Helen.
Letter VIII
From the Lady Helen Pole to the Countess of Edge and Ross.
Chipmunk Lake,
August 4th
Dear Polly?
I HAVE solved the mystery of Mrs. Opp, and it has been the cause of much thought and speculation on my part. Her father was a German noble, high in favour of his Kaiser some fifty years ago. For some reason he fell from grace and was expatriated, his estates confiscated. He came to this country with a large family, drifted to one of the Northern counties of New York State and tried to make a living by farming. Of course he was a failure, poor man, but he was highly respected in the humble community, not only for his worthy character, but because he could read and write in seven languages. It was also known that he corresponded with Bismarck. Some twelve years after his arrival in the New World his youngest child was born—she who now is Mrs. Opp, wife of the keeper of Chipmunk Lake. By that time he was a common farmer and woodsman, working fourteen hours a day with his sons for a bare living, with neither the money nor the time to educate his superfluous children. The little girl grew up in the woods, turning her hand to everything, from milking to making syrup from the maple trees. When her father died and the farm was divided she “hired out,” and supported herself until she married, some ten years ago.
There you have the key to the mystery; the unconscious pride of carriage, the gracious manner, the well-kept teeth and nails, the more than suggestion of breeding in her face. But all this becomes strange only when you realize her absolute unselfconsciousness. I have talked with the woman over and over again and it is as plain as her descent that she has not the slightest appreciation of what she is and has been deprived of, much less cherishes any pride or vanity in it. It is all unconscious, this persistence of inherited instincts through the most unfavourable circumstances, with not an impulse in the brain to guide it. And how short it stops, this heredity! It goes so far and no farther; the brain, most important of all, is choked with the weeds of a bitter fate. Still, she is happy—why should I pity her? She has her handsome woodsman, her placid mountain life, that eternal youngness in her face. Courts could give her nothing more; rather, would they give her too much.
But how it sets one to thinking, Polly. I have tried to imagine myself in similar circumstances: Dad exiled with a large brood, myself born on a mountain farm, “hired out”——The respectable amount of brain I had inherited from a long line of brilliant and useful men would be as surely mine as now—but with nothing put into it, could it have been wholly ignorant and unambitious and unsuspecting? Could I have cooked without protest for Mrs. Van Worden while her distinguished brother addressed me merely to demand more potatoes or the pepper? Could I have been content with finger nails and teeth, and a backbone with a pride the brain had forgotten? Oh, no! I cannot imagine it. I should have demanded schooling, read my father’s correspondence with Bismarck, fed myself with his nightly tales of past splendour, and married an American of the haute noblesse—in short, my heredity would have worked itself out along the lines of the conventional novel, that is always so pleasantly prone to give you life as it should be, not as it is. Here I am face to face with a fact I never have met in fiction, and I am grateful for it—even while I feel sad as I speculate upon a fate I happily have escaped. The Fact is Mrs. Opp of noble blood and low degree, jolly, hearty, happy, unwarped by what she knows not of ungrammatical—and ambitious for a hotel on the St. Lawrence river. Surely, there is a motif for a novel of advanced realism.
I have talked it over with Mr. Nugent. He is so interesting and illuminating to talk anything over with. We take long walks and rows every day. He is my constant cavalier, for it would be really unprincipled of me to attempt to cut any of these women out, they have been so sweet to me. A party of us always start off together, but there are so many paths in the forest!
I cannot analyze for you, Polly, the stage at which I have arrived with Mr. Nugent. He has not actually said anything, so far—he is too clever—but he has a faculty of embracing me with an invisible presentment of himself, which is very disturbing. I don’t know what to think—except that I think a great deal about him. It is very sweet—but if only I could be sure. He is so different—everything over here is so different from anything I have ever known. (I don’t idealize him. I wonder if that is fatal?)