There is no contour to life. Life is chaotic. Whenever I thought of Fred as marrying at all, I had mentally mated him with Gertrude. That, in my opinion, would have been an ideally eugenic combination. But instead, Fred is obviously attaching himself to Gina and Gertrude has been eighteen months married to Minot Blackden, the rediscoverer of glass-staining. They live happily in apartments, about a mile apart, and I am told breakfast together occasionally.
And this notation, oh, my aged correspondent, proves to me that I am not a novelist. For were I a novelist, I should doubtless idealize these pictures—romanticize as I note them. Gertrude—my old cold flame, Gertrude—married to Blackden! There ought to be a chapter of that—a veritable lyric epithalamium upon those highly modern spousals. Blackden should fix them forever in a series of stained-glass windows!
Instead of that, my feeling is, "What am I to Gertrude now, or what is Gertrude to me? No more than Hecuba to the Player in 'Hamlet.'" Always in place of romance, reality seems to break in, to take possession of my pen and, willy-nilly, I find myself recording events as they happen, without varnish or adornment.
But if my pen is so veracious as I have intimated above, why is it so overproud and under-honest as not to record the torture that persists beneath the seemingly calm surface of life, the agony, the anguish of seeing Alicia daily under unaltered conditions, the same beloved Alicia, yet with a barrier reared before her to which the screen of the Sleeping Beauty was a miserable clipped privet hedge, to which Brynhild's circle of fire was a pitiful conjuror's trick?
Having been forced by the pressure of circumstance into ordered and natural life, I am now maddened by a passion to straighten it altogether out of its odd contortions and entanglements. My soul cries out to live naturally and virtually whispers to me every day that natural living is the first requisite to constructively social living. I see heights glimmering of service, of great impersonal love—but only through personal love lies my path toward them.
In other words, I am now aware that you cannot, like another Aaron Latta, "violate the feelings of sex." A few primal instincts there are, so tremendously important, so powerfully imbedded in the human, in the animal organism, that to violate them is to twist and crumple the personality, the very soul within one—life itself. A normal man must wive and beget and rear before his imagination is disentangled and freed for the constructive and corporate life of humanity—before his use to society is real and stable, reliable and not a sham.
I have reared children, but I have never had a wife or ever begotten any children of my own. Alicia embodies the completion of life for me—and Alicia is now pledged to some one else, leaving my world empty and meaningless. Come what will and avoid me as she may, existence cannot go on in this manner. I must take the risk of private talk with Alicia—to my pain, possibly, but for my information inevitably. Is she in reality in love with my nephew?
"Alicia," I began gruffly this evening after dinner, "I want to talk to you. Will you come into my study in a few minutes?"
She lifted her eyes to mine searchingly for an instant and lowered them again swiftly.
"Yes, Uncle Ranny," she murmured. There are times when I feel I could jump out of my skin, as the phrase is, when she calls me Uncle Ranny. That "uncleship" has been my undoing. Yet what a wealth of prerogatives it has brought me!