The Book of Susan Part 18

Please tell me you don't think poor Sister--she refuses to leave me, and I wouldn't let her anyway--will have to undergo martyrdom in a cheap hall bedroom for the rest of her days?"

Needless to say, Phil did not approve of Susan's plan. He agreed with her that under the given conditions she could not remain with me in New Haven; and he commended her courage, her desire for independence. But Susan would never, he felt, find her true pathway to independence, either material or spiritual, as a journalistic free-lance in New York.

He admitted the insatiable public thirst for soda-water, but saw no reason why Susan should waste herself in catering to it. He was by no means certain that she could cater to it if she would.

"You'll too often discover," he warned her, "that your tap is running an unmarketable beverage. The mortal taste for nectar is still undeveloped; it remains the drink of the G.o.ds."

"But," Susan objected, "I can't let Ambo pay my bills from now on--I can't! And Sister and I must live decently somehow! I'd like nothing better than to be a perpetual fountain of nectar--supposing, you nice old Phil, that I've ever really had the secret of distilling a single drop of it. But you say yourself there's no market for it this side of heaven, which is where we all happen to be. What do you want me to do?"

"Marry me."

"It wouldn't be fair to you, dear."

There was a momentary pause.

"Then," said Phil earnestly, "I want you to let Hunt--or if you can't bring yourself to do that--to let _me_ loan you money enough from time to time to live on simply and comfortably for a few years, while you study and think and write in your own free way--till you've found yourself. My nectar simile was nonsense, just as your soda-water tap was. You have brains and a soul, and the combination means a shining career of some kind--even on earth. Don't fritter your genius away in makeshift activities. Mankind needs the best we have in us; the best's none too good. It's a duty--no, it's more than that--it's a true _religion_ to get that expressed somehow--whether in terms of action or thought or beauty. I know, of course, you feel this as I do, and mean to win through to it in the end. But why handicap yourself so cruelly at the start?"

Phil tells me that Susan, while he urged this upon her, quietly withdrew and did not return for some little time after he had ceased to speak. He was not even certain she had fully heard him out until she suddenly leaned to him from her chair and gave his hand an affectionate, grateful squeeze.

"Yes, Phil," she said, "it is a religion--it's perhaps the only religion I shall ever have. But for that very reason I must accept it in my own way. And I'm sure--it's part of my faith--that any coddling now will do me more harm than good. I must meet the struggle, Phil--the hand-to-hand fight. If the ordinary bread-and-b.u.t.ter conditions are too much for me, then I'm no good and must go under. I shan't be frittering anything away if I fail. I shan't fail--in our sense--unless we're both mistaken, and there isn't anything real in me. That's what I must find out first--not sheltered and in silence, but down in the scrimmage and noise of it all.

If I'm too delicate for that, then I've nothing to give this world, and the sooner I'm crushed out of it the better! Believe me, Phil dear, I know I'm right; I _know_."

She was pressing clenched hands almost fiercely between her girl's b.r.e.a.s.t.s as she ended, as if to deny or repress any natural longing for a special protection, a special graciousness and security, from our common taskmaster, life.

Phil admits that he wanted to whimper like a homesick boy.

XII

Susan's informal dinner for Jimmy that evening was not really a success. The surface of the water sparkled from time to time, but there were grim undercurrents and icy depths. Perhaps it was not so bad as my own impression of it, for I had a sullen headache pulsing its tiresome obbligato above a dull ground base of despair. Despair, I am forced to call it. Never had life seemed to me so little worth the trouble of going on; and I fancy Phil's reasoned conviction of its eternal dignity and import had become, for the present, less of a comfort to him than a curse. Moods of this kind, however ruthlessly kept under, infect the very air about them. They exude a drab fog to deaden spontaneity and choke laughter at its source.

Neither Phil nor I was guilty of deliberate sulking; whether from false pride or native virtue we did our best--but our best was abysmal. Even Susan sank under it to the flat levels of made conversation, and poor Jimmy--who had brought with him many social misgivings--was stricken at table with a muscular rigor; sat stiffly, handled his implements jerkily, and ended by oversetting a gla.s.s of claret and blushing till the dusky red of his face matched the spreading stain before him.

At this crisis of gloom, luckily, Susan struggled clear of the drab fog and saved the remnant of the evening--at least for Jimmy, plunging with the happiest effect into the junior annals of Birch Street, till our heavier Hillhouse atmosphere stirred and lightened with _Don't-you-remember's_ and _Sure-I-do's_. And shortly after dinner, Phil, tactfully pleading an unprepared lecture, dragged Jimmy off with him before this bright flare-up of youthful reminiscence had even threatened to expire. Their going brought Susan at once to my side, with a stricken face of self-reproach.

"It was so stupid of me, Ambo--this dinner. I've never been more ashamed. How could I have forced it on you to-night! But you were wonderful, dear--wonderful! So was Phil. I'll never forget it." There were tears in her eyes. "Oh, Ambo," she wailed, "do you think I shall ever learn to be a little like either of you? I feel--abject." Before I could prevent it, she had seized my hand in both hers and kissed it.

"Homage," she smiled....

It broke me down--utterly.... You will spare me any description of the next ten minutes of childishness. Indeed, you must spare me the details of our later understanding; they are inviolable. It is enough to say that I emerged from it--for the experience had been overwhelming--with a new spirit, a clarified and serener mind. My love for Susan was unchanged--yet wholly changed. The paradox is exact. Life once more seemed to me good, since she was part of it; and my own life rich, since I now knew how truly it had become a portion of hers. She had made me feel, know, that I counted for her--unworthy as I am--in all she had grown to be and would grow to be. We had shaped and would always shape each other's lives. There for the moment it rested. She would leave me, but I was not to be alone.

No; I was not to be alone. For even if she had died, or had quite changed and forsaken me, there would be memories--such as few men have been privileged to recall....

INTERLUDE

On the rearward and gentler slopes of Mount Carmel, a rough, isolated little mountain, very abrupt on its southerly face, which rises six or seven miles up-country from the New Haven Green, there is an ancient farm, so long abandoned as to be completely overgrown with gray birch--the old field birch of exhausted soils--with dogwood and an aromatic tangle of humbler shrubs, high-bush huckleberry and laurel and sweet fern; while beneath these the dry elastic earth-floor is a deep couch of ghost-gray moss, shining checkerberry and graceful ground pine.

The tumbledown farmstead itself lies either unseen at some distance from these abandoned fields or has wholly disappeared along with the neat stone fences that must once have marked them. Yet the boundaries of the fields are now majestically defined through the undergrowth by rows of gigantic red cedars so thickset, so tall, shapely, and dense as to resemble the secular cypresses of Italian gardens more nearly than the poor relations they ordinarily are.

And at the upper edge of one steep-lying field, formerly an apple orchard--though but three or four of the original apple trees remain, hopelessly decrepit and half buried in the new growth--the older cedars of the fence line have seeded capriciously and have thrown out an almost perfect circle of younger, slenderer trees which, standing shoulder to shoulder, inclose the happiest retreat for woodland G.o.d or dreaming mortal that the most exacting faun or poet could desire.

That Susan should have happened upon this lonely, this magic circle, I can never regard as a mere accident. Obviously time had slowly and lovingly formed and perfected it for some purpose; it was there waiting for her--and one day she came and possessed it, and the magic circle was complete.

Susan was then seventeen and the season, as it should have been, was early May. Much of the hill country lying northward from the Connecticut coast towns is surprisingly wild, and none of it wilder or lovelier than certain tracts spread within easy reach of the few New Haveners who have not wholly capitulated to business or college politics or golf or social service or the movies, forgetting a deeper and saner lure. A later Wordsworth or Th.o.r.eau might still live in midmost New Haven and never feel shut from his heritage, for it neighbors him closely--swamp and upland, hemlock cliff and hardwood forest, precipitous brook or slow-winding meadow stream, where the red-winged blackbirds flute and flash by; the whole year's wonder awaits him; he has but to go forth--alone.

Nature never did betray the heart that loved her, though she so ironically betrays most of us who merely pretend to love her, because we feel, after due instruction, that we ought. For Nature is not easily communicative, nor lightly wooed. She demands a higher devotion than an occasional picnic, and will seldom have much to say to you if she feels that you secretly prefer another society to hers. To her elect she whispers, timelessly, and Susan, in her own way, was of the elect. It was the way--the surest--of solitary communion; but it was very little, very casually, the way of science. She observed much, but without method; and catalogued not at all. She never counted her warblers and seldom named them--but she loved them, as they slipped northward through young leaves, shyly, with pure flashes of green or russet or gold.

Nature for Susan, in short, was all mood, ranging from cold horror to supernal beauty; she did not sentimentalize the gradations. The cold horror was there and chilled her, but the supernal beauty was there too--and did not leave her cold. And through it all streamed an indefinable awe, a trail one could not follow, a teasing mystery--an unspoken word. It was back of--no rather it interpenetrated the horror no less than the beauty; they were but phases, hints, of that other, that suspected, eerie trail, leading one knew not where.

But surely there, in that magic circle, one might press closer, draw oneself nearer, catch at the faintest hint toward a possible clue? The aromatic s.p.a.ce within the cedars became Susan's refuge, her nook from the world, her Port-Royal, her Walden, her Lake Isle of Innisfree. Once found that spring she never spoke of it; she h.o.a.rded her treasure, slipping off to it stealthily, through slyest subterfuge or evasion, whenever she could. For was it not hers?

Sometimes she rode out there, tying her horse to a tree in the lowest field back of a great thicket of old-fashioned lilac bushes run wild, where he was completely hidden from the rare pa.s.sers-by of the rough up-country road or lane. But oftenest, she has since confessed, she would clear her morning or afternoon by some plausible excuse for absence, then board the Waterbury trolley express, descending from it about two miles from her nook, and walking or rather climbing up to it crosslots through neglected woodland and uncropped pasture reverting to the savage.

At one point she had to pa.s.s a small swampy meadow through which a mere thread of stream worked its way, half-choked by thick-springing blades of our native wild iris; so infinitely, so capriciously delicate in form and hue. And here, if these were in bloom, she always lingered a while, poised on the harsh hummocks of bent-gra.s.s, herself slender as a reed.

The pale, softly pencilled iris petals stirred in her a high wonder beyond speech. What supreme, whimsical artistry brought them to being there, in that lonely spot; and for whose joy? No human hand, cunning with enamel and platinum and treated silver, could, after a lifetime of patience, reproduce one petal of these uncounted flowers. Out of the muck they lifted, ethereal, unearthly--yet so soon to die....

Oh, she knew what the learned had to say of them!--that they were merely s.e.xual devices; painted deceptions for attracting insects and so a.s.suring cross-pollination and the l.u.s.ty continuance of their race. So far as it went this was unquestionably true; but it went--just how far?

Their color and secret manna attracted the necessary insects, which they fed; the form of their petals and perianth tubes, and the arrangement of their organs of s.e.x were cunningly evolved, so that the insect that sought their nectar bore from one flower to the next its fertilizing golden dust----

Astonishing, certainly! But what astonished her far more was that all this ingenious mechanism should in any way affect _her_! It was obviously none of her affair; and yet to come upon these cunning mechanistic devices in this deserted field stirred her, set something ineffable free in her--gave it joy for wings. It was as if these pale blooms of wild iris had been for her, in a less mortal sense, what the unconscious insects were for them--_intermediaries_, whose more ethereal contacts cross-fertilized her very soul. But she could not define for herself or express for others what they did to her. Of one thing only she was certain: These fleeting moments of expansion, of illumination, were brief and vague--moments of pure, uncritical feeling--but they were the best moments of her life; and they were real. They vanished, but not wholly. They left lasting traces. Never to have been visited by them would have condemned her, she knew, to be less than her fullest self, narrower in sympathy, more rigid, more dogmatic, and less complete.

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 cl.u.s.tered 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 s.p.a.ciously 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 cla.s.srooms were seized with irrelevant fancies and, while trying to recover some dropped thread of discourse, openly sighed--haunted by visions of the phoebe 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, _pa.s.sim_.] 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, d.a.m.n 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 pa.s.sions, 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.

Jessica, well up to it, offered no objections to the plan, and we were soon trotting briskly along the aerial Ridge Road, from which we at length descended to the dark eastern flank of Mount Carmel. It would mean a long pull to go right round the mountain by the steep back road, and I had at first no thought of attempting it; but the swift remembrance of a vast cherry orchard bordering that road made me wonder whether its blossoms had yet fallen. When I determined finally to push on, poor Jessica's earlier fire had cooled; we climbed the rough back road as a slug moves; the cherry orchard proved disappointing; and the sun was barely two hours from the hills when we crossed the divide and turned south down a gra.s.s-grown wood road that I had never before traveled. I hoped, and no doubt Jessica hoped, it might prove a shorter cut home.

What it did prove was so fresh an enchantment of young leaf and flashing wing, that I soon ceased to care where it led or how late I might be for dinner. Then a sharp dip in the road brought a new vision of delight; dogwood--cloudy ma.s.ses of pink dogwood, the largest, deepest-tinted trees of it I had ever seen! It caught at my throat; and I reined in Jessica, whose aesthetic sense was less developed, and stared. But presently the spell was broken. An unseen horse squealed, evidently from behind a great lilac thicket in an old field at the left, and Jessica squealed back, instantly alert and restive. The sharp whinnying was repeated, and Jessica's dancing excitement grew intense; then there was a scuffling commotion back of the lilacs and to my final astonishment Susan's little mare, Alma, having broken her headstall and wrenched herself free of bit and bridle, came trotting amicably forth to join her old friends--which she could easily do, as the ancient cattle bars at the field-gate had long since rotted away.

It was unmistakably dainty Alma with her white forehead star--but where was her mistress? A finger of ice drew slowly along my spine as I urged Jessica into the field and round the lilac thicket. Alma meekly followed us, softly breathing encouragement through pink nostrils, and my alarm quieted when I found nothing more dreadful than the broken bridle still dangling from the branch of a dead cedar. It was plain that Susan had tied Alma there to explore on foot through the higher fields; it was plain, too, that she must have preferred to ride out here alone, and had been at some pains to conceal her purpose.

For a second, so piqued was I, I almost decided to ride on and leave the willful child to her own devices. But the broken bridle shamed me. I dismounted to examine it; it could be held together safely enough for the return, I saw, with a piece of stout twine, and there was certain to be a habitation with a piece of stout twine in it on down the road somewhere. Susan must have come that way and could tell me. But I must find her first....

"Susan!" I called. "_Oh-ho-o-o! Soo-san!_"