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)