Chapter VII: Book FIVE: Approaching Religion and Other Grave Matters

I

WE MEET IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

It is not my intention to make public, in any detail, what I know of the means by which His Excellency got young Oliver out of his New Year’s scrape in New York. In recording my conversations with Cornelia and her family, I have been animated throughout by a desire to increase popular respect for the members of our upper class as the suitable persons to give tone to the democracy; and this particular incident happens not to be altogether creditable to the ethical sense of His Excellency—if one uses as a criterion the ethical austerity of Jeanie Deans or George Washington of blessed memory. I am not sure that almost any other man in the same circumstances—even a member of our very moral middle-class—would not have strained a point to keep his own son from public punishment and disgrace. I mean only that we all talk about “equality before the law,” until we find ourselves in personal need of special privileges; and that when His Excellency’s withers were wrung, he took it as a matter of course that he should use his money and his persuasive tongue, his acquaintance with the police captain, his relationship with Judge Black, and his influence with the newspapers to smooth things over. The matter was adjusted out of court and without publicity, chiefly by the prepayment, while the recovery of the principal victim was in doubt, of the moderate sum which disinterested persons estimated the life of an eight-year-old boy of the laboring class to be worth. His Excellency himself wrote to me, in the latter part of March, as I remember, that everything had been “fixed up—_Gott sei Dank_; so that’s over.”

What immediate effect the accident and the reparation of it had upon the internal harmony of Cornelia’s household, I did not know. In the occasional letters which I had received from her early in the year, she expressed considerable anxiety about the health of her son. She said that the accident was preying on his mind and making him nervous and listless about his school work—and perhaps she should have to take him out of school. In one letter, which she asked me to burn, I thought that I detected a hint of bitterness toward Oliver for concealing from her his knowledge that Oliver Junior had been less innocent of the tastes and follies of his age than she had imagined him to be. But in all the years of our acquaintance, both she and her husband had maintained a proud and—I had supposed—happy reticence regarding their more intimate relations; and except in the essentially comic incident, last summer, of Dorothy’s bobbed hair, I had never been admitted to so much as a glimpse of anything like a domestic “difference.” Being, myself, an old bachelor with perhaps somewhat idealistic notions of family life, it was quite beyond me to conceive that a serious misfortune, like the automobile accident, could have any other influence than to cement more closely the family unity.

I was even so guileless as to suspect nothing, when, in the middle of April, I received a letter from Cornelia, saying that Oliver had gone to Paris for some months to get material for his war book, _Lying Abroad for One’s Country_; that she was taking the children to southern California for an indefinite sojourn; and that she hoped I might visit them when my college work was over—there was something which she wished very much to talk about. I searched through the letter to see if I could discover what it was. To my obtuse perceptions, the point of interest appeared not to be in the main news but in the incidental reference to Cornelia’s religious bias, contained in the following paragraph:—

“Don’t be afraid,” she wrote, “of going to southern California in July. The climate is delightfully right, if only one stays near enough to the coast. I have been hoping for years to spend a summer there, but have always had to give it up because my cousin Ethelwyn lives there! Such a pity: she has a charming Spanish house—Spanish with American improvements—in a walnut grove, with a ‘kitchen garden’ of orange and fig trees, near a little village ten or fifteen miles north of San Diego. But she—I have told you something about her, haven’t I?—she is a Theosophist or a Bahaist or one of those dreadful things that Boston Unitarians become infected with when they live long in California. And the people she has around her—well, fond as I am of her, I myself find them impossible; and Oliver always used to say that he would ‘rather be d——d to all eternity with Voltaire than spend ten minutes in Heaven with Ethelwyn.’ Well, poor dear Ethelwyn has just had a chance to join a pilgrim ship, which is going by way of China and India to visit some ‘saint’ in—I think—Arabia; and she has offered me the place, together with all the servants, for a year. My sister Alice will go with me for company. We shall fumigate and air the place thoroughly! I have engaged an excellent tutor for the children—a young man from St. Luke’s School; and we shall see what can be done to get them back again to their right minds before they go to college in the fall. So do come and help us!”

To anyone acquainted with either Cornelia or California, it should be 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.

“But Oliver dear,” said Cornelia, “you really wouldn’t care for these 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.”

“You would have to leave Dorothy and Oliver behind you,” I said, “if 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