Serpentine Wall: The Midst of Life. Iii

August sixth

I HAVE not written you for several days because what I have had in my mind to say to you takes more courage to express than I have been able to muster.

For all these years, nearly five now, I’ve always pretended that your last word to me was ‘beautiful.’ And indeed it was the last word uttered by the you still conscious of earthly beauty. But once after that you spoke to me in a way that for years pained me so much I could never bear to remember it.

It must have been about two hours before you died that I went out of the room for a moment. A nurse came almost immediately to fetch me. She said that accidentally the bowl of water from which they had been cooling your hands and face had spilled on the bed, and you refused to have the sheets changed or let them touch you. They thought perhaps I might persuade you. I came and stood next the bed. Your face, unshaven for ten days, wan and haggard, looked like Christ’s. I mumbled something about the damp clothes being bad for you, but you stared at me and said, ‘Go away. Leave me alone.’ That anguish is something I cannot even now bear to recall.

I rushed into the corridor, where Jim and Gregory were pacing up and down, too nervous to stay in any one room. I flung myself into Gregory’s arms, sobbing, ‘He doesn’t know me any more. He does n’t want me there. He told me to go away and leave him alone.’

‘He does n’t mean it, my dear,’ they said. ‘He doesn’t know what he is saying. He’s too weak to know.'

But there was nothing consoling in that explanation. For days they had been telling me your mind was wandering, but when I asked you what you were thinking your words always seemed sensible to me. One morning when you were being washed, one of the nurses came to fetch me, saying that you wished to see me at once about something very important. Two things, you said, must be remedied immediately. You must have something beautiful to look at when I was out of the room, and I must devise some way to help you remember the nurse’s name. She shook her head in the intolerably knowing way they have, and whispered, ‘Delirious.’ My rapidly evaporating core of sanity still held.

‘Will you please, Miss Sullivan, go in the other room and bring back the largest of those full-blown yellow roses?’

She thought it unbalanced that you should discuss in front of her your politeness to her, not realizing that in that network of doctors and nurses and the omnipresent technician, sitting night and day by the oxygen machine, the only privacy we could establish was through our understanding of each other.

‘That’s not what I call her,’ you said. ‘Is it Carrie or Gracie or Rosie?’

‘Sally, darling. Don’t you remember? Sally’s what you call her.’

‘Yes . . . Sally. . . . Print it in big letters. Paste it . . . down there.'

You were gasping for breath, but you pointed to the footboard of the bed. She returned with the rose, and I forgave her pitying grin at the sight of her name on the footboard when I saw the neat way she stuck on to one of the metal pipes that supported the oxygen tent, with two pieces of adhesive tape, the Pernet rose that was to be my alternate.

To me it seemed so natural that even when you were dying you should find it distasteful to be rude or ungracious to a woman you liked, and who was kind to you. I could never understand why it did n’t seem so to the others until years later, when I found the explanation in War and Peace: —

His mind was not in its normal condition. The healthy man ordinarily thinks, feels, and remembers a countless collection of objects at one and the same time; but he has the power and strength to choose one series of thoughts or phenomena, and to give to this series all of his attention.

The man in health, no matter how deep may be his thoughts, can put them aside at a moment’s notice in order to speak a courteous word to anyone coming in, and then immediately resume them again. Prince Andrei’s mind was not in a normal condition in this respect. All its forces were more keen and active than ever, but their activity was entirely outside of his will. They were simultaneously under the control of the most heterogeneous thoughts and visions.

You had lost that power of speaking the ‘courteous word to anyone coming in,’ but we were still close enough together for me to give it to you. That night, however, just before your consciousness was gone forever, — though, if I believe that, why do I write you now? — you had already left the world of symbols and gestures. ‘Go away. Leave me alone’ was right. For man is born into the world alone, he leaves it alone, and in a way he lives in it alone, too.

I remember one night when the perfection of our love seemed to me to have achieved the ultimate, the subjugation of time and space, the only whole. But gradually, as my mind rose back to the level of the immediate, I realized that at that moment I had no knowledge of your thoughts, nor you of mine. This shattering of our unity seemed too great a pain. I spoke of it to you, crying like a child deprived of its faith in God. Patiently, holding me in your arms, you explained to me how through long years of illness you had become accustomed to the knowledge which so shocked me: that man’s only freedom lies in that solitary core which is born in him, which sustains him through life, and which continues after he is dead. Only weak and fear-ridden people, you said, were afraid to admit the necessity of a private life. Only brave and generous ones could, relying on its sustenance, risk the dangers of complete love.

You, of course, were right. But it has taken me years of experience to corroborate what I learned from you in a moment of faith. So at last I know that between us there could be no last word. As husband to wife, it was right that your last word should be ‘beautiful.’ And, as man to woman, ‘alone’ was equally right. But for the symbol of love that cuts the spheres there is only silence.

August eighth

The variety of happenings incidental to life in the country never ceases to excite me.

Before lunch I went down to the pool for a swim. Each time I go down there I am transfixed anew by its beauty. What other pool is there in the world, dammed from a Baptist’s swimming hole, shining so clear and golden, translucent to its amber-brown depths? The rich, I am told, have blue or green pools reeking of chlorine, although the water changes constantly. But they have no falls splashing over a dam built by your hands. Nor can they lie and sun themselves on softest green turf fringing a meadow out of which rises, proud and pure, a white birch, high and big and perfectly proportioned.

I was standing on the rock trying to conjure up courage enough to brave that first plunge over which I am always so cowardly, looking Eve-like at my reflection, thinking of what you had written me once about having chosen me to swim forever in your pool because you thought I balanced so well the birch tree on the other bank. Suddenly the volupté of my narcissism was shattered. A long snake swam leisurely across my reflection in the water.

I realize it is stupid to hate snakes. I know how the tenets of psychoanalysis brand me. I know the harmlessness of all snakes in this part of the country, but nothing anyone could do or say would diminish the violence of my revulsion. I screamed for the farmer, and succeeded in covering my nakedness with a bathrobe a second before he arrived. I pointed to the snake, which by that time was writhing and coiling in front of its hole by the steps where I always emerge. Calmly the farmer put his hand in the water, picked out the snake, and, to my anxious question ‘What are you going to do with it?’ replied quite simply, ‘Send it downstream.’

I was glad he did n’t kill it, for I feel sure that my disgust at the thought of encountering the snake under water could be no stronger than his fear of being thus encountered. One day last summer when I was weeding the garden, a very young garter snake slithered out from under one of the plants almost into my hand. It was so small even I could be only mildly startled, but I called to a young man who was sitting on the terrace. ‘Oh dear, John! There’s a snake in the garden. Come here quickly.’ Before he could reach me the shake had vanished, and when I asked him whether he thought it would come back he said, ‘No. It probably just thought, “Oh dear, there’s a lady in the garden,” and was much more frightened than you.’ Sure as I am that he was right, it took all my courage finally to plunge into the pool.

After lunch I was picking blueberries when Nellie’s little girl Lorna was brought up to see Nellie by the aunt who takes care of the child. I had been told by Nellie that Lorna took a great interest in me, and that whenever she was taken motoring she asked perpetually which house was Mrs. Sherburn’s. As soon as she stepped out of the car she said, ‘Where’s Mrs. Sherburn? I want to see Mrs. Sherburn.’

‘There she is,’said Nellie, pointing at what must have looked to Lorna like a colossal brown figure with hair like a Golliwog (for swimming, as you know, always gives me hair rampant) and clad in faded blue overalls. She stared at me for a moment and then burst into heartbreaking tears. I have never felt so inadequate.

Lorna was named, Nellie once told me, after the lady of the manor in the Scotch village where Nellie originated. She said that even when she was a little girl she thought Lorna the most beautiful name in the world, and decided to give it to her oldest daughter. I suspect that some of that lady-of-the-manor romanticism has descended to Lorna, who expected to see a Mrs. Sherburn dressed in cloth of gold, sitting on a cushion, sewing a fine seam.

I’ve a certain feeling of social responsibility in the matter, for perhaps, in an age when the intelligentsia conceive of themselves as so akin to the masses, those few of us who still hold by some sort of view of aristocracy ought to preserve that tradition for the conservative working classes. Perhaps I should go at once, put on my best white-and-gold tea gown, on the train of which it used to amuse you to see the Siamese kittens ride, and present Lorna with tea and cake in languid splendor.

What arrant nonsense I am writing! I shall go immediately and cultivate the dwarf red zinnias in the bed at the corner of the lawn. I can see all the way from here, where I sit under the apple tree, how parched they look. On the other hand, if I sat here indefinitely, one of the summer apples which are nearly ripe might fall on my head and knock some sense into it. There goes an apple. But only on to my foot. No sense to-day.

August ninth

I do wish you could see the flowers in here to-day. They seem to me particularly satisfactory. The big copper kettle in the curve of the piano is filled with dozens of very tall tiger lilies, blending to perfection with the orange velvet folds hanging from the piano. The little gate-legged table on which Saint Barbara stands is transformed into a shrine suitable to her placid if somewhat worm-eaten Gothic beauty by a pewter bowl of deep crimson snapdragons.

On second thought, do snapdragons suitably enshrine a saint? I never see them or pick them without thinking of Lawrence’s poem. Do you remember?

I should think in eternity you two would know each other, for you were a man after his own heart — warm-hearted and passionate, tender and wise — and in this world he seemed to find all too few. The same illness carried you both to your graves too early, and had your love for me not achieved the height and depth of his art at its finest, I should not, I suppose, have wept tears from my soul when I read in a newspaper of the death of a man three thousand miles away whom I had never seen or known.

August tenth

Have you ever known Pico della Mirandola? I have just spent an hour with him, and for a reason you might never guess. It’s an odd story.

Ever since I can remember there has been a little three-word refrain in the back of my mind — the unconscious summary, I suppose, of whatever situation at the time focused my emotions. The first one I recall dates from my earliest teens, when I cherished an unexpressed passion for the prettiest girl in the upper school. I never spoke a word to her, but always after I had seen her, in gaps of thought when I was alone, I would repeat over and over to myself, ‘She turned around. She turned around.’ Next, over a long period, I remember chanting, ‘He kissed me. He kissed me’ — though for how many years the ‘he’ remained an imaginary symbol I smile even now to think. From the time ‘he’ became an actuality the refrain lapsed away, only to return in the last few years as ‘My lover’s dead. My lover’s dead.’

The other morning when I was picking nasturtiums, suddenly those words came from my lips. ’My lover’s dead. My lover’s dead.’ I had felt quite happy until my voice insisted on reminding me of a truth I know too well. Impatiently I said, ‘Yes, but other people are dead too. Lots of people. “Picus of Mirandola is dead."' The line is from a poem I once read years ago whose authorship has long since slipped my mind. ‘And Picus of Mirandola is dead.’ Who, I thought, was Picus of Mirandola, of whom I know only vaguely his time, his name, and his deadness?

I found that he was a young man ‘of feature and shape seemly and beauteous, of stature goodly and high, of flesh tender and soft, his visage lovely and fair, his color white intermingled with comely reds, his eyes gray, and quick of look, his teeth white and even, his hair yellow and abundant,’ who died young and was greatly mourned. He was one of those glamorous and brilliant young men of the world who, disillusioned with life at court and the power his magnetism drew to him, lived at a time when the excitements of religion and learning were not a solace or a compensation, but a career and a passion.

Pico’s neighbor on the library shelf was, curiously enough, another beautiful young man. But two hundred years later the fire of the Renaissance had cooled, and an equally attractive nobleman was driven to the consolation of religion and learning only by the consuming fires of a fatal illness. . . . ‘He died in the Three and Thirtieth Year of his Age. Nature had fitted him for Great things, and his Knowledge and Observation qualify’d him to have been one of the most extraordinary Men, not only of his Nation, but of the Age he lived in. . . . He came from his Travels in the 18th year of his Age, and appeared at Court with as great Advantages as most ever had. He was a graceful and well shaped person, tall and well made, if not a little too slender: He was exactly wellbred, and what by a modest behaviour natural to him, what by a Civility become almost as natural his Conversation was easy and obliging; He had a strange Vivacity of thought, and vigour of expression: His Wit had a subtility and sublimity both, that were scarce imitable. His Style was clear and strong. . . . Few men ever had a bolder flight of Fancy, more steddily governed by Judgment than he had: No wonder a young man so made, and so improved was very acceptable in a Court.’

Does it make you flash the smile that still pricks like an arrow into my heart when, closing my eyes, I indulge in the luxury of remembering it, to think that when you are nearly five years dead a woman you loved well persists in finding chiefly your image in a Renaissance nobleman and a Restoration courtier, flung together in the quirks of her mind by their juxtaposition on a library shelf? Smile if you like. I’m glad you lived in this machine-ridden age against which I am forever railing, for, had you lived at a time when Genius was not synonymous with Inventor and God was not a Dynamo, would you have found me so necessary?

Were you here you would say, ‘It’s a pretty idea, Jinny. But facts remain facts. I appreciate your susceptibility to my appearance and my ways, but by no stretch of the imagination could I be termed either a scholar, a roué, or a poet.'

I know that. I know that from the outset you knew what so few men ever discover, that the way to an understanding of the human heart, and particularly of the hearts of women, is not through a large variety of hasty and superficial entanglements, but rather through a few deep and wellexplored adventures. No, the analogy I see between you and Rochester and Mirandola is less obvious than that. It is based on your, too, having come suddenly to a realization of the poverty and inadequacy of a life which, except for an accident of fate beyond your control, you might always have found satisfactory and amusing.

No one could ever have thought you an invalid, least of all I, who knew how carefully you husbanded your strength — the raw eggs you forced yourself to gulp because it was the quickest way, the quarts of milk you drank, the hours you willed yourself to sleep. A thin-blooded scientist, a plodding man of affairs, might have dubbed the heightened color of your cheeks, the gusto you brought to the dullest detail, feverish. But to the world at large you were a phenomenon of energy, a man strengthened by a long cure. Only once did you let me feel the sword hanging over you — the time you started coughing again and said it was a warning that you must rest for a while. You did rest, and soon there was no trace of it. Ostrich-like, I forgot my fear.

The night you asked me to marry you, you said, ’You must n’t think I am asking you to run the risk of becoming a trained nurse. When I left Saranac, the doctors told me pneumonia would kill me. Twice I’ve had it, and here I am. The third time may finish me, but you’ll never have an invalid on your hands. Happiness is the best tonic I know, so we shan’t have to worry for a long time.’ By the fire on a January night the glow of living was warm and secure. All life was before us. Death, even to you whose neighbor he was, seemed a stranger. For us there was no fear.

How much your two years of exile changed your character and taste I only half suspected. You used to say you were glad we never met when we were both young — I a rebel, susceptible only to the wiles of reformers; you a man about town, enjoying clubs and parties and fashionable women.

Once, when a thread from my past started to unravel, threatening the pattern of our life, you wove it back so neatly, with such imagination and skill, that I was overcome with admiration for your ingenuity and wisdom.

‘How do you know the things you do?’ I asked.

‘I shouldn’t,’ you told me, ‘if I had n’t suddenly been jarred into the necessity of thinking — and even reading. Two years with time for nothing else is bound to teach a man something. But the kind of thing I learned was determined by luck. It just happened that I found myself in the company of one of the few really rare men of this age. If you think I understand you well, it is to him, not to me, that you owe thanks.’

He was the president of a great university, you told me, who at the height of his career, at the time an important ambassadorship had been offered him, was stricken ill and forced into the same exile as yours. Old enough to be your father, but with the same heightened feeling for life that was both the bane and the benison of your disease, he shared with you all the rich experiences of his mind and spirit.

What learning and the Church gave Mirandola, what faith in God gave Rochester too late, the wisdom and erudition of a great gentleman and scholar gave you in the fullness of life.

You remember when we went to see him he was too ill to receive us, so we wandered by ourselves through the grounds and buildings of the university. Now, when I think of it, it is the majesty, the symmetry, and the proportion I remember. But that first time my sharpest feeling was one of acute æsthetic rapture when we came upon the thin curving walls, only one brick thick, daffodils blooming in the hollow of each curve. That Jefferson should have designed Monticello and the university seemed in keeping with his historical character, but that he should have been both gifted and human enough to lake such loving pains with a fragile brick wall annihilated for me the century or more it had stood. ‘I love that man,’ I thought, and each year when I go back to replenish my eyes and my heart I am newly grateful for the dearth of bricks which prompted Jefferson to so ingenious and beautiful an economy.

After you died I wrote to the President, and he invited me to pay him a visit. Only when I arrived there did I learn that you had not seen each other in fifteen years, not since he had walked with you to the railroad station when you left Saranac.

‘It was right for Jack to leave,’ he said. ‘He talked to me a great deal about it. The doctors told him he could live to be eighty if he stayed there, but they would n’t guarantee him more than fifteen years if he left. For him there was no choice, was there? ’

‘None,’ I said.

‘Of course, if he’d been an old man like me who had done half a life’s work and wanted time to finish, he might have gone back every year or so, for a while, and kept himself going.’

‘He hated the mention of the place, except for you and the doctor.’

‘Yes, I know. It’s no place for the young. But tell me about him. He had a good life, did n’t he? I can see that by looking at you.’

‘I came into it late, sir. But he did have a good life. He loved his work. He built himself a new house from an old one, and furnished it with rare and lovely things. He cultivated the soil and grew gardens. His workmen loved him, and he knew and gave to me perfection.’

‘I loved him too,’ he said, and took my hand.

We talked about the university, about Jefferson and architecture.

‘We have been fortunate,’ he said, ‘to have had only one architect since Jefferson, and one who was both gifted and humble enough to express Jefferson’s ideas rather than his own. His death was a great blow to me. Only three days before, we were standing on the steps of the Rotunda looking down at the façade. He said, “You know, this place embodies everything that matters most to me — perfect harmony, perfect symmetry.” And three days later he was shot by a madman for love of a harlot. I have never forgotten those words of his.’

When, as I left, I begged him not to work too hard, to take care of himself, he laughed.

‘They want me to retire,’ he said, ‘and write my life of Jefferson. If I wanted fame, I would, for I know things about Jefferson other people don’t understand. If I wrote his life, I should at least be sure of the fame that comes of having a place in every library in the country. But you know, I don’t care about that. I love the university. For me, it is enough to have been the first president of the university Jefferson founded. As for fame — all the fame I want is to know that after I am dead two people who love me will sit down together and talk of me for an hour or two, as you and I have talked of Jack.’

Last winter he died too. Somehow, in a way I accept without understanding, I feel that you two are again companions. This summer when I stood for the first time in the moonlight at the end of the avenue, looking back through the shadows of the tall elms at the flight of steps leading to the Rotunda, — the pillars and the dome, the terraces on either side, the perfect proportion of the whole, — I could have wept but for the serenity of my happiness. An overpowering belief in the unity of all good things came to me. Granted that you could n’t have built the building standing there before me, you might so easily have designed those beautiful and clever brick walls. Indeed, I felt there in the moonlight, as I looked at every varying detail on the colonnades flanking the Rotunda, that somewhere in time or space you must have become Jefferson’s spiritual son. For you, above all the people I have known, could express your feeling about life so adequately in brick and mortar. Just as Jefferson copied the designs for the capitals of his columns, not from the acanthus, but from the native tobacco leaf, so you gave to this house the beauty of the past and the significance of the present.

Had it not been for your illness and the pattern the President gave to your thought, you would never have built your house which is now mine, we should never have loved each other, and a hot August afternoon would have passed unburdened by the struggles of my illogical mind.

August eleventh

Sandy was shot to-day. I hate it. I did n’t actually know when it was happening, for I asked the farmer to do it while I was away. This morning I was going into town to market, and as I went through the kitchen I asked Nellie where the farmer was. She said, ‘He’s gone up to his house with the horse.’ I took it for granted she meant Betty, the work horse, and that he was going to bring down a load of hay. But part way into town, as I passed John’s house, I suddenly realized that Sandy was the horse he had taken, and that the chair in front of John’s house was empty because he had gone to shoot him. At the last moment the farmer could n’t bear to do it himself. I felt quite sick.

Never again to feel his soft nose in my hand, never again to sec the curved arch of his neck, nor to grip his flanks with my knees in that perfectly timed, delicious canter. So few physical excitements endure long enough even to enter into the memory. The sheer exultation of riding Sandy I shall remember even when I am old and decrepit in a wheel chair. But now I have no horse to ride, and one more living thing is dead.

August twelfth

To-day I heard a strange story. I had been sitting on the grassy bank after my swim, dangling my legs in the water, teasing the polliwogs and thinking about Ophelia, wondering whether the tenets of the Church were true, that those who take their own lives are shut out forever from sharing the realms of the welcome dead. As I walked back across the lawn, I saw old Mr. Church cutting the brush in the neighboring pasture.

‘Muggy day, Mr. Church,’ I said.

‘Ya-as,’ he said, ‘sticky. ... I see that astrachan tree’s ripenin’ over thar.’ I looked around. I had n’t noticed how red the apples were.

‘Yes; seems early for them. Would n’t you like some to take home to Mrs. Church?’

‘Wa-al, now, I would at that, thank you.’ He paused. ‘I grafted that tree the day Murdock killed himself.’

‘Did you really? I always wondered why that tree blossomed pink on one side and white on the other.’ But Murdock, I thought. Who was Murdock? Apparently I was expected to know.

‘You know, Mr. Church, I don’t think I know who Murdock was.’

‘Is that so? That’s funny. He used to live thar in your house.’ He pointed as though I did n’t know my own house.

‘Did he really? Did he kill himself in the house?'

‘No . . . No . . . He killed himself down the road a piece, by the waterin’ trough this side my brother Orange’s house. He was on his way home, walkin’ up from the village, when it seems he was too heartbroken to go on any more.’

‘What was the trouble, Mr. Church? ’

‘Oh, it was money troubles. Financial, I guess. He’d been down to the city and could n’t borrow no more.’

‘Was he a gambler?’

‘No. He were n’t no gambler. Just had his heart set on farmin’ the place for profit. Said by God he was going to make a livin’ out of it no matter what no one said.’

‘He could n’t do it?’

‘No. Just seems as if nothin’ he did ever went right. He bought a lot of goats. Angora goats — you know? Fancy kind. Put ’em down thar on the bank of the brook. Thought they’d clean out the brush for him, but they just sickened and died. His father, old Colonel Murdock down to the city, he’s a lawyer. He would a given him fifty or seventy-five dollars a week just to stay away from this place. But it wa’n’t no use. He had his heart dead set on farmin’ it.’

‘How did he kill himself, Mr. Church? With a gun?’

‘No. I guess he wished he had. He’d bought some sheep dip down to the village and some wood alcohol. He just mixed it all together and swallowed it down.’

‘My God, Mr. Church, how could he? How horrible!’

‘Ya-as. They say he suffered something terrible. His inwards was well nigh et up afore he died.’

He was on his way here to this house, I thought. How strange for such a ghost to have remained unknown to us these many years.

‘How long ago was that, Mr. Church? It must be a long time now, is n’t it?’

‘Good many years, I reckon. Was before the time that German fella had the place. And Mr. Sherburn, he bought it from some Poles, did n’t he?’

‘Yes. That was fifteen years ago, and they’d had it for some time. Were the Germans here long?’

‘I’ve kinda lost track. Might be ten years or so. I could n’t exactly say.’

‘Around thirty or forty years ago you grafted that tree, eh?’

‘I guess so,’ he said. ‘I always remember that tree, ’cause it was the day Murdock died I grafted it for him.’

‘Did you ever graft any others?’

‘Ya-as. Thar’s that one down by the spring and one out back o’ the barn, but I did n’t do them the same time.’

‘Well, you help yourself to those astrachans, won’t you? Take as many as you like.’

‘Thank ye very much. I’ll take a few. I always liked that tree.’

The Civil War buckle you found that time when you were cleaning out the attic must have belonged to the old Colonel who would have paid his son to stay away from this house.

(To be concluded in the next issue)