The Making of Americans, Being a History of a Family's Progress (83 page)

     Though Miss Dounor was detached by the quality of her nature from worldly affairs it was not because she loved best dreams and abstract thought, for her deepest interest was in the varieties of human experience and her constant desire was to partake of all human relations but by some quality of her nature she never succeeded in really touching any human creature she knew. Her transfigured innocence, too, was not an ignorance of the facts of life nor a puritan's instinct indeed her desire was to experience the extreme forms of sensuous life and to make even immoral experiences her own. Her detachment was due to an abstracted spirit that could not do what it would and which was evident in her reserved body, her shy eyes and gentle face.
     As I was saying Phillip Redfern had been invited by the dean to meet the assembled faculty at a tea at her house. He entered in some wonder of anticipation and excitement of mind and was met by the dean Miss Charles, “You must meet Miss Dounor” she said to him breaking abruptly through the politeness of the new instructor who was as I said south-western. Redfern looked with interest at this new presentment of gentleness and intelligence who greeted him with awkward shyness. Her talk was serious pleasant and intense, her point of view clear, her arguments just, and her opinions sensitive. Her self-consciousness disappeared during this eager discussion but her manner did not lose its awkward restraint, her voice its gentleness or her eyes their shyness.
     While the two were still in the height of the discussion there came up to them a blond, eager, good-looking young woman whom Redfern observing presented as his wife to his new acquaintance. Miss Dounor checked in her talk was thrown into even more than her original shy awkwardness and looking with distress at this new arrival after several efforts to bring her mind to understand said; “Mrs. Redfern yes yes, of course, your wife I had forgotten.” She made another attempt to begin to speak and then suddenly giving it up gazed at them quite helpless.
     “Pray go on as I am very anxious to hear what you think,” said Mrs. Redfern nervously and Redfern bowing to his wife turned again to Miss Dounor and went on with the talk.
     An observer would have found it difficult to tell from the mere appearance of these three what their relation toward each other was. Miss Dounor was absorbed in her talk and thought and oblivious of everything except the discussion, her shy eyes fixed on Redfern's face and her tall constrained body filled with eagerness, Redfern was listening and answering showing the same degree of courteous deference to both his companions, turned first toward one and then toward the other one with impartial attention and Mrs. Redfern her blond good-looking face filled with eager anxiety to understand listened to one and then the other with the same anxious care.
     Later Redfern wandered to a window where Miss Hannah Charles, Miss Dounor and Mrs. Redfern were standing looking out at a fine prospect of sunset and a long line of elms defining a road that led back through the town of Farnham to the wooded hills behind. Redfern stood with them looking out at the scene. Mrs. Redfern was listening intently to each one's thinking. “Ah of course you know Greek,” she said with eager admiration to Miss Dounor who made no reply.
     It happens often about the twenty-ninth year of a life that all the forces that have been engaged through the years of childhood, adolescence and youth in confused and sometimes angry combat range themselves in ordered ranks, one is uncertain of one's aims, meaning and power during these years of tumultuous growth when aspiration has no relation to fulfillment and one plunges here and there with energy and misdirection during the strain and stress of the making of a personality until at last we reach the twenty-ninth year, the straight and narrow gateway of maturity and life which was all uproar and confusion narrows down to form and purpose and we exchange a dim possibility for a big or small reality.
     Also in our American life where there is no coercion in custom and it is our right to change our vocation as often as we have desire and opportunity, it is a common experience that our youth extends through the whole first twenty-nine years of our life and it is not till we reach thirty that we find at last that vocation for which we feel ourselves fit and to which we willingly devote continued labor. It must be owned that while much labor is lost to the world in these efforts to secure one's true vocation, nevertheless it makes more completeness in individual life and perhaps in the end will prove as useful to the world, and if we believe that there is more meaning in the choice of love than plain propinquity so we may well believe that there is more meaning in vocations than that it is the thing we can first learn about and win an income with.
     Redfern had now come to this fateful twenty-ninth year. He had been a public preacher for women's rights, he had been a mathematician, a psychologist and a philosopher, he had married and earned a living and yet the world was to him without worth or meaning and he longed for a more vital human life than to be an instructor of youth, his theme was humanity, his desire was to be in the great world and of it, he wished for active life among his equals not to pass his days as a guide to the immature and he preferred the criticism of life in fiction to the analysis of the mind in philosophy and now the time was come in this his twenty-ninth year for the decisive influence in his career.
     Cora Dounor had on her side too her ideals which in this world she had not found complete. She too longed for the real world while wrapped away from it by the perverse reserve of her mind and the awkward shyness of her body. Such friendship as she had yet realised she felt for the dean Miss Hannah Charles but it was not a nearness of affection, it was a recognition of the power of doing and working, and a deference to the representative of effective action and the habitual dependence of years of protection. What ever Miss Charles advised or undertook seemed always to Miss Dounor the best that could be done or affected. She sustained her end of the relation in being a learned mind, a brilliant teacher and a docile subject. She pursued her way expounding philosophy, imbibing beauty, desiring life, never questioning the things nearest her, interested only in abstract ideas and concrete desire and all her life was arranged to leave her untouched and unattached but in this shy abstracted, learned creature there was a desire for sordid life and the common lot.
     It was interesting to see the slow growth of interest to admiration and then to love in this awkward reserved woman, unconscious of her meanings and the world's attention and who made no attempt to disguise or conceal the strength of her feeling.
     Redfern's life experience had been to learn that where there was woman there was for him danger not through his own affections but by the demand that this sex made upon him. By this extreme chivalry he was always bound to more than fulfill the expectations he gave rise to in the mind of his companion. Indeed this man loved the problem of woman so much that he willingly endured all pain to seek and find the ideal that filled him with such deep unrest and he never tired of meeting and knowing and devoting himself to any woman who promised to fulfill for him his desire and here in Cora Dounor he had found a spirit so delicate so free so gentle and intelligent that no severity of suffering could deter him from seeking the exquisite knowledge that this companionship could give him. And he knew that she too would willingly pay high for the fresh vision that he brought her.
     It is the French habit in thinking to consider that in the grouping of two and an extra it is the two that get something from it all who are of importance and whose claim should be considered; the American mind accustomed to waste happiness and be reckless of joy finds morality more important than ecstasy and the lonely extra of more value than the happy two. To our new world feeling the sadness of pain has more dignity than the beauty of joy. It takes time to learn the value of happiness. Truly a single moment snatched out of a distracted existence is hardly worth the trouble it takes to seize it and to obtain such it is wasteful to inflict pain, it is only the cultivators of leisure who have time to feel the gentle approach the slow rise, the deep ecstasy and the full flow of joy and for these pain is of little value, a thing not to be remembered, and it is only the lack of joy that counts.
     Martha Redfern eager, anxious and moral had little understanding of the sanctity of joy and hardly a realisation of the misery of pain. She understood little now what it was that had come upon her and she tried to arrange and explain it by her western morality and her new world humanity. She could not escape the knowledge that something stronger than community of interest bound her husband and Miss Dounor together. She tried resolutely to interpret it all in terms of comradeship and great equality of intellectual interests never admitting to herself for a moment the conception of a possible marital disloyalty. But in spite of these standards and convictions she was filled with a vague uneasiness that had a different meaning than the habitual struggle against the hard wall of courtesy that Redfern had erected before her.
     This struggle in her mind showed itself clearly when she was in the company of her husband and Miss Dounor. She would sit conscientiously bending her mind to her self-imposed task of understanding and development, when in the immediate circle of talkers that included her husband and Miss Dounor she gave anxious and impartial attention to the words of one and the other occasionally joining in the talk by an earnest inquiry and receiving always from Redfern the courteous deference that he extended to every one, to everything, to all women. She listened with admiring attention particularly to Miss Dounor who genuinely unconscious of all this nervous misery paid her in return scant attention. When she was not in the immediate group of talkers with these two she kept her attention on the person with whom she was talking and showed the burden of her feeling only in the anxious care with which she listened and talked.
     She was not to be left much longer to work out her own conclusions. One afternoon in the late fall in the second year of their life at Farnham, Miss Charles came to the room where she was sitting alone and in her abrupt way spoke directly of the object of her visit. “Mrs. Redfern,” she began “you probably know something of the gossip that is at present going on, I want you to keep Mr. Redfern in order, I cannot allow him to make Miss Dounor the subject of scandalous talk.” She stopped and looked steadily at the uneasy woman who was dazed by this sudden statement of her own suspicion, “I, I don't understand,” she stammered. “I think you understand quite well. I depend upon you to speak to him about it,” and with this the dean departed.
     This action on Miss Charles part showed her wisdom. She knew very well the small power that Mrs. Redfern had over her husband and she took this method of attack only because it was the only one open to her. Mrs. Redfern could not accomplish anything by any action but she was a woman and jealous and there was little doubt, so the dean thought, that before long she would effect some change.
     Martha Redfern's mind was now in a confusion. Miss Charles had added nothing to her facts nevertheless her statement had made a certainty of what Mrs. Redfern had resolutely regarded as an impossibility. She sat there long and long thinking over again and again the same weary round of thoughts and terrors. She knew she was powerless to change him, she could only try to get the evidence to condemn him. Did she want it, if she had it she must act on it, she dreaded to obtain it and could not longer exist without it. She must watch him and find it all out without questioning, must learn it by seeing and hearing and she felt dimly a terror of the things she might be caught doing to obtain it, she dreaded the condemnation of Redfern's chivalrous honor. She did not doubt his disloyalty she was convinced of that and she still feared to lose his respect for her sense of honor. “He is dishonorable, all his action is deceit,” she said to herself again and again but she found no comfort in this thought, she knew there was a difference and that she respected his standard more than her own justification.
     In the long weary days that followed she was torn by these desires, she must watch him always and secretly, she must gain the knowledge she dreaded to possess and she must be deeply ashamed of the ways she must pursue. She was no longer able to listen to others when her husband and Miss Dounor were in her presence, she dared not keep an open watch but her observation was unceasing.
     Redfern was not wholly unconscious of this change in his wife's manner perhaps more in the relief that she ceased her eager efforts to please him than in the annoyance of her suspicious watching. Redfern was a man too much on guard to fear surprise and with all his experience too ignorant of women's ways to see danger where danger really lay.
     It was the end of May and one late afternoon Mrs. Redfern filled with her sad past and sadder future, sat in her room watching the young leaves shining brilliantly in the warm sunshine on the long row of elms that stretched away through the village toward the green hills that rose beyond. Mrs. Redfern knew very well the feel of that earth warm with young life and wet with spring rains, knew it as part of her dreary life that seemed to have lasted always. As she sat there in sadness, the restless eagerness of her blond good-looking face was gone and her hands lay clasped quietly without straining, time and sadness had become stronger in her than desire.
     Redfern came into the house and passed into his own study. He remained there a short while and then was called away. As soon as he was out of sight Mrs. Redfern arose and went into his room. She walked up to his desk and opening his portfolio saw a letter in his writing. She scarcely hesitated so eager was she to read it. She read it to the end, she had her evidence.
     Categories that once to some one had real meaning can later to that same one be all empty. It is queer that words that meant something in our thinking and our feeling can later come to have in them in us not at all any meaning. This is happening always to every one really feeling meaning in words they are saying. This is happening very often to almost every one having any realisation in them in their feeling, in their thinking, in their imagining of the words they are always using. This is common then to many having in them any real realisation of the meaning of the words they are using. As I was saying categories that once to some one had real meaning come later to that same one not to have any meaning at all then for that one. Sometimes one reads a letter that they have been keeping with other letters, and one is not very old then and so it is not that they are old then and forgetting, they are not very old then and they come in cleaning something to reading this letter and it is all full of hot feeling and the one, reading the letter then, has not in them any memory of the person who once wrote that letter to them. This is different, very different from the changing of the feeling and the thinking in many who have in them real realisation of the meaning of words when they are using them but there is in each case so complete a changing of experiencing in feeling and thinking, or in time or in something, that something, some one once alive to some one is then completely a stranger to that one, the meaning in a word to that one the meaning in a way of feeling and thinking that is a category to some one, some one whom some one was knowing, these then come to be all lost to that one sometime later in the living of that one.