; and I, at any rate, can’t live my
life unless I feel every day, all the time, my relation to something
that is peaceful and beautiful and good, and that doesn’t change.”
“Have you really found it? Are you really happy—Bluebird?”
“I like to have you call me Bluebird,” she said. “I feel like one. I
have never been so happy in my life as in this last month, since I
have learned to keep the mood, the adorable mood, of the silence here
by the sea.”
“I guess,” I said, “I caught a bit of it—your mood, to-night. But
I know it won’t stay. It’s a mood that I can’t count on. And I
don’t have it—often. Perhaps my setting isn’t right. At any rate I
don’t seem able to establish the relations which you think are so
important. So, with me, the mood is a lovely fugitive.”
“I have it all the time,” said Cornelia eagerly, “since I began to
fill, really fill, my life with the things I love, and to leave the
rest out: walking alone on the mesa; and being with the children; and
talking with my sister and Mr. Blakewell (he’s really a most unusual
young man); and going to church in the dear little church here in La
Jolla. I always liked to go to church: it made everything seem so
certain and peaceful afterward—till Oliver and the children began to
argue. And I liked religious music and the little choir boys in white
and the lovely procession of them singing. It put me into a frame of
mind that I knew was right, because it harmonized perfectly with all
the things that I wanted to have in my mind, and it shut the other
things out.”
“When did this new mood begin?” I questioned.
“It wasn’t,” she said, “a very serious matter with me till this last
spring. Other things than attending church had put me in the same
frame of mind. But after our trouble began and especially after
Oliver—went to Paris, and I felt so desperately isolated, isolated
inside, I mean, I went to church very regularly, and I began to
attend early communion, and often to go into the cathedral and sit
for half an hour when no one was there. And by and by the horrible
sense of isolation left me. Something came in and filled up the
vacancy. I couldn’t see just why—nothing had changed; and in the
first month after he left, I hadn’t heard a word from Oliver except
by his postcards to the children, but somehow I didn’t care whether I
heard from Oliver or not; and somehow I was growing happy, positively
happy, and clear and certain in my own mind. The ‘mood’ stayed. I
know why, now; and now—you may think I am foolish, but now—I have
only to go into our little church and touch anything there, or just
sit still alone in the dusk, to feel ecstatically happy.”
“How do you explain it? I have never felt ecstatically happy, in
those circumstances.”
“I can’t tell you,” she replied. “The children want me to discuss
it. I don’t want to discuss it. The beautiful thing about it is that
it doesn’t have to be discussed. All I know is, that in this fixed
and blessed mood of mine I feel my life in relation with what hasn’t
changed and won’t change; and if one can only keep one’s life there,
what actually becomes of one, in ordinary personal relations, doesn’t
matter, simply doesn’t matter.”
“I felt that way once,” I said, “or something like that. It was when
I had ended a labor of ten years, and had written the last page of my
_Roman Epigraphy_. I didn’t care for several days whether I lived or
died, after that. ‘All the best of me,’ I said to myself, ‘is there,
exempted from time, safe in that book.’ But I found that I couldn’t
get my table companions at the University Club to take that view.
When it was published, not a soul of them read a word of my ‘best.’
They seemed still to prefer the worst of me, the mere empty shell
from which the oyster had been extracted—and canned.”
Cornelia looked at me gravely. “You are jesting,” she said. “Please
don’t. I am in earnest. When I step into our little church, I say
to myself, ‘Cornelia, what you really care for is safe here. You
don’t need to worry because other people don’t agree with you, and
don’t value what you value.’ And then the final responsibility, for
everything, seems to slip so blissfully from my shoulders, and to
be accepted by a Power so much stronger and surer than myself, that
sometimes I envy the white-cowled peaceful-faced women who have gone
into the Church and closed the door behind them.”