you did that; and they are worth saving, too. My dear Cornelia, I am
afraid this ‘blessed mood’ is a little dangerous to you, and very
dangerous to the rest of us. Don’t wrap it too closely around you. I
knew a woman once who never gave her husband any occasion for anxiety
about any other man, but she fell so much in love with her clothes
that she became inaccessible to him, and finally made him frantically
jealous—jealous of her necklace and of her gowns.”
“Do you think I am really like that?”
“No, but that is a parable. You are becoming very fond of Church
clothes. You are so ‘dressy’ that you have become a little
inaccessible to the children, already—to their sympathies, I mean.
They are essentially so informal, you see. They don’t understand
you. I do understand you—somewhat. And what I understand chills me a
little. I understand you to be on the verge of losing heart over the
problem of reconciling yourself to the undistinguished mixture of
life. Your son would say that you have the ‘retreat-complex.’”
“I’m sure I don’t know what he would mean by that. What do you mean
by it?”
“I understand you to be on the point of making a mystical surrender
of your personality—on the verge of lapsing into a beatific mood
which will separate you still farther from Oliver—and from me, and
will ensure you against the pain and bitterness of reality. If you
should surrender and really become spiritual, like Father Blakewell,
or saintly, like no one of my acquaintance, you would drop out and
desert us. If you became saintly, which Heaven forbid, your character
would melt away like a little cloud in the moonlight. Your charm for
me, for all of us, is in the definiteness of your personality, the
clearness and distinction of your individuality. You are piquant
and delightful because you are a challenge, a whiff of the wind, a
counterblast. You have the ‘fighting edge.’”
Cornelia smiled as if she were recalling something sweet. “I am a
little tired just now,” she said, “of fighting. There are pleasanter
things than that. I want to surrender and repent.”
“Repent of what?”
“Oh, of being worldly, you might call it.”
“Please postpone that till you are ninety. You mustn’t repent yet.
Do you know, I used to think scornfully of deathbed repentances, but
now I think I was wrong; a deathbed is the place for repentance; and
the Catholic Church and the Gospels are right in welcoming those who
turn up at the eleventh hour. In fact, I half suspect—if we were
put into the world to see what we can make of it, and I don’t know
any other good reason for our presence here—I half suspect that God
Himself admires most those who ‘surrender’ to Him only with their
last breath.”
“How perfectly shocking!” exclaimed Cornelia. “What can you mean by
such absurdity?”
“By surrendering, I mean throwing yourself on God before you have
exhausted every possibility of making sense out of the world for
yourself. Perhaps there will come a time for you and for me when
there will be wisdom in such a surrender. But for young people, and
for people at our time of life, too, there is, there ought to be,
something repugnant in losing one’s intellectual grip, in letting
go, in abandoning the effort to find right relations with realities,
in giving up the attempt to make a little cosmos out of the chaotic
materials at hand. To my mind, it is the unpardonable sin against the
Holy Ghost to desert that fine heartbreaking task in order to take
refuge in a mood of mystical ‘peace without victory,’ peace without
substance. Your son would smile at my use of religious phraseology
and ‘mythological bunk.’ But he would understand, I think,—with a
little explanation, anyway,—precisely what I mean by not surrendering
to God till the last breath.”
“The children’s ideas of religion at present,” said Cornelia, “are
simply heathenish. Will you believe what Oliver said to Mr. Blakewell
the other day? He said something like this: ‘God? What is God? God
is a short word composed of three sounds: a guttural, a vowel, and a
dental!’”
“It’s true, isn’t it?” I ventured.
“I’m sure I don’t know. But just imagine a boy of nineteen saying a
thing like that! No wonder everyone is dismayed at the disappearance
of religion among the younger generation.”
“My dear Cornelia,” I replied, “religion itself, as some one has
said, is one of the most lovable things in the world. The word
sometimes becomes obnoxious and is avoided by young people; the thing
itself doesn’t disappear. The word ‘God’ is a symbol for one of the
great ideas in the world. The word sometimes acquires obnoxious
associations; but young people do not lose interest in the idea which
it represents. God and religion are, and always will be, popular, in
the best sense, because they come, offering to do for young and old
what old and young desire above everything else should be done for
them.”
“Well? What horrid paradox next?”
“Not a paradox at all. What everyone desires most in the world is:
to be taken seriously. That is what I want, from you. That is what
Oliver wants, from his parents. That is what His Excellency wants,
perhaps from someone else. That is what you wanted, I suppose, from
His Excellency. But none of us, apparently, is quite willing to
perform that great boon for any of the others. God and religion take
all men and every man seriously. That is why they have such power
of conferring happiness that they could never fall into disrespect
if the guttural and vowel and dental which we have just referred to
did not, when uttered together, often call into consciousness the
obnoxious things which we don’t believe in instead of the desirable
things which we do believe in.”
“I don’t quite understand you.”
“Why, I mean that at various times of life and at various ages of the
world people get together all the things that they believe necessary
and desirable, and then they say that God, meaning all the beneficent
power anywhere in the universe, is interested in preserving and
forwarding those things.”
“Yes; and then what?”
“And then people acquire a fresh stock of information—about
geology and hygiene and economics and slavery and intoxication and
sovereignty and war and Asiatics and international relations and
so forth. In consequence, they are forced gradually to revise, in
the light of their new information, their lists of things which are
necessary and desirable. Your son Oliver is busy at just that task
now; and he needs a lot of help and sympathy.”
“Oliver is really a dear boy,” said Cornelia, “and I am helping him
all I can. We are reading Newman; and I hope by and by to get him to
listen to a little of the _Imitation_, at breakfast.”
“You would do much better,” I said, “to read with him John Morley’s
_Compromise_ or Santayana’s _Poetry and Religion_. Nothing will so
decisively check, just now, the growth in him of a religious sense
as any attempt to persuade him that the beneficent powers in the
universe are pleased with ascetic withdrawals from life, or that they
countenance authoritative limitations on the use of the intelligence.”
“But isn’t Morley an atheist?” inquired Cornelia.
I ignored the question, for it was growing dark between the walls of
the little valley, and we were entering the deeper darkness of the
trees on the domain of Santo Espiritu.
“Oliver,” I said, “is reaching out into the real world, into his
own times, and gathering up here and there, without very much high
counsel, everything that, as he puts it, sounds good to him. That
is going to be the substance of his religion; that will be what he
believes in. Whether this collection of his beliefs will acquire
for him the compulsion and animating power, the ‘psychological
efficacy’ of the religions which possess a great history and a great
poetry—that will depend on his imagination and on his susceptibility
to high and noble emotions. At present he strikes me as a fairly
cool-tempered and slightly cocky young positivist, unconscious that
he is building an altar, certainly expecting no fire from heaven to
light his sacrifice—rather disdainful, indeed, of all cults which
profess that they have come down out of the skies.”
“But why, why,” cried Cornelia, “does he disdain what comes down
out of the skies? That, for me, is the indispensable essence of
religion. That is what makes the difference between a house and a
church. Till it comes, there can be nothing sacramental. And unless
the sacramental element enters, there is nothing really binding and
obligatory and final in all this miscellaneous collection of beliefs.
And everything gets so ‘messy’ and so confused. And everyone picks
and chooses, and does just what he pleases. I don’t wish to pick and
choose—not about the really great things, I mean; I want those things
decided.”
We had been strolling slowly up through the deep night of the walnut
grove along the path which ends at the gate in the walled garden.
The darkness, which had made us almost invisible, had brought us
physically nearer together. Cornelia seldom takes anyone’s arm; she
likes to be free when she walks. But, in the obscurity, our swinging
hands occasionally brushed at our sides, with an effect—a mutual
effect, I believe—of merely instinctive or “animal” sympathy, which,
in me, was instantly heightened into a kind of aching tenderness.
At the same time I was conscious that our minds—what we call our
minds—had been moving at a widening distance. And now shafts of light
from the windows of Santo Espiritu cut across the path, and as we
neared the gate, we stepped into the soft radiant glow of the place,
and the color in the bluebird gown lived again. We hesitated, then
stopped, and a momentary silence fell on us once more. I pulled the
crushed and wilted heliotrope from my buttonhole, and inhaled the
faint fragrance, meant for my “time of day.” Then I said, with my
ultimate effort:—
“Cornelia, when one goes out at the church door, one enters the
universe. The only blessed mood that I know comes when I feel that
all the universe is holy. And a sacrament, as I understand it, makes
not merely the difference between a house and a church; it makes also
the difference between a house and a home. When the world is before
one, where to choose, as it is for every one of us since Adam’s
day, don’t we have to pick and choose—even about the ‘really great
things’? Like, for example, how we are going to spend what remains,
at our time of life, of our poor little hungry human lives?”
“No,” Cornelia replied. “No; for me, there is no choice at all about
those things. Everything is perfectly clear to me now. I am going to
spend mine with Oliver. The reason why Oliver and I rasped so upon
one another last spring was that we were too near together, with no
point of contact but our miserable nerves. I have been learning this
summer how to ‘carry on’ with Oliver. When we are together again in
the fall, I shall not live with him, any more than I have for years.
I shall live in my blessed mood—in my secret garden. And I shall be
happy again, perfectly happy.”
“And I?”
“You are an old dear!” she said. “A very dear old dear! Come now,
let’s go in.” She seized my hand gayly, like a child, and opened
the gate, and led me through the walled garden, damp with the
spraying fountain, into the bright colorful patio, fragrant with
the cedar-wood fire. The mah jongg game was still in progress but
Father Blakewell and Cornelia’s sister relinquished their places and
withdrew. We played for an hour with the children. Cornelia, who sat
opposite me, drew all the “honors” and “wooed” with hands full of
seasons and dragons, while I steadily failed to complete my sequences
and ended the evening with four winds, one of each kind, on my hands.
When we broke up for the night, Cornelia unfolded a plan for my
assisting Mr. Blakewell with tutoring the children several hours a
day for the next two weeks; and, as a matter of fact, we adhered
strictly to the programme.
* * * * *
They gave me a cool bed in the guest-chamber, with a couch, at my
discretion, prepared on the flat roof above, to which a staircase
inside my room gave access. I chose the bed on the roof. I lay awake
there for a long time, studying the constellations and the star
clusters of the Milky Way, and recalling how, in the summer before,
after the little flurry over the bobbed hair had kindled in my heart
a faint flicker of hope, I had gone out at midnight with a strong
field-glass, and had lain for hours in the ferns, trying in vain
what I had often heard could easily be accomplished—to disjoint and
separate the double stars.
Printed by McGrath-Sherrill Press, Boston
Bound by Boston Bookbinding Co., Cambridge