IV
I did not go to America until the following year, and then I went alone, leaving Jinny with your mother. You remember about that, how after all they made me leave my child behind as a hostage. We won’t dwell on it now. It was only significant in so far as it showed me that my new intimacy with your mother was not quite what I had believed it to be.
As for St. Mary’s Plains, it gave me a different welcome from the one I had expected. It disapproved of me and showed it. My people went for me. They greeted me with the proprietary affection that claims the right to outspoken criticism. On the whole, I liked that. It was a relief. Although at first I was bewildered, amused and occasionally annoyed by their vigorous upbraiding, I was glad that they felt entitled to treat me as they did: their scolding gave me a feeling of their solidarity with me. And it was refreshing to find myself among a group of people who had no respect for my fortune but blamed me honestly for being so disgustingly rich and doing so little good with my money.
Paris gossip had reached St. Mary’s Plains. I had thought it so far away, so safe. I was mistaken. Many acquaintances had been going back and forth across the Atlantic carrying information, more or less correct, of my doings. The fact that my husband was no longer living with me was variously interpreted. Had I come rushing home for refuge that first summer they would have been on my side, but I had not. I seemed to have cynically accepted his liaison with another woman and was brazenly continuing my worldly life.
My Aunt Patience, as I came gradually to realize, had been the person least affected by these tales. She lived the life of a hermit, wrapped up in her studies, and had refused to listen to gossip. “I guess Jane herself tells me what she wants me to know,” she had said to more than one busybody, but of course I suspected nothing of all this on arrival. I had gone to America because of an unquenchable longing to be with my own people, but I was not without a certain feeling of pride. I was scarcely fatuous enough to consider myself as a martyr, but it did seem to me that I had suffered through no fault of my own and had taken my troubles with a respectable calm. Philibert was still wandering about Europe with Bianca. I had heard nothing from him directly. An occasional message reached me through his solicitors, that was all. I had continued to carry on. I was keeping my promise to your mother.
My Aunt Patty came to New York to meet my steamer. I saw her from the deck, before the ship was in dock, a powerful figure, something elemental about her, reducing others to insignificance; I waved. She looked at me but made no sign; she did not recognize me. As I came down the gangway I saw her peering about in the crowd still searching, and when I walked up to her and said “Aunt Patty, it’s me, Jane,” she dropped her large black handbag and gave a gasp. She of course was the same, only more so, bigger and grander, with her black mackintosh flapping, her bonnet askew and wisps of grey hair hanging down, a grand old scarecrow. How she hugged me, her long arms round me, people jostling us. That was a blissful moment. I was perfectly happy for that moment, a child at rest and comforted.
Then she said, “Where’s your baby?”
“I didn’t bring her, Aunt.”
“Oh!” Her face fell.
“I couldn’t, Aunt, such a long trip for such a short visit, and her father wouldn’t let her come.”
“I see.” She shut her grim lips. It was clear that she was very disappointed.
We were to take the train that night for St. Mary’s Plains. There was some confusion about my luggage and trouble about getting it across the city. I seemed to have a great deal. A great deal too much, my Aunt said. Celestine had a difference of opinion with the porters and scolded them in her high, voluble, native tongue. My Aunt did not know what to make of Celestine.
I was ridiculously excited when we arrived at St. Mary’s Plains and drove up Desmoisnes Avenue, and then as our taxi stopped and I looked across the grass to that modest old house I had a feeling of immense relief. This was my home.
The Grey House welcomed me kindly. It had shrunk in size. It had grown shabby and ugly, but it had the charm of an old glove or shoe, much worn. I loved it with gratitude and pity and an ache of regret.
Standing in the front hall I knew that its spirit was unchanged. My mind reached out comfortably to its furthest corners, to the cupboards on the back stairs and the pantry sink that I knew as I knew my own hand. I remembered the smell of the carpet on the dark stairs and the way the Welsbach burner sizzled on the landing, spreading a round of light on the stained wall. My room was just as I had left it twelve years before. The white counterpane on the narrow bed, the flat pillow, the rag rug on the waxed floor that my Aunt Beth had made for me when I broke my arm falling off the stepladder.
Patience changed for dinner into a black silk blouse and serge skirt. Her high collar was fastened with an oval brooch of gold, the only ornament I ever saw her wear. There were two servants in the house, a cook and a housemaid. I suspected that one had been got in for my visit. It was clear to me that she was poor, even poorer than she had been. The house was not too clean and very shabby. Patience Forbes was no housekeeper. She never cared what she had to eat or poked into corners to find dust. The drawing-room looked forlorn in the pale gas light. I gathered that she never sat there but spent all her time in the museum among her precious specimens. The drawing-room made me feel dismal. In the days when my Aunt Beth kept house it had been a cosy room. Now the old mahogany sofas and chairs, covered in frayed black horsehair, were pushed back against the wall in ungainly attitudes. They seemed to watch me reproachfully. I loved their austere, proud forlornness, but I felt uncomfortable. The place did not disappoint me, but I felt that I disappointed it. The blurred and misty mirrors that held mysteriously behind their marred surfaces the invisible reflection of my little grandmother’s sweet face and prim figure showed me myself, large, bright and vulgar, a great outlandish creature in an exaggerated dress, glittering, hard and horrible. I was profoundly disturbed. If I looked like that to myself, how must I look to my Aunt Patience? I soon found out. She was not a person to mince matters. She told me plainly that I looked wicked.
“Wicked, Aunt?”
“Yes, Jane, that’s just about it.”
“But, Aunt, this is terrible. What is it? What shall I do about it?”
She stared at me grimly. “I don’t know. I guess it’s everything—your clothes, that thick bang across your eyes, those ear-rings, that red stuff on your lips. It looks bad. It makes you look like an ungodly woman.”
I rubbed off the lip salve and took off the ear-rings. “Is that better?”
“Humph. A little.” Suddenly I saw her face quiver, her mouth twist. I crossed to her and knelt on the floor beside her, put my arms round her and looked into her working face.
“Aunt, tell me, what’s the matter? Tell—”
“There, Jane, I’m an old fool.” She tried to laugh but failed. Her voice cracked. “I can’t help it. You’re so different that I’m scared. Janey, Janey, you’ve no call to be so different.” She put her large worn hands on my shoulders.
“I’m not changed in my heart, Aunt.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am sure.”
“There ain’t nothing real wrong with you, Jane?”
“No, Aunt.”
“You can tell me solemnly that your heart’s not changed, that you’ve come to no harm?”
I looked into her eyes. Humbly, I knelt and looked into those honest eyes, not beautiful, with blistered, opaque irises, the whites yellow now with age. I knew what she meant, and I knew what would put things right between us. If I told her everything, all about Philibert and Bianca and my own loneliness she would give me the sympathy I wanted. Then all her criticism and disappointment would be swallowed up in pity. I hesitated. I did not believe that she knew anything of my troubles with Philibert. I had never written her one word about being unhappy. My happiness, I knew, was the most precious thing on earth to her. How, then, tell her now, and why? Break her old heart so that she might comfort me? Sadden the remaining years of her life that I might enjoy the luxury of being understood? And how explain? What could she ever understand of such things? She was an innocent woman.
So I lied. I chose my words in order to keep as near to truthfulness as I could.
“No, Aunt, I have come to no harm. I am just the same as the girl who left you twelve years ago. My looks, why should they matter to you, Aunt? They are not my own. All that is just dressmakers and hairdressers and the people round me. I have grown to look like them there, but I am more like you and yours than you think. I have been so home-sick, Aunt. I have longed so longingly for this, just this, Aunt, just to come home.”
Her face had changed, her eyes searched mine wistfully now.
“You are unhappy, child.”
“No, Aunt.”
“Your husband?”
I felt myself turn pale as she held my head between her hands. What could I safely say? There was a look in her face that frightened me. Did she know after all? Had she heard?
“Aunt, he is a Frenchman, different from us.”
“But is he a good man?”
“Yes.”
“True to you as you are to him?”
“Yes.”
For a moment longer she looked at me closely, then with a sigh of relief leaned back. “I believe you, Jane, I always said it wasn’t true. I couldn’t believe my girl wouldn’t tell me.”
I buried my head in her knees. I felt sick and guilty, and as I knelt there I saw that long ago I had thrown over my Aunt Patience for your mother, though I loved Patience Forbes better than any one in the world.
Presently she said humorously with her slow American twang—“Well, I guess I’ll have to get used to your looks, Jane, and not be silly, but I reckon it would be easier if your voice weren’t so French. You’ve got a queer sort of accent. I don’t know what all your aunts and uncles will say when they see you. I expect if you explain it’s just the effect of the world you’ve come from they’ll think it’s a pretty queer world.”
But I had no intention of explaining myself to my relatives. Aunt Patty had the right to bring me to book, but no one else had. It seemed to me that night, lying awake in my cool, puritan bed, rather funny to think of the people of St. Mary’s Plains holding me to account. What had I done, after all, to come in for a scolding? I had told my aunt I was unchanged. In a sense it was true. If I had not been the same I should not have wanted to come.
I could hear Celestine fussing about in the next room. Celestine was going to be a thorn in the side of the Grey House. She was out of place. There she was surrounded by my clothes. My clothes looked horribly gawdy littered all over that room. Presently her light was extinguished. I lay in the dark between the sheets that smelled of lavender, my eyes open in the kind familiar darkness, and told myself that it was true, that I was unchanged, the same—the very same person that had lain in that bed in that same homely safe obscurity years before—and for a time, the sounds and the unseen but palpable presences round me, seemed to agree, to reassure me.
I heard the tram rumbling by up the Avenue, I could see in my mind’s eye, the arc light above the street shining on the high branches of the elm trees, the comfortable houses set back in their grass plots, shrouded in shadow, lighted windows showing here and there, and beyond them to the West, I knew was the river, filled with the dark hulls of ships, lumber schooners from the great lakes, pleasure boats, tugs, their red lights riding high above the black water. From the side of my bed my mind could move surely out through the night among known objects, along familiar and friendly streets, past houses and shops and churches, all acquainted with me as I was with them. And I felt the furniture of the room was kindly, sedate and prim, taking me for granted, assuming that all was well, that I belonged there—but did I? Was it true? The years seemed to have been rolled up, as if the intervening time were a parchment scroll, put away in a corner, but there was something else, something different that could not be put away. It was in me. It existed in my blood, in my body. It was restless and it gnawed me. No—no—it was not true. I was not the same. No miracle could undo what had been done to me. No relief could obliterate from my mind what I had learned. I was old—I was tired and corrupt—something irrevocable had happened to me—something final and fatal, that no longing and no prayers could ever exorcise.
St. Mary’s Plains had “got a move on” during my absence, so my relatives told me. I saw as much. It had entered upon one of those sensational periods of industrial success that come to American towns so unexpectedly. Some one had invented a stove, some one else a motor car. Former modest citizens were making millions and building factories. Down town was encroaching on the pleasant shady districts of up town. The lots on either side of the Grey House had been bought by a syndicate who proposed to put there a hotel and an apartment building. The Grey House would be sandwiched in between them. It would become a little dark building at the bottom of a well, but Patience Forbes had refused to sell, though the price offered her would have left her more than comfortably off for the rest of her life. I asked leave to buy the Grey House from her for greater security, but she refused. “I’m safe enough, Jane, because I don’t want money. No man alive can make me sell if I don’t want to. You’ve no call to worry about me.”
My Uncle Bradford was not in town but there were a great many other family connections who came to see us and asked us to come to them for large hospitable succulent meals. They greeted me with hearty kisses and handshakes. “Well, Jane, glad to see you home at last. Hope you left your husband well.” And then we settled down into chairs.
“You certainly have changed. You’re real French, aren’t you? We’ve heard a lot about your doings. It sounds pretty funny to us, giving parties all the time to crowned heads, aren’t you?” This from the men, or from the women more gently—
“Dear, couldn’t you have brought your baby? We’re so disappointed. Yes, you do seem different, but we hope you’re happy. We can’t imagine your life, you know. It seems so empty, so artificial. The papers give such strange accounts. All those gambling places, your cousin fighting a duel, it sounds so strange. France seems to be turning to atheism with terrible rapidity. The separation of Church and State might be good if it led to a spiritual revival, but they don’t keep Sunday at all, do they? All the theatres are open Sundays they say.”
The elders were gentle but positive in their disapproval, the younger generation frankly intolerant. They had been struck by various religious and emotional disturbances that had swept the country, evangelical revivals, a thing called the “Student Movement,” and a university type of socialism. I felt myself being measured up to a certain high standard and found lamentably wanting. Had I forgotten their standards, I asked myself, or was this something new? When they asked me what I was doing with my life I said I didn’t know, that it took me about all my time just to live it. Wasn’t I interested in anything? Oh, yes, a great many things, music especially, and old enamels. They didn’t mean that, they meant causes. I didn’t understand. What causes, I asked, did they refer to? Women’s suffrage, the negro question, sweated labour. No, I was obliged to admit that women’s suffrage had not interested me and that there being no negro question in France I hadn’t thought about the subject. As for sweated labour, I supposed it did exist in Paris, but that its evils had never been brought to my notice. All the young people were espousing causes. They quite took my breath away. They believed so hard in so many things, and they talked so much about the things they believed in. Really they were violent talkers. Their fresh young lips uttered with ease the most astounding phrases. They were fond of big words. Their talk was a curious mixture of undigested literature and startling slang. Some of the things they believed in were love, democracy, the greatness of the American people and the equality of the sexes. What they didn’t believe in they condemned off-hand. There was for them no quiet region where interesting questions were left pleasantly unanswered. They abhorred an unanswered question as nature abhors a vacuum. Every topic was a bull to be taken by the horns. Everything concerned them. There was nothing that was not their business. They were crusaders, at war with idleness and cynicism, vowed to the regeneration of the world. They went for me, but how they went for me! I was a renegade, a back-slider, a poor, misguided victim of an effete and vicious foreign country. I had nothing to give them of any value. When I talked of the charm of Paris they yawned. When I mentioned my friends they called me a snob. When I spoke of my activities they laughed in gay derision. On the whole I didn’t mind. I was too tired to mind. They were so young, so keen, so good to look at, so full of hope. I wouldn’t have stopped their talking for the world, and I liked them for despising my money.
I envied them. They were happy, they were free. Deep in my heart I suspected that they were right to despise my life. In the evenings when they gathered on the shadowy verandahs of their comfortable countrified houses, the young men with mandolins, the girls in billowy muslin dresses, I listened to their laughter and their tinkling music, feeling so old, so very old. On those summer nights Aunt Patty and I would sometimes sit on the front steps of the Grey House as the custom was in the town, and all the street would seem to be charged with romance and joy and mystery. Through the trees one could see young forms flitting from house to house where lights streamed from hospitable windows down across the plots of grass, while on the shadowed verandahs young hearts whispered to young hearts, whispered of dreams that must come true, gallant, innocent dreams.
And there was the difficulty of religion. They couldn’t swallow my having become a Catholic. On the first Sunday morning I asked my Aunt Patience if she would like me to go to church with her.
“Why, yes, Jane, but I thought you’d be going to the Catholic Church.”
“I’d rather go with you, Aunt.”
“Come, then.” But I saw that she was troubled.
“You see, Aunt, I don’t really care what church I go to; I’m only a Catholic for social convenience.”
“That’s too bad, isn’t it?” She was putting on her bonnet.
“I don’t know, I don’t seem to have any feeling about it one way or another. I never could seem to learn much about God, Aunt, don’t you remember?”
“But don’t you believe in Him, Jane?”
“Honestly, Aunt, I don’t know. Sometimes I wish I could, but that’s when I’m in trouble and only because I want some one to help me out. That’s not believing, is it? It’s just cowardice.”
My aunt grunted. “Religion mostly is, but there’s something else, like what your grandmother had.”
“Yes, I know.”
She said no more, and I was grateful to her for taking it like that. We were companions in spite of everything.
But when my Aunt Beth came with her husband to visit us things became more difficult. She had taken my turning Roman Catholic as a dreadful personal problem of her own, and felt, dear little soul, that she must try to bring me back to the fold. The result was painful. She came armed with tracts and pamphlets, a whole bag full of appalling literature. I was greatly astonished, for I remembered her as a very gentle little creature. With age she had grown militant in the cause of evangelical truth. She took me to camp meetings and prayer meetings. She would come into my room at night in her pink flannel dressing gown, her little middle-aged face aglow with ecstatic resolve, and would press into my hand just one more message, a dreadful booklet, “The Murder of God’s Word,” or something of that kind. I was at last driven to appeal to my Aunt Patience for protection. She took up the cudgels for me.
“I guess Jane’s all right, Beth, I wouldn’t worry. God’s the same, whatever your Church.”
“But Patty, it’s heathen idolatry, worshipping the Virgin Mary. The Virgin Mary was just a woman like you and me.”
“Well, dear, what does it matter? Perhaps Jane doesn’t worship her in a heathen spirit, do you, Jane?”
“No, Aunt, I’m afraid I don’t worship her at all.”
“But think of the Jesuits,” wailed Aunt Beth.
“I don’t,” snapped Aunt Patty.
“Patty, I believe you’re in danger of losing your faith.”
“No, I’m not, Beth, don’t you fret about me. I’ve a good conscience before my God and my Saviour. Now just you leave Jane in peace and trust her to God. That’s what you’re told to do in the Bible. Just you trust the Lord. He’ll look after Jane.”
And Beth would be momentarily silenced more by the sense of her elder sister’s family authority than by any respect for her arguments.
Aunt Patty and I were happiest when we were left alone.
In July it became very hot. The back garden was ablaze with flowers. Rows of hollyhocks lined the wooden fences at either side. Butterflies fluttered in the sun. The bee-hives at the bottom of the garden were all a-murmur. We spent long hours on the back verandah, and Aunt Patty, her knitting needles moving swiftly (she knitted a good deal, but always had a book open on her lap), would question me about my life in Paris, and I would tell her as much of the truth as I could. Her conclusions were characteristic.
“Your set over there doesn’t seem to have too much sense,” she would say. “You sound a very giddy lot. You take no interest in science, do you? I don’t suppose you’ve any of you an idea of what’s being written and done.”
“Oh, come, Aunt, some of us are awfully clever. Fan knows all about art and music. My sister-in-law paints and embroiders quite beautifully, and all our relatives are gifted.”
“Humph, art is all very well, but do you keep up with the times?”
“How do you mean, ‘keep up’?”
“I mean, child, with what’s going on in the world of thought, intellectual progress. They’re making great strides in medicine in Germany. France is doing most in mathematics. But I daresay you never heard of Professor Lautrand. He lives in Paris. Ever met him? Ever heard of him?”
“I’m afraid not, Aunt.”
“Well, there you are, one of the great spirits of the age.” And she rubbed her nose with her knitting needle. “A noble intellect. His books have opened up for me a new world. To think you could talk to him and don’t even know he’s there! Why, landsakes, Jane, if I were in your shoes I’d wait on his doorstep till my bones cracked under me.” She laughed.
“Come and visit me, dear, do, and we’ll have him to lunch every day,” I urged. At which she laughed again her young, hearty laugh, but with a wistful look in her eyes as if the light of a lovely dream glowed a moment before her.
“No, Jane, no. I’m too old to go gallivanting about Europe, but I do wish you’d take my advice. You never did take any interest in science. If you did you’d not be so dependent upon mere human beings. If you’d only study geology and biology and the history of races, you’d see that human beings are no great shakes, anyhow, and don’t count for much, save that they’ve the power of thought. Has it ever occurred to you to stop and consider how wonderful it is that you can think, and how little you avail yourself of the privilege? Go one day to the Bibliothèque Nationale, that’s what it’s called, they’ve got one of my books there, and just think for a moment that all that building is crammed full of the records of man’s thought. Stupid, most of it, you’d say, too dull to read, all those books. Well, that may be their fault and it may be yours, but it’s neither here nor there. The fact is that the recording of knowledge is a miracle.”
Wonderful Patience Forbes, taking me to task for the frivolity of my world, sitting on the back verandah, her spectacles on the end of her nose, her knitting on her lap, her heelless slippers comfortably crossed, her little modest volume tucked away on a shelf in the Bibliothèque Nationale. She seemed to me very remarkable, and she seems even more so now. Time for most of us is just a process of disintegration, old age is often pitiful and ugly, but at the age of sixty-five Patience Forbes had the heart of a child and the robust enthusiasm of a student. She had been persuaded by the State Board of Education to write a series of text-books on birds, and in the evenings she would work in the room she called the museum, and I would sit watching her while she chewed her pen, rapped irritably with her hard old fingers on the desk, or went down on her knees before a shelf of books to look up some reference. Sometimes she would walk the floor and grumble—“Gracious, how difficult it is to write a decent sentence. English certainly isn’t my strong point. I write like a clucking hen. Style never was in my line.” And then she would laugh, her young, vigorous, chuckling laugh.
When I compared my life with hers, how could I not feel that there was justice in all that young American condemnation. Patience Forbes was old, she was poor, she went about in tram-cars, she worked for her living, and she was happy. There was no doubt that she was happy. She envied no man and no woman, and asked nothing of any one. She would not even let me help her. She said that she had everything she wanted and I was bound to believe her.
Early in August we went up to my Uncle Bradford’s camp in the woods at the head of the lake. He had written urging us to come and saying that if we didn’t he would come down to St. Mary’s Plains as he wanted particularly to see me.
A white steam-boat, with side paddles churning peacefully through the water, carried us for a long day and night and part of another day west by north-west, past little white straggling towns, calling at long piers to deliver mails and provisions, moving on and on, farther and farther across the wide shining expanse of water, away from the world of men. Timber schooners passed us, square-rigged, coming down from the great forest lands. The skies were boundless and light and high above the water. We moved in marvellous translucent space. The air was new as if the world had been created yesterday.
Uncle Bradford and his sons with their wives and children had built themselves log houses on the shore of the lake. The forest stretched away behind them as far as the Canadian border, and a great tract of it belonged to them, with its rivers, its game and its timber. Some of them were in the lumber business, others came there merely for the summer holidays. I found my Aunt Minnie there, and an even greater crowd of youngsters than in St. Mary’s Plains. Uncle Bradford, dressed in a red flannel shirt and a sombrero, ruled his camp like a Russian patriarch, and again I found every one interested in things that I had forgotten were interesting. There in that glorious pagan world surrounded by virgin forests they worshipped a stern and exacting God, read the Bible, and argued in the evening before the blazing log fire as to whether the mind were separate from the soul, or evolution incompatible with the principles of Christianity. And I wondered at them, for they were not afraid of their puritan God, nor weary of endless argument. Their consciences were clear. They could look God in the face, and their brains, if rather empty, were admirably keen.
I watched the women. They all seemed to have devoted husbands who assumed the sanctity of marriage to be the basis of life and took the beauty of their women for granted. Extravagant youngsters, how I envied them. Husbands who remained faithful lovers, wives who remained innocent girls, all contented and unafraid, and with their outspokenness, shy people keeping secret the sacred intimacy of love.
The children were splendid animals. They liked me and included me in their games. We used to go swimming before breakfast when the heavenly morning was crystal pale. I would slip from my cabin and join those little bronze figures, run through the clearing to the shore and down the wooden pier, stand an instant with them all about me breathing in the sweet air, then with a shout all together we would dive. I swam as well as any of those boys. It pleases me now to remember their respect for my prowess. And I could paddle a canoe and throw a ball like a man, and I caught the largest fish of all, a fine big salmon trout weighing fifteen pounds. My thought was—“I want a boy like one of these to become a man for Jinny. I want her to have a husband from my people.”
It was a delicious life. The air was fine and dry and sharply scented with the scent of pine woods drenched in sunlight. Each morning was a miracle as clear as the first morning of creation. Swift rollicking streams tumbled over rocks, fat salmon jumped in deep pools. Mild-eyed Indians came travelling down from the depths of the vast forest, paddling their lovely canoes of birch bark, laden with grass baskets and soft moccasins embroidered in beads. The nights were cold. One was lifted up into sleep, one floated up and away into sleep under sparkling stars, hearing the waves lapping the shore and the wind murmuring through the branches of the innumerable pines of the forest that spread away, further and further away, endlessly, countless trees murmuring a strong chant under the wide sky, stretching beyond the edge of the mind’s compass, as far as one could think, as far as one’s soul could reach out, the forest, the sky, the water, calm, untroubled, eternal.
Then suddenly something crashed into that crystal space.
My Uncle Bradford took me one morning to his office.
“You are nearly thirty now, Jane.”
“Yes, Uncle.”
“I have a letter for you from your father. He left it with me to deliver to you when you were thirty years old.”
I took the envelope he handed me. I was trembling. My uncle mopped his forehead and cleared his throat.
“You will be absolute owner of your property when you are thirty.”
“Oh,” I said blankly.
“Yes, you were not to know. It was your father’s wish. Did your mother, before she died, tell you anything about him?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Well, I’m sorry. It was her place to tell you. Your father is buried out west, in Oregon.”
“Yes, I know.”
“He’s not buried in a cemetery. He’s buried on a hill. He bought the tract of land himself.”
I waited. The noises of the camp came cheerily through the cabin windows. There was a strong smell of pine wood and resin and of bacon frying somewhere out of doors.
“Your father broke his neck falling down the elevator shaft in a New York hotel. The verdict was accidental death, but it was not an accident. Your mother knew, and I knew.”
I stood up, staring at him stupidly, holding the letter in my fingers, then quickly turned and went out. I crossed the camp and struck off into the woods. In a quiet place I sat down and opened the letter. It began, “My dear daughter Jane.” I know it by heart. This is the letter.
“My dear daughter Jane: It is time for me to go. A man is free to choose his time. This I believe, not much else. I am sorry to leave you, but you are only five years old and you will be better off with your grandmother in St. Mary’s Plains than you would be with me. Your grandmother and your aunts will take care of you. They are good women. It’s not their fault that they don’t like me. The truth is, Jane, that I’m not their kind. I’m nobody’s kind and I’m awful tired of being alone in a crowd. This world is getting too full of people for me. I want space and I guess I’ll find it where I’m going.
I wouldn’t leave you so much money if I knew what to do with it. It never did me any good. It was only fun getting, not having. At first I worked with my hands—in the earth—then I found gold. I bought land and more land, built a railroad or two, and then Wall Street got me. That was like the poker table I’d known when I was a boy working on the Chippevale Ranch. That was just excitement, no good to any one, but fun for a spell.
When you are thirty years old you’ll have as much sense as you’re ever going to have. Perhaps you’ll do better than I did. Perhaps you’ll know how to spend. I didn’t. I’d like you to enjoy what I’ve left you. It would console me some.
I’m not a believer in the Cross of Jesus and I don’t want it on my grave, but I’m not sure there isn’t something over yonder on the other side. I hailed from the far West. It’s spoiling now, but a wide prairie and a high sky are the best things I know, that and working with your hands.
Good-bye, little girl Jane, you’re the only thing I mind leaving behind. I’d kind of like to know what you’ll be like when you get this.
Your Uncle Bradford’s an honest man, there aren’t many, you can trust him. He’ll give you this and explain that there was no disgrace. Only I didn’t feel like living any more. There are too many people hanging round. I want to get away. If I’m doing you a wrong by quitting I ask you to forgive me.
“Your loving father,
“Silas Carpenter.”
I worked it out that night with maps and time-tables. I had just enough time to go to Redtown and get back to New York to catch my boat. I left the next morning. My aunt went with me. Uncle Bradford’s steam launch took us down the lake. We caught a train at a place called Athens and joined the western express the middle of the next day. It took us three days and three nights to get to Oregon. We crossed the Mississippi river early one morning. The next day we thundered through the Rocky Mountains. The plains beyond were immense and stupefying.
I visited the grave alone. A block of granite, reminding me of a druid’s stone, marked the spot on the hill where he was buried. It stood up stark and solid on the bare ground. It looked as if it had been left there endless ages before by some slow, gigantic movement of nature, some glacier travelling by inches from the north, or some heaving of the earth’s surface. One side of it was polished and bore an inscription cut into the stones:—
“here lies silas carpenter, who was born in this place before it was a town and who died in new york on January 5th 1885.”
From the hill-top one had a view of the city lying along the sea, a new, bright city, an unfriendly sea of a dazzling blue. I sat down on the grass by the great stone. Here, at last, was something that belonged to me and to no one else. No one would dispute with me the possession of my father’s grave. I felt excited and uplifted as if I had come into a precious inheritance. And yet what had he left me? A message of failure, an unanswered question, a sense of not having counted for him enough myself to keep him on the earth. He had shuffled me off with the rest of it. My mother must have hated him. She must have had something to do with his giving it up like that. I would have loved him. I would have understood him. If he had waited for me we would have been good companions. If he had lived I would never have gone to Paris. I would have gone west with him to his wide prairie and high skies. Everything would have been different. I had missed something. What had I missed? I looked out across the dry grass, the rolling hills, the big, bare, blazing land, the glittering sea under the windy sun, and I recognized it as mine. I had missed my life. I had taken the wrong turn.
We boarded the train again next day and recrossed the continent of America. It took us seven days and nights to reach New York. We passed through Denver, Chicago, Cleveland, and countless other cities. We crossed deserts white as sand and overgrown with cactus. In the middle of the Mohawa desert we stopped at a place called Bagdad to give the engine a drink of water. Bagdad was a single wooden shed standing in a waste of sand. Bagdad, Bagdad. It was very hot in the train. My aunt and I sat most of the time on the open platform at the end of the observation car, watching the earth fly from under the train and drinking iced drinks that the coloured porters brought us. It is very exciting to be in a train like that, rushing across the earth at such speed, suspended in space as if on a giant bridge, and the vast, the immense, the overwhelming panorama flying endlessly past. Cities, rivers, prairies, mountains, lonely farms, the steel jaws of stations engulfing you, out again through the crowding buildings of a city you will never know, full of people you will never see, into the open, the horizon endlessly wheeling, the earth under the train flying backwards, but the far edge of the earth towards the horizon wheeling with you. Thundering along, the pounding of the engine, the grinding wheels exciting your brain to a special liveliness, the train is a miraculous thing, a steel comet cushioned inside imitating a dwelling, but a long comet whirring through space, a blaze of flying light by night, a streak and a noise by day, and from it you look out upon a thousand worlds flying past, and you have glimpses, instant, quick glimpses, of countless mysterious lives, a group of children hanging over a fence waving, a farmer in a wide straw hat sitting in a blue wagon at a railway crossing, a boundless golden field behind him of innumerable garnered sheaves all gold, a village like a collection of wooden boxes, saddled horses tethered to a rope in front of an unpainted post office. Cowboys driving cattle, rolling prairies, horses, wild, running, kicking up their heels, a lonely cabin against a hill, hens scratching outside, thin smoke coming from the wobbling iron smoke stack, lost in the boundless blue; families moving, all their household goods piled on wagons, the men walking beside the horses with long whips, a mail coach lurching along a mountain road, the driver has a Colt revolver in his pocket. You know that. You hope he’ll get the highway robbers who will be waiting for him at dark. Bret Harte wrote about him. And now Walt Whitman’s country—Leaves of Grass—a great poem, the greatest. He knew. He had found out. He understood the giant, the great urge of life, in this my country.
And I thought of my father, crossing and recrossing the continent, restless, lonely, powerful, dissatisfied, an isolated man moving up and down the land, handling money, gambling with money, not knowing what to do, growing tired of it all.
I said to my aunt—“It was twenty-five years ago, but it brings him close.”
“Your father’s death?”
“Yes, it makes a difference.”
“How?”
“I’m with him. It clears the ground.”
I did not quite know what I meant then, but I know now.
We reached New York. I was suddenly filled with foreboding. In the high window of our towering hotel I sat with Patience far into the night. We sat together like watchers in a tower, and a million lighted windows shone before us in the blue night.
“I am afraid, Aunt.”
“Why, my child?”
“I am afraid to leave you.”
“Yes, I know.”
How much did she know, I wondered? What did she suspect? Philibert had not written to me, of course. She must have noticed. She must know a good deal.
“You have your little girl, Jane. Think of her.”
“I do. She’s a prim little thing, not a bit like me.”
“Promise me to love your child, to love her enough.”
“Enough for what, dear?”
“Just enough; you’ll find out how much that is.”
“I will try to love her as you have loved me, Aunt, always.”
She gripped my hand. “Janey,” she muttered, “my girl.” We sat a long time silent. The desire to unburden all my heart was unbearable. But it was too late now.
“Europe is too full of people, Aunt. They have made the earth into a trivial thing. It is not good for people to subdue the earth. In Paris one is never out of doors. I don’t feel at home there. I am sick for my own country, for a wide prairie and a high sky.”
“You’ll come back again, Jane.”
“Yes,” I answered, “I will come back.”
I thought she was asking for a promise. I did not know that she was stating a prophecy.
And in the morning I went aboard my ship and my aunt left me and went down the gangway onto the pier, and the ship moved slowly away from the dock. There she was again, standing in the crowd in her queer black clothes, but this time the water between us was widening. She lifted both her arms to me in a last large gesture of full embrace, then her arms fell to her sides, and she stood there buffeted by the wind, jostled by the crowd, a strong old woman, looking after me bravely. I had a desperate moment. I wanted to jump, to swim back. I felt an agony of regret, of longing, of warning. I struggled. It was horrible, such pain. What did it mean? Why was I going? It was wrong, it was wrong.
I never saw her again.