Phil admits that he wanted to whimper like a homesick boy.
XII
Susan's informal dinner for Jimmy that evening was not really a success. The surface of the water sparkled from time to time, but there were grim undercurrents and icy depths. Perhaps it was not so bad as my own impression of it, for I had a sullen headache pulsing its tiresome obbligato above a dull ground base of despair. Despair, I am forced to call it. Never had life seemed to me so little worth the trouble of going on; and I fancy Phil's reasoned conviction of its eternal dignity and import had become, for the present, less of a comfort to him than a curse. Moods of this kind, however ruthlessly kept under, infect the very air about them. They exude a drab fog to deaden spontaneity and choke laughter at its source.
Neither Phil nor I was guilty of deliberate sulking; whether from false pride or native virtue we did our best—but our best was abysmal. Even Susan sank under it to the flat levels of made conversation, and poor Jimmy—who had brought with him many social misgivings—was stricken at table with a muscular rigor; sat stiffly, handled his implements jerkily, and ended by oversetting a glass of claret and blushing till the dusky red of his face matched the spreading stain before him.
At this crisis of gloom, luckily, Susan struggled clear of the drab fog and saved the remnant of the evening—at least for Jimmy, plunging with the happiest effect into the junior annals of Birch Street, till our heavier Hillhouse atmosphere stirred and lightened with Don't-you-remember's and Sure-I-do's. And shortly after dinner, Phil, tactfully pleading an unprepared lecture, dragged Jimmy off with him before this bright flare-up of youthful reminiscence had even threatened to expire. Their going brought Susan at once to my side, with a stricken face of self-reproach.
"It was so stupid of me, Ambo—this dinner. I've never been more ashamed. How could I have forced it on you to-night! But you were wonderful, dear—wonderful! So was Phil. I'll never forget it." There were tears in her eyes. "Oh, Ambo," she wailed, "do you think I shall ever learn to be a little like either of you? I feel—abject." Before I could prevent it, she had seized my hand in both hers and kissed it. "Homage," she smiled. . . .
It broke me down—utterly. . . . You will spare me any description of the next ten minutes of childishness. Indeed, you must spare me the details of our later understanding; they are inviolable. It is enough to say that I emerged from it—for the experience had been overwhelming—with a new spirit, a clarified and serener mind. My love for Susan was unchanged—yet wholly changed. The paradox is exact. Life once more seemed to me good, since she was part of it; and my own life rich, since I now knew how truly it had become a portion of hers. She had made me feel, know, that I counted for her—unworthy as I am—in all she had grown to be and would grow to be. We had shaped and would always shape each other's lives. There for the moment it rested. She would leave me, but I was not to be alone.
No; I was not to be alone. For even if she had died, or had quite changed and forsaken me, there would be memories—such as few men have been privileged to recall. . . .
INTERLUDE
On the rearward and gentler slopes of Mount Carmel, a rough, isolated little mountain, very abrupt on its southerly face, which rises six or seven miles up-country from the New Haven Green, there is an ancient farm, so long abandoned as to be completely overgrown with gray birch—the old field birch of exhausted soils—with dogwood and an aromatic tangle of humbler shrubs, high-bush huckleberry and laurel and sweet fern; while beneath these the dry elastic earth-floor is a deep couch of ghost-gray moss, shining checkerberry and graceful ground pine. The tumbledown farmstead itself lies either unseen at some distance from these abandoned fields or has wholly disappeared along with the neat stone fences that must once have marked them. Yet the boundaries of the fields are now majestically defined through the undergrowth by rows of gigantic red cedars so thickset, so tall, shapely, and dense as to resemble the secular cypresses of Italian gardens more nearly than the poor relations they ordinarily are.