The Book of Susan: A Novel

by Lee Wilson Dodd

But that first May day of her discovery, when called out to wander lonely as a cloud by the spirit of spring—the day she had happened on her magic circle,—all that rough upland world was burgeoning, and the beauty of those deserted fields hurt the heart. Susan never easily wept, but that day—safely hidden in the magic circle, then newly hers—she threw herself down on the ghost-gray moss among the spicy tufts of sweet fern and enjoyed, as she later told me, the most sensuously abandoned good cry of her life. The dogwood trees were a glory of flushed white about her, shining in on every hand through the black-green cedars, as if the stars had rushed forward toward earth and clustered more thickly in a nearer midnight sky. Life had no right to be so overwhelmingly fair—if these poignant gusts of beauty gave no sanction to all that the bruised heart of man might long for of peace and joy! If life must be accepted as an idiot's tale, signifying nothing, then it was a refinement of that torture that it could suddenly lift—as a sterile wave lifts only to break—to such dizzying, ecstatic heights. . . . No, no—it was impossible! It was unthinkable! It was absurd!

That year we spent July, August, and early September in France, but late September found us back in New Haven for those autumnal weeks which are the golden, heady wine of our New England cycle. Praise of the New England October, for those who have experienced it, must always seem futile, and for those who have not, exaggerated and false. Summer does not decay in New England; it first smoulders and then flares out in a clear multicolored glory of flame; it does not sicken to corruption, it shouts and sings and is transfigured. I had suggested to Susan, therefore, a flight to higher hills—to the Berkshires, to be precise—where we might more spaciously watch these smoke-less frost-fires flicker up, spread, consume themselves, and at last leap from the crests, to vanish rather than die. But Susan, pleading a desire to settle down after much wandering, begged off. She did not tell me that she had a private sanctuary, too long unvisited, hidden among nearer and humbler hills.

The rough fields of the old farm were now rich with crimson and gold—bright yellow gold, red gold, green and tarnished gold—or misted over with the horizon blue of wild asters, a needed softening of tone in a world else so vibrant with light, so nakedly clear. This was another and perhaps even a deeper intoxication than that of the flood tide of spring. Unbearably beautiful it grew at its climax of splendor! An unseen organist unloosed all his stops, and Susan, like a little child overpowered by that rocking clamor, was shaken by it and almost whimpered for mercy. . . .

It was not until the following spring that chance improbably betrayed her guarded secret to me. All during the preceding fall I had wondered at times that I found it so increasingly difficult to arrange for afternoons of tennis or golf or riding with Susan; but I admonished myself that as she grew up she must inevitably find personal interests and younger friends, and it was not for me to limit or question her freedom. And though Susan never lied to me, she was clever enough, and woman enough, to let me mislead myself.

"I've been taking a long walk, Ambo." "I've been riding."

Well, bless her, so she had—and why shouldn't she? Though it came at last with me to a vague, comfortless feeling of shut-outness—of too often missing an undefined something that I had hoped to share.

During a long winter of close companionship in study and socially unsocial life this feeling disappeared, but with the spring it gradually formed again, like a little spreading cloud in an empty sky. And one afternoon, toward middle May, I discovered myself to be unaccountably alone and wishing Susan were round—so we could "do something." The day was a day apart. Mummies that day, in dim museums, ached in their cerements. Middle-aged bank clerks behind grilles knew a sudden unrest, and one or two of them even wondered whether to be always honestly handling the false counters of life were any compensation for never having riotously lived. Little boys along Hillhouse Avenue, ordinarily well-behaved, turned freakishly truculent, delighted in combat, and pummelled each other with ineffective fists. Settled professors in classrooms were seized with irrelevant fancies and, while trying to recover some dropped thread of discourse, openly sighed—haunted by visions of the phœbe bird's nest found under the old bridge by the mill dam, or of the long-forgotten hazel eyes of some twelve-year-old sweetheart. A rebellious day—and a sentimental! [See Lord Tennyson, and the poets, passim.] The apple trees must be in full bloom. . . .

Well then, confound it, why had Susan gone to a public lecture on Masefield? Or had she merely mentioned at lunch that there was a public lecture on Masefield? Oh, damn it! One can't stay indoors on such a day!

Susan and I kept our saddle horses at the local riding academy, where they were well cared for and exercised on the many days when we couldn't or did not wish to take them out. As the academy was convenient and had good locker rooms and showers, we always preferred changing there instead of dressing at home and having the horses sent round. Riding is not one of my passions, and oddly enough is not one of Susan's. That intense sympathy which unites some men and women to horses, and others to dogs or cats, is either born in one or it is not. Susan felt it very strongly for both dogs and cats, and if I have failed to mention Tumps and Togo, that is a lack in myself, not in her. I don't dislike dogs or cats or, for that matter, well-broken horses, but—though I lose your last shreds of sympathy—they all, in comparison with other interests, leave me more than usual calm. Of Tumps and Togo, nevertheless, something must yet be said, though too late for their place in Susan's heart; or indeed, for their own deserving. But they are already an intrusion here.

For Alma, her dainty little single footer, Susan's feeling was rather admiration than love. Just as there are poets whose songs we praise, but whose genius does not seem to knit itself into the very fabric of our being, so it was with Alma and Susan. She said and thought nothing but good of Alma, yet never felt lonely away from her—the infallible test. As for Jessica, my own modest nag, I fear she was very little more to me than an agreeably paced inducement to exercise, and I fear I was little more to her than a possible source of lump sugar and a not-too-fretful hand on the bridle reins. To-day, however, I needed her as a more poetic motor; failing Susan's companionship, I wanted to be carried far out into country byways apart from merely mechanical motors or—ditto—men.