Chapter I: AM an essayist, if anything, trying to tell Susan's story, and telling (6)

Final Note, by Susan--_insisted upon_: "But all the same, secretly, he is ashamed. For there's nobody in the world like Ambo, whether for dearness or general absurdity. Why shouldn't he have been a little happy, if he could manage it, throughout those interminable weeks of physical pain? He suffered day and night, preferring not to be kept under morphine too constantly. I won't say he was a hero; he _was_, but there's nothing to be puffed up about nowadays in that. If the war has proved anything, it is that in nearly every man, when his particular form of Zero Hour sounds for him, some kind of a self-despising hero is waiting, and ready to act or endure or be broken and cast away. We all know that now. It's the cornerstone for a possible Utopia: no, it's more than that--it's the whole foundation. But I didn't mean to say so when I started this note.

"All I meant to say was that you must never take Ambo _au pied de la lettre_. I'm not in the least as he's hymned me--but that, surely, you've guessed between the lines. What is much more important is that he's not in the least as he has painted himself. But unless I were to rewrite his whole book for him--which wouldn't be tactful in an otherwise spoiled and contented wife--I could never make this clear, or do my strange, too sensitive man the full justice he deserves. He's--oh, but what's the use! There isn't anybody in the world like Ambo."

XII

More than a year has already passed since those dark-bright days, the spring of 1918. Down here in quiet, silvery Provence, at our nursing-home for children--I call it ours--the last of the cherry blossoms are falling now in our walled orchard close. As I write, James Aulard Kane sits--none too steadily--among a snow of petals, and sweeps them together in miniature drifts with two very grubby little hands. He is a likely infant and knows definitely what he wants from life, which is mostly food. He talks nothing but French--that is, he emits the usual baby grunts and snortings in a funny harsh accent caught from his Marseillaise nurse. Susan is far too busy to improve this accent as she would like to do: perhaps it would be simpler to say that she is far too busy. She is the queen-bee of this country hive; and I--I am a harmless enough drone. They let me dawdle about here and do this and that; but the sun grows more powerful daily, and I sleep a good deal now through the warmer hours. I am haunted by fewer mysterious twinges, here and there, when I sleep....

Meanwhile, the world-cauldron bubbles, and the bubbles keep bursting, and I read of their bursting and shake my head. When a man begins shaking his head over the news of the day, he is done for; a back number. Susan never shakes her head; and it's rather hard on her, I think, to be the wife of a back number. But she's far too thoughtful of me ever to seem to mind.

Only yesterday I quoted some lines to her, from Coventry Patmore. Susan doesn't like Coventry Patmore; the mystical Unknown Eros he celebrates strikes her as--well, perhaps I had better not go into that. But the lines I quoted--they had been much in my mind lately--were these:

_For want of me the world's course will not fail;
When all its work is done the lie shall rot;
The truth is great and shall prevail
When none cares whether it prevail or not._

"Stuff! We do care!" said Susan. "And it won't prevail, either, unless we make it. Who's working harder than you to make it prevail, I should like to know!"

You see how she includes me.... So this book is my poor tribute to her thoughtfulness, this Book of Susan.

* * * * *

But sometimes I sit and wonder. Shall we ever, I wonder, go back to my ancestral mansion on Hillhouse Avenue and quietly settle down there to the old securities, the old, slightly disdainful calm? I doubt it. Tumps, ancient valetudinarian, softened by age; Togo, rheumatic, but steeped in his deeply racial, his Oriental indifferentism--they are the inheritors of that august tradition, and they become it worthily. For them it exists and is enough; for us it is shattered. Phil, a later Waring, is lost in Russia. Jimmy is gone. But Susan will do, I know, more than one woman's part to help in creating a more livable world for his son, and I shall gain some little strength for that coming labor, spending it as I can. It will be an interesting world for those who survive; a dusk chaos just paling eastward. I shall hardly see even the beginnings of dawn. But--with Susan beside me--I shall have lived.

* * * * *

Farewell, then, Hillhouse Avenue!... Make way for Birch Street!

(THE END)