Atlantic Classics Volume I Part 6

'I think one might own a Mountly House without greed,' persisted Grace wistfully. 'Having no house at all, I naturally refuse to think of myself as ending my days in any less perfect domicile. What do you mean by the "ultimate purpose" of our houses?'

'Ah! that,' said Honoria, with a quick indrawing of her breath, 'is the very core of all my thought, and I don't know how to make you see it!'

She rose abruptly and walked to the end of the veranda. She stood there a while, looking across at the spreading gables of her own brown bungalow, with the yearning on her face that only house-mothers know.

Yonder was her home. Set on a mighty shoulder of the earth, facing the sunset and the sea, it clung to the soil as the brown rocks cling.

Behind it were the mighty Sierras with their crests of snow; before it, the sweetest land G.o.d ever smiled upon; within it, all the treasures of her eyes, her mind, her heart. Just as it stood there in the February sun, it was an abode compact of love, of aspiration, of desire. The ancient love of man for his shelter had gone into it, and the love of woman for the place of her appointed suffering. Desire for beauty and hope of peace were in its making. Its walls had heard the birth-cries; her children had played about its doors; out from it had been borne her dead. Inconsiderable speck on the vast hill-shoulder that it was, it could defy time and the elements, even as she defied them, for she had given it of her own immortality.

'I have not yet said it all,' she said a little thickly. 'It is hard to say, even to you. I have found an att.i.tude of mind, a path, a way of life I call intensive, for lack of a better name, and I believe in it, not only because it increases my sane satisfaction in living, but also because it finally leads _out_--out of all this tangle of our material lives, into the eternal s.p.a.ces.

'I see the world of men's business activities chiefly as a place of wrath and greed, and yet even the most grasping must be blindly seeking through their greed an ultimate satisfaction--not more houses or more automobiles, or railroads, or mines, or even power, but something dimly apprehended as beyond all these and more than they--something that is good and that _endures_. For we all want the Enduring Thing. One man sees it here, another there. As for me, I see it in my house. I tell you, the Greeks and Romans did not make a religion of the hearthstone; they merely recognized the religion that the hearthstone _is_. Under that quiet roof I have learned that it is a woman's business to take stones and make them bread. Only she can make our surroundings live and nourish us.

'Beyond the need for bread, a woman's needs are two; deeper than all cravings save the mother's pa.s.sion, firm-rooted in our endless past, is the heart-hunger. The trees that sweep my chimney have their roots at the world's core! The flowers in my dooryard have grown there for a thousand years! What millenniums have done, shall decades undo? We are not so shallow, so plastic as that! We will go into the mills, the shops, the offices, if we must, but we know we are off the track of life. Neither our desire nor our power is there.

'I have talked glibly enough about restricting superfluous possessions for the sake of developing a finer quality in those we have; I have said only personality gives that quality to our surroundings--but I have not said the final thing. It is this: I believe that in the humble business of loving the material things that are given to us to own and love, in shaping our homes around them, in making them vital and therefore beautiful, so that they serve our spirits in their turn, we are not only making the most of our resources in this life, but are doing more than that. Somehow, I cannot tell you how, I know that we are _getting them across_--into the timeless places! In making them vital we are making them enduring.

'Christ tells us to lay up for ourselves treasures in heaven. What did that mean to you when you were young? I thought it meant a procession of self-denials and charities, more or less lifeless because the offering was made slightly against the grain! I had no idea that when I loved somebody very much or pitied somebody very much, when I shared my heart or shared my roof eagerly, that I was doing the commanded thing. Still less did I realize, when I worked hard to make my home more comfortable or more beautiful, that I was sending vibrations from my everyday world right into the eternal one--every deed an actual hammer stroke on my house not made with hands. But so sure as that our mortal shall put on immortality, I now hold it that what we first find in the eternal world will be the things into which we have unstintingly flung our vitality, our _feeling_, while we are briefly here.

'_Here we have no continuing city_. But when I am making my house live, I and no other, putting into it as I best may something of the serenity of Athens and the sacredness of Jerusalem and the beauty of Siena, then it is taking its place beside my greater loves. Then I am creating a home, not only in this world, but in the next. I have put something over into the eternal world that fire cannot burn, nor floods destroy, nor moth and rust corrupt. It is safe, even from myself, forever! No Heaven can be holy to me if I have not made this spot holy. I shall not ask, even from the mercy of the Merciful, a heavenly mansion if I have failed to make this earthly dwelling live. Eternity begins beside my hearth, shaped by my will. A woman knows!'

Reminiscence with Postscript

By Owen Wister

I

Not alone because of their good meat and drink are three meals shrined at the heart of these following impressions. Singly, each one did delightfully engage the palate, but the three together speak appealingly to sentiment. It is of a great house, a little inn, and of the fair region round about them that I shall mainly discourse--and whether I do or don't give a final _x_ to the name of the house, there are people and doc.u.ments to say I have spelt it wrong: which comes very near to saying that both ways are right. The _x_ shall remain, the majority seems to favor it, and I at once beg that you share my relish of these posturing Renaissance lines, written by royal command in honor of Chenonceaux:--

Au saint bal des dryades, A Phbus, ce grand dieu, Aux humides nayades J'ai consacre ce lieu.

This highly plaster-cast lyric was recited during the 'triomphe' held at Chenonceaux to celebrate the arrival there of Francois II and Mary Stuart. The hostess was as distinguished as her visitors; and never, before I went to Chenonceaux, did I a.s.sociate naiads and dryads and poems of welcome with Catherine de'Medici. But we must allow this monstrous personage an eye for good houses. She preferred Chenonceaux to all her dwellings--she preferred it so much, indeed, that she made another lady get out of it, exchanging for it the decidedly inferior residence of Chaumont. And we have Catherine to thank (I fear) for the strangely felicitous fancy that placed upon the arches built from the rear of the house to the farther side of the river by her rejected predecessor, Diane de Poitiers, that enchanting hall or gallery, which rises three stories high, if you count the nine windows in the steeply and gracefully pitched slate roof.

Basti si magnifiquement Il est debout, comme un geant, Dedans le lit de la riviere, C'est-a-dire dessus un pont Qui porte cent toises de long.

These verses b.u.mp down heavily upon the bridge, and, despite their scrupulous statistics as to its length, they scarcely measure the excellence of Chenonceaux, but rather the gap between French verse and French architecture in the sixteenth century. Villon could have come nearer the mark; but Villon was long gone before the ancient mill on the river Cher was transfigured by its purchaser into the chateau he did not live to complete. 'S'il vient a point' said Thomas Bohier, and he graved it in many ornamental places of his edifice, 'me souviendra.'

And here am I writing his name and thinking about him, three hundred and ninety-two years after his death. What a pleasant reason for being remembered! What a quietly ill.u.s.trious introduction to posterity: the originator of the mansion whose sheer beauty brought a succession of kings and queens and other great people to sojourn in it, whose walls have listened to the blandishments of Francois I, the sallies of Fontenelle and Voltaire, the sentimentalities of Rousseau. Do their ghosts walk here upon these terraces? Do they meet in the long gallery over the Cher? If they don't, they are less wise in the next world than they were in this. Almost might one envy some figure in a well-preserved piece of tapestry, hanging in any hall or chamber here and commanding a view out of any window that looked up or down the placid river.

Embroidered thus for ever, amid high company, ladies and gentlemen of importance with hawks and feathers and armor and steeds richly caparisoned, ministered to by esquires and serfs, one would exist admired, valued, and carefully dusted. Daily sight-seers from all lands would be conducted into one's presence (Sundays included, 10-11 A.M., 2-6 P.M.), thus animating one's feudal leisure with sufficient variety.

There one would be, an acknowledged masterpiece, for ever aloof from the unstable present, nevermore driven to enlist against the restless evils of the world. The trouble is, somebody from Pittsburg might buy one. Now I could no more brook living as tapestry in America than I could live as an American in Europe, expatriated and trivially evaporating amid beauties and comforts that were none of my native heritage.

Do you know the country where Chenonceaux stands? Do you know the river?

Have you ever gone there from Tours, or come there the opposite way, from Bourges through Vierzon and Montrichard?

The region shares a secret with certain rare people, whom all of us are glad to count among our acquaintance. Certain men and women, immediately on our first meeting them, make us desire to meet them again; not because they have uttered remarkable thoughts or reminded us of Venus or Apollo: perhaps they have said nothing that you and I couldn't say, and we may know people much better looking. But they radiate--what is it that they radiate? We feel it, we bask in it, it flows over us. It isn't sunlight or moonlight, but a fairy-light of their own. When these shining creatures come into the room, happiness enters with them. How do they do it? It gets us nowhere to say that there is 'something' in the tone of their voice, or 'something' in the look of their eyes: what is the something? I'm glad I don't know; mystery is growing so scarce, that I am thankful for anything which cannot be explained.

Now this rare quality (and don't flatter yourself that you understand it because you happen to know its name) is possessed not only by men and women, but also by places; and, no more than with people, has it anything to do with their being remarkable or beautiful. The White Mountains in New Hampshire haven't a trace of it; it fills the mountains of North Carolina; there is almost none along our Atlantic seaboard, but it hangs over and haunts nearly every foot of our Pacific Coast.

Whenever one of these happy spots has been long known to man, man has invariably cherished it in word and deed. His chronicles celebrate it; he sets it lovingly like a jewel in his romances, dramas, verse, prose, song; he graces it with his best in architecture; his roads and gardens bring it alike into his hours of work and of ease; in fine, he garlands it with his imagination, weaves it into his life century after century, until it comes to smile upon him from the heart of his History and Literature, as well as upon his daily present. That is what mankind has done beneath the spell of a place which has charm.

Thus Touraine to the Frenchman,--_beau pays de Touraine_, as the page in Meyerbeer's _Huguenots_ sings of it in that opera's second act, which takes place at Chenonceaux. I suppose--indeed I remember--that rain falls in that country; yet, when I think about it, sunshine invariably sparkles through the picture--not the kind that glares and burns, but the kind that plays gently among leaves and sh.o.r.es and shadows; sunshine upon the twinkling, feathered silver of the poplars, the grapes in sloping vineyards, the green islands and tawny bluffs of the Loire, the quiet waters of the Indre and the Cher; a jocund harmony seems to play about the very names,--Beaulieu, Montresor, Saint-Symphorien,--but were I to begin upon the music in the names of France, I should run far beyond the limits of Touraine and of your patience. Say to yourself aloud, properly, Amboise, Chateaurenault, La Chapelle-Blanche, Saint-Martin-le-Beau, and then say Naugatuck, Saugatuck, Pawtucket, Woonsocket, Manayunk, Manunkachunk, and you will catch my drift.

Stevenson's joy in our names was at bottom purely that of the collector.

But have you ever seen the Loire and its tributary realm? I have already owned myself (together with all other men) as unable to explain the mystery of charm. No Niagara is hereabouts, nor Matterhorn, nor anything you could call sublime; nothing so l.u.s.trously beautiful as Bar Harbor, or the Berkshire Hills. Wildness is wholly absent, but so is tameness too. It is somehow through its very moderation that the glamour of this land is wrought. But we must nicely distinguish between the poetry and the prose of moderation: Princeton Junction, New Jersey, is perfectly moderate, and is also the type and pattern of hundreds of thousands of square, comfortable, unoffending miles in the United States which you would never wish to see again--indeed which you would never wish to see once; whereas, even as I write, I am homesick for Touraine, though it isn't my home.

Once again I must draw the parallel between human qualities and the ways of our mother earth. We place at the top of our esteem those people who take chivalrously the heavy blows of life, who are not brave merely, but gallant. We draw scant inspiration from the sight of somebody who is all too obviously and dutifully bearing something; who goes, day after day, with a set and sombre expression that says as plainly as words: 'Just watch me carrying my Cross. Just wait till you have one.' We prefer those whose gayety so conceals the fact that they're behaving well, that we should never suspect it, did we not know what they have pa.s.sed, and are pa.s.sing, through. Thus also does Touraine conceal the tears and the blood she has known. Louis the Eleventh, Catherine de' Medici, the gibbet balcony of the Salle des Armes at Amboise, the iron cage and the black dungeons of Loches,--Touraine, with her smiling, high-bred elegance, keeps all this to herself, and gives you a bright welcome.

Often as she has been the scene of Tragedy, often as the glaive and not the lute has been the instrument of her drama, she might well look in her gla.s.s and exclaim with Richard the Second,--

Hath sorrow struck So many blows upon this face of mine, And made no deeper wounds?

Wearing no c.r.a.pe, betraying no scars, hinting naught of its dark experience of life, this realm, this _beau pays_, more than any in Europe, to my thinking, lies in the true key of high comedy, of masque and pastoral. If, here and there above its trees or upon its hills, the brooding frown of some tower, the gaunt stare of some donjon in ruins, fierce with memories, brings one up short, so that in joy's mid-current some smack of the bitter wells up--this is not Nature's doing. Look away from these works of man to the feathered poplars, the vineyards, the gentle waters, and see the earth's countenance, smiling and serene.

Decorous it is always; only the irregularities of the Loire and its channel seem to bear any reference to the conduct of those beautiful historic ladies who dispersed their reputations in the vicinity. Even man did not always build a Langeais or a Loches. Urbane and gracious amid their parks or on their bluffs rise those dwellings planned when France's architectural genius was in its happiest mood--though not its loftiest. They look like the good society which once a.s.sembled in them; their mere aspect suggests the wits, the brilliant talkers and listeners of a day when conversation was a living art still, the day which furnishes us even now with those letters and memoirs which are the dainty wainscotting and mantelpieces, the interior decorations of Literature. You may wander almost anywhere among the poplars and the chestnuts in the valleys of the Loire's quiet tributaries; you can hardly go wrong; if the turrets of Usse against their rising woodland do not regale your eye, it will be Azay-le-Rideau, or something less famous, or, best of all, Chenonceaux, to which I now return.

II

I saw it first upon an afternoon when no air was stirring, even in the poplars, when the green of Touraine was changing to gold: golden fruit, pears, and apples, where summer's fruit had been; golden leaves flickering down from high branches, or raked into golden heaps; while the faint, sweet smoke of burning twigs hovered in the autumn day. It was the moment and scene of the year when, just because other things have ceased to grow, memories blossom in the mind; and on every golden heap of leaves retrospect seemed to be sitting. We visitors were three.

I can recall the first sight of the chateau's yellow facade, framed by the distant end of the high, formal avenue into which we turned to approach it. All sorts of feet had stepped where we were walking: almost four centuries of distinguished feet had gone in and out of that beautiful front door; but over its appealing a.s.sociations the still more appealing aspect of the wonderful house triumphed. If I knew about _Le Devin du Village_ then, the scene of its first performance interested me much more because that long and many-windowed gallery was built right over the water, right across the Cher, upon arches that the gla.s.sy surface of the stream reflected symmetrically. I was captured then and for ever by the beauty and the originality of this residence. Our best country houses take earth and air into partnership, but this abode of grace possessed, embraced, a little river. To go in at your front door on one green margin and come out of your back door on the other; to dwell in a masterpiece that was house and bridge in one--I can still recover my first sensations of delight at this triumph of French art.

Only--the concierge didn't let us go out of the back door; and my disappointment was cherished through long years, until its sequel, which I shall presently reach. This first afternoon became a chapter in the most delightful of guide-books, from which I quote the following:--

'We took our way back to the Grand Monarque, and waited in the little inn parlor for a late train to Tours. We were not impatient, for we had an excellent dinner to occupy us; and even after we had dined we were still content to sit a while and exchange remarks upon the superior civilization of France. Where else, at a village inn, should we have fared so well?... At the little inn at Chenonceaux the _cuisine_ was not only excellent, but the service was graceful. We were waited on by mademoiselle and her mamma; it was so that mademoiselle alluded to the elder lady, as she uncorked for us a bottle of Vouvray mousseux.'

On another page of this same guide-book you may read how, at the Hotel de l'Univers in Tours, the chateau of Amboise was described to us by an English lady of a type that I sadly miss to-day. One met her everywhere then. She was a more fragile sister of that robust, brick-complexioned spinster who used to climb all the Alps in practical but awful garments.

She didn't often venture to speak to you for fear you weren't respectable, or might think she wasn't. When she did, it was apt to be with explosive shyness, running all her words together, as she did about Amboise. 'It's-very-very-dirty-and-very-keeawrious!' Curious and furious she always p.r.o.nounced to rhyme with glorious and victorious; and it invariably made me think of 'G.o.d Save the Queen.'

In my interest as to whether we should again have the excellent fare and graceful service which I so well remembered at the little inn, and whether now at last my long-cherished wish to step out of that back door on the river's farther side were to be gratified, Chenonceaux itself had so dropped out of my thoughts that it fairly burst upon my sight.

Bursting is, of course, a thing which that delicate and restrained edifice could never really do, only I wasn't thinking about it as our party (we were four on this second visit, and it was spring-time) came into the avenue. There at the other end stood the fair, gay vision of the chateau, and its beauty and wonder so suddenly waked my admiration, that I exclaimed, 'How young it looks!'

Yes; it didn't look new, but it looked young: youth is the particular and essential note of this enchanted building. None of its neighbors have it, not even Azay-le-Rideau or Blois, which are its rivals, though never its equals. Chenonceaux was four hundred years old in January, 1915. Age makes one type of person decrepit, and so it is with houses.

But Chenonceaux, if ever it come to show its years, will belong to the other type: it will look venerable. Did it, do you think, catch its secret from the ring of Charlemagne, by whose sorceries its mistress, Diane de Poitiers, was accused of preserving her youth? This lady's success with Francois Premier so disconcerted the amiability of the d.u.c.h.esse d'Etampes, that she constantly reminded Diane she was born on the day Diane was married.--But I resist the temptation to dwell upon Diane and everybody else linked to Chenonceaux by history; it's all accessible to you in books; and I proceed with the visit our party of four made, this spring day.

Touraine was now all delicate in green; as lovely, as gracious, as discreet in its budding leaves as when the leaves had flickered down, spangling the air and gra.s.s and garden-walks with their gold. We had met at the little inn the same welcome, the same excellent _cuisine_, the same agreeable Vouvray mousseux. Mademoiselle was not there, but mamma was. Her premises and herself showed no ill effect from the prosperity brought to her through the guide-book I have already quoted. No guide-book in its author's plan, it was now become established as one, and he, pet.i.tioned in a letter from mamma, had corrected a certain error. In the first edition, page 60, you may read that we took our way back to the Grand Monarque; in later editions it is the Hotel du Bon-Laboureur. The confusion to travelers, the injury to her custom, ensuing from the wrong name, madame had represented to the author; and now all was well. The inn wasn't any larger, but more and more each season were pilgrims with expectant appet.i.tes led to her door.

'Tenez, monsieur,' she said to me eagerly, when I narrated to her how I had been present at the germination of her renown, 'tenez. Voila!' She showed me the precious guide-book. She treasured it, though she couldn't read it, because it was in English. And I came in for her smiles and cordiality, which really belonged to the author.

You will have perceived, our party this time took their _dejeuner_, not their dinner, at the Bon-Laboureur. The good omelette and cheese and fruit and wine, mamma's prosperity and her well-preserved state,--for now she was really an elderly woman,--all this had brought us in peaceful and pleased spirits to the chateau. When we had seen the rooms downstairs and the concierge was conducting the other sightseers--some ten or twelve--to the second story, our party under my guidance stole away to the back door.

'Back door' implies no dishonorable pa.s.sage through pantry and kitchen; we simply didn't go up the staircase in the wake of the concierge, but independently along the hall instead, and thus across the Cher through Catherine's celebrated gallery. _Le Devin du Village_ came into my mind, and I wondered which figure was the more diverting, Jean-Jacques Rousseau composing opera, or Richard Wagner dabbling in philosophy.

The door was open. I emerged, the happy leader of my party, upon stone steps, crossed a little draw-bridge, and our triumphant feet trod the gra.s.s beneath the trees which shaded the river's bank. I had my wish; and as my obedient band followed me, I fear my complacent back and Anabasis manner expressed some sentiment like this: 'Only observe how it pays to see France with a person who knows the ropes!' We sauntered, we expatiated, we paused before what I'll call by metonymy the tocsin--a great bell and chain suspended from strong framework; from this point the chateau, with its fine, detached, cylindrical donjon tower of the fifteenth century, looked, in the afternoon light, particularly well: those poor sheep with the concierge weren't getting this view. We must have lingered by the tocsin a quarter of an hour, enjoying ourselves, before returning to the back door.

It was shut. It was locked. Rattling made no impression upon it, nor shaking, nor kicking. We knocked then, fancying this to be an accident.

Next we called, or rather, I, the party's personal conductor and competent guide, began to call. Nothing happened. I augmented my efforts. Catherine's gallery, famous scene of the first performance of Rousseau's _Devin du Village_, responded with cavernous echoes. Between these reigned silence, and a gentle breeze rustled the young leaves of the chestnuts. We abandoned the door and went a few steps down the river to where our gesticulations could be seen from the windows of Chenonceaux. We made these gesticulations with our four umbrellas, whilst I shouted continually. Not a window blinked. It might have been a sorcerer's palace, and we his four new victims, presently to be roasted, boiled, or changed into cats. We looked down the river--no escape; up the river half-a-mile was a bridge; but what impediment mightn't lie between? And even if the way were clear, to go round by the bridge would lose us our train to Tours. One of us, in her deep voice, said that she hoped the robin-red-b.r.e.a.s.t.s would find her body and cover it with leaves. Again we flourished our four umbrellas, during vociferations from me, at the imperturbable chateau. Then, quite suddenly, something did happen. Out of a window in the donjon tower of the fifteenth century was thrust a head, and from across the river it wagged at us malevolently.

It was the concierge. The shock of discovering he had locked us out purposely in punishment of our independent excursion, threw me into extreme rage. My Anabasis manner had already dropped from me; but Xenophon got his party successfully back, and this same task was now searchingly, compellingly, 'up to me.' More malevolent wagging from the tower was all that resulted from my next demonstrations. In these I was now alone; my party, at the apparition of the concierge, had become abruptly quiet, thinking doubtless that loud calls and wavings would diminish my dignity less than theirs, whose years and discretion were more than mine. Therefore my companions brandished their umbrellas no more, but stood upon the banks of the Cher decorously, in a reserved att.i.tude, patient yet stately, as if awaiting the tumbril; I, meanwhile, hurled international threats across the river. These wrought no change.

In repose my French halts, but when roused it acquires both speed and point; yet none of my idioms disturbed the concierge at his window. And now I was visited by inspiration. I seized the chain and rang the tocsin. It sounded as if Attila were coming at once. Somebody would have come, undoubtedly,--the whole _arrondiss.e.m.e.nt_ I should think,--but after a few moments of that din, the head disappeared; in a few more the door was unlocked, and my companions preceded me with restraint yet with celerity across Catherine's gallery and out of Chenonceaux's front door and away, down the avenue to the railway, whilst I delivered some final idioms to the concierge. I am happy to record that these made him livid, and in the presence of a highly attentive audience. But--we had in truth small idea with whom we were dealing. Some time later we got final news of him. He had committed a murder, been caught, tried, convicted, sentenced, and executed.