“H-m,” I said reflectively, “h-m-m—What is your mother doing now?”
“Why she’s done—we’ve all done—California from Mount Shasta to Tia Juana, specializing on the Missions and the juniper trees from Palestine that the padres planted. But now we’re doing religion. We’ve settled down in Santo Espiritu with Aunt Alice and our tutor,—Dolly and I call him Father Blakewell to his face and the Holy Father behind his back; he’s going to be an Anglican monk, you know,—we’ve settled down to do religion, mainly, and get ready for college, incidentally. Mother is really ‘doing’ it; Dolly and I—well, we ‘assist,’ in the French sense. We study a little, and go to church a lot, and swim in the afternoon, and play mah jongg after dinner; and the Holy Father reads prayers in the morning on week days and twice on Sundays; and Mother is reading Newman’s Idea of a University aloud, and she goes to early communion, and fasts on saints’ days, and is a member of the altar guild—and she is taking in laundry.”
“Taking in what?” I ejaculated.
“Taking in laundry. She has consecrated her hands to the Church. She washes the rector’s vestments and things. You know she always had a kind of passion for keeping things clean—souls and bodies and so on. So this job just hits her fancy now, and ‘fills her life,’ you know. When we started for Los Angeles this morning, she was ironing the vestments, and, believe me, when I saw her bending over the ironing-board, she looked so perfectly blissful that I—I pitied her. It seems kind of daffy to me.”
Though the painter was satirical, the picture, to my fond imagination, was delightful. I saw her—herself all in white—bending her golden head over the snowy linen, her hands moving smoothly; it would be a very special iron, silver perhaps. She would do it beautifully, adorably. I should be reminded of some early Italian saint; and all the æsthetic Christianity in me would enjoy a kind of Pre-Raphaelite resurrection.
“H-m,” I repeated helplessly. I hadn’t the faintest notion how to treat the idea with any profit to a young fellow of Oliver’s age and point of view. It simply wasn’t in his experience, and I didn’t see how to put it there. His fondness for his mother, his complete detachment from her religious interests, his absolute incomprehension of her position appalled me. One can reason with an earnest young intellectual rebel, occasionally to some effect. But an amused young seraph in Oliver’s state, contemplating his mother with kindly compassion from his pinnacle of intellectual certitude and religious inexperience—one can’t even draw such a person to the portals of argument.
“I hope,” I said, “you and Dorothy are behaving yourselves at home, as well as you know how.”
“Oh yes,” he replied, “we are being good, aren’t we, Dolly? Wait till you hear us after dinner discussing with the Holy Father about the existence of angels, and the Apostolic Succession, and the priority of Persons in the Blessed Trinity. Dorothy and I got together and decided it was up to us to mortify our sinful flesh by holding our tongues this summer. Even father used to do that, most of the time, so far as religion is concerned; and it was harder for him than it is for us.”
“How was that?”
“Oh, father, you know, doesn’t believe in anything. He calls himself an ‘old Voltairean,’ and he reads Herbert Spencer and Nietzsche and Henry Adams. But he really doesn’t believe in anything but chaos and the ‘struggle for survival’ and the ‘degradation of energy.’ We believe in plenty of things.”