Part 9

Does it sound neurotic and silly? It wasn't. Conceive her if you can--Kathleen Somers, whom probably you never knew. From childhood she had nourished short hopes and straightened thoughts. At least: hopes that depend on the æsthetic passion are short; and the long perspectives of civilized history are very narrow. Kathleen Somers had been fed with the Old World: that is to say, her adolescent feet had exercised themselves in picture-galleries and cathedrals and palaces; she had seen all the right views, all the right ceremonies, and all the censored picturesqueness. Don't get any Cook's tourist idea, please, about Miss Somers. Her mother had died young, and her gifted father had taken her to a hundred places that the school-teacher on a holiday never gets to and thinks of only in connection with geography lessons. She had followed the Great Wall of China, she had stood before the tomb of Tamburlaine, she had shaded her eyes from the glare of Kaïrouan the Holy, she had chaffered in Tiflis and in Trebizond. All this before she was twenty-five. At that time her father's health broke, and they proceeded to live permanently in New York. Her wandering life had steeped her in delights, but kept her innocent of love-affairs. When you have fed on historic beauty, on the great plots of the past, the best tenor voices in the world, it is pretty hard to find a man who doesn't in his own person, leave out something essential to romance. She had herself no particular beauty, and therefore the male sex could get on without her. A few fell in love with her, but she was too enchanted and amused with the world in general to set to work at the painful process of making a hero out of any one of them. She was a sweet-tempered creature; her mental snobbishness was not a pose, but perfectly inevitable; she had a great many friends. As she had a quick wit and the historic imagination, you can imagine--remembering her bringing up--that she was an entertaining person when she entered upon middle age: when, that is, she was proceeding from the earlier to the later thirties.

It was natural that Kathleen Somers and her father--who was a bit precious and pompous, in spite of his ironies--should gather about them a homogeneous group. The house was pleasant and comfortable--they were too sophisticated to be "periodic"--and there was always good talk going, if you happened to be the kind that could stand good talk. Of course you had to pass an examination first. You had at least to show that you "caught on." They were high-brow enough to permit themselves sudden enthusiasms that would have damned a low-brow. You mustn't like "Peter Pan," but you might go three nights running to see some really perfect clog-dancing at a vaudeville theatre. Do you see what I mean? They were eclectic with a vengeance. It wouldn't do for you to cultivate the clog-dancer _and_ like "Peter Pan," because in that case you probably liked the clog-dancer for the wrong reason--for something other than that sublimated skill which is art. Of course this is only a wildly chosen example. I never heard either of them mention "Peter Pan." And the proper hatreds were ever more difficult than the proper devotions. You might let Shakespeare get on your nerves, provided you really enjoyed Milton. I wonder if you do see what I mean? It must be perfect of its kind, its kind being anything under heaven; and it must never, never, never be sentimental. It must have art, and _parti pris_, and point of view, and individuality stamped over it. No, I can't explain. If you have known people like that, you've known them. If you haven't, you can scarcely conceive them.

By this time you are probably hating the Somerses, father and daughter, and I can't help it--or rather, I've probably brought it about. But when I tell you that I'm not that sore myself, and that I loved them both dearly and liked immensely to be with them, you'll reconsider a little, I hope. They were sweet and straight and generous, both of them, and they knew all about the grand manner. The grand manner is the most comfortable thing to live with that I know. I used to go there a good deal, and Arnold Withrow went even more than I did, though he wasn't even hanging on to Art by the eyelids as I do. (I refer, of course, to my little habit of writing for the best magazines, whose public considers me intellectual. So I seem to myself, in the magazines ... "but out in pantry, good Lord!" Anyhow, I generally knew at least what the Somerses were talking about--the dears!) Withrow was a stock-broker, and always spent his vacations in the veritable wilds, camping in virgin forests, or on the edge of glaciers, or in the dust of American deserts. He had never been to Europe, but he had been to Buenos Aires. You can imagine what Kathleen Somers and her father felt about that: they thought him too quaint and barbaric for words; but still not barbaric enough to be really interesting.

I was just beginning to suspect that Withrow was in love with Kathleen Somers in the good old middle-class way, with no drama in it but no end of devotion, when the crash came. Mr. Somers died, and within a month of his death the railroad the bonds of which had constituted his long-since diminished fortune went into the hands of a receiver. There were a pitiful hundreds a year left, besides the ancestral cottage--which had never even been worth selling. His daughter had an operation, and the shock of that, _plus_ the shock of his death, _plus_ the shock of her impoverishment, brought the curtain down with a tremendous rush that terrified the house. It may make my metaphor clearer if I put it that it was the asbestos curtain which fell suddenly and violently; not the great crimson drop that swings gracefully down at the end of a play. It did not mark the end; it marked a catastrophe in the wings to which the plot must give place.

Then they carried Kathleen Somers to the hills.

* * * * *

It was Mildred Thurston who told me about it first. Withrow would have rushed to the hills, I think, but he was in British Columbia on an extended trip. He had fought for three months and got them, and he started just before Kathleen Somers had her sudden operation. Mildred Thurston (Withrow's cousin, by the way) threw herself nobly into the breach. I am not going into the question of Mildred Thurston here. Perhaps if Withrow had been at home, she wouldn't have gone. I don't know. Anyhow, when she rushed to Kathleen Somers's desolate retreat she did it, apparently, from pure kindness. She was sure, like every one else, that Kathleen would die; and that belief purged her, for the time being, of selfishness and commonness and cheap gayety. I wouldn't take Mildred Thurston's word about a state of soul; but she was a good dictograph. She came back filled with pity; filled, at least, with the means of inspiring pity for the exile in others.

After I had satisfied myself that Kathleen Somers was physically on the mend, eating and sleeping fairly, and sitting up a certain amount, I proceeded to more interesting questions.

"What is it like?"

"It's dreadful."

"How dreadful?"

Mildred's large blue eyes popped at me with sincere sorrow.

"Well, there's no plumbing, and no furnace."

"Is it in a village?"

"It isn't 'in' anything. It's a mile and a half from a station called Hebron. You have to change three times to get there. It's half-way up a hill--the house is--and there are mountains all about, and the barn is connected with the house by a series of rickety woodsheds, and there are places where the water comes through the roof. They put pails under to catch it. There are queer little contraptions they call Franklin stoves in most of the rooms and a brick oven in the kitchen. When they want anything from the village, Joel Blake gets it, if he doesn't forget. Ditto wood, ditto everything except meat. Some other hick brings that along when he has 'killed.' They can only see one house from the front yard, and that is precisely a mile away by the road. Joel Blake lives nearer, but you can't see his house. You can't see anything--except the woods and the 'crick' and the mountains. You can see the farmers when they are haying, but that doesn't last long."

"Is it a beautiful view?"

"My dear man, don't ask me what a beautiful view is. My education was neglected."

"Does Kathleen Somers think it beautiful?"

"She never looks at it, I believe. The place is all run down, and she sits and wonders when the wall-paper will drop off. At least, that is what she talks about, when she talks at all. That, and whether Joel Blake will remember to bring the groceries. The two women never speak to each other. Kathleen's awfully polite, but--well, you can't blame her. And I was there in the spring. What it will be in the winter!--But Kathleen can hardly last so long, I should think."

"Who is the other woman?"

"An heirloom. Melora Meigs. _Miss_ Meigs, if you please. You know Mr. Somers's aunt lived to an extreme old age in the place. Miss Meigs 'did' for her. And since then she has been living on there. No one wanted the house--the poor Somerses!--and she was used to it. She's an old thing herself, and of course she hasn't the nerves of a sloth. Now she 'does' for Kathleen. Of course later there'll have to be a nurse again. Kathleen mustn't die with only Melora Meigs. I'm not sure, either, that Melora will last. She all crooked over with rheumatism."

That was the gist of what I got out of Mildred Thurston. Letters to Miss Somers elicited no real response--only a line to say that she wasn't strong enough to write. None of her other female friends could get any encouragement to visit her. It was perhaps due to Miss Thurston's mimicry of Melora Meigs--she made quite a "stunt" of it--that none of them pushed the matter beyond the first rebuff.

By summer-time I began to get worried myself. Perhaps I was a little worried, vicariously, for Withrow. Remember that I thought he cared for her. Miss Thurston's pity for Kathleen Somers was the kind that shuts the door on the pitied person. If she had thought Kathleen Somers had a future, she wouldn't have been so kind. I may give it to you as my private opinion that Mildred Thurston wanted Withrow herself. I can't swear to it, even now; but I suspected it sufficiently to feel that some one, for Withrow's sake had better see Kathleen besides his exuberant and slangy cousin. She danced a little too much on Kathleen Somers's grave. I determined to go myself, and not to take the trouble of asking vainly for an invitation. I left New York at the end of June.

With my perfectly ordinary notions of comfort in traveling, I found that it would take me two days to get to Hebron. It was beyond all the resorts that people flock to: beyond, and "cross country" at that. I must have journeyed on at least three small, one-track railroads after leaving the Pullman at some junction or other.

It was late afternoon when I reached Hebron; and nearly an hour later before I could get myself deposited at Kathleen Somers's door. There was no garden, no porch; only a long, weed-grown walk up to a stiff front door. An orchard of rheumatic apple-trees was cowering stiffly to the wind in a far corner of the roughly fenced-in lot; there was a windbreak of perishing pines.

In the living-room Kathleen Somers lay on a cheap wicker chaise-longue, staring at a Hindu idol that she held in her thin hands. She did not stir to greet me; only transferred her stare from the gilded idol to dusty and ungilded me. She spoke, of course; the first time in my life, too, that I had ever heard her speak ungently.

"My good man, you had better go away. I can't put you up."

That was her greeting. Melora Meigs was snuffling in the hallway outside--listening, I suppose.

"Oh, yes, you can. If you can't I'm sure Joel Blake will. I've come to stay a while, Miss Somers."

"Can you eat porridge and salt pork for supper?"

"I can eat tenpenny nails, if necessary. Also I can sleep in the barn."

"Melora!" The old woman entered, crooked and grudging of aspect. "This friend of my father's and mine has come to see me. Can he sleep in the barn?"

I cannot describe the hostility with which Melora Meigs regarded me. It was not a pointed and passionate hatred. That, one could have examined and dealt with. It was, rather, a vast disgust that happened to include me.

"There's nothing to sleep on. Barn's empty."

"He could move the nurse's cot out there, if he really wants to. And I think there's an extra washstand in the woodshed. You'll hardly need more than one chair, just for a night," she finished, turning to me.

"Not for any number of nights, of course," I agreed suavely. I was angry with Kathleen Somers, I didn't know quite why. I think it was the Hindu idol. Nor had she any right to address me with insolence, unless she were mad, and she was not that. Her eyes snapped very sanely. I don't think Kathleen Somers could have made her voice snap.

Melora Meigs grunted and left the room. The grunt was neither assent nor dissent; it was only the most inclusive disapproval: the snarl of an animal, proceeding from the topmost of many layers of dislike.

"I'll move the things before dark, I think." I was determined to be cheerful, even if I had to seem impertinent; though the notion of her sticking me out in the barn enraged me.

"You won't mind Melora's locking the door between, of course. We always do. I'm such a cockney, I'm timid; and Melora's very sweet about it."

It was almost too much, but I stuck it out. Presently, indeed, I got my way; and moved--yes, actually lugged and lifted and dragged--the cot, the chair, and the stand out through the dusty, half-rotted corridors and sheds to the barn. I drew water at the tap in the yard and washed my perspiring face and neck. Then I had supper with Miss Somers and Melora Meigs.

After supper my hostess lighted a candle. "We go to bed very early," she informed me. "I know you'll be willing to smoke out-of-doors, it's so warm. I doubt if Melora could bear tobacco in the house. And you won't mind her locking up early. You can get into the barn from the yard any time, of course. Men are never timid, I believe; but there's a horn somewhere, if you'd like it. We have breakfast at six-thirty. Good-night."

Yes, it was Kathleen Somers's own voice, saying these things to me. I was still enraged, but I must bide my time. I refused the horn, and went out into the rheumatic orchard to smoke in dappled moonlight. The pure air soothed me; the great silence restored my familiar scheme of things. Before I went to bed in the barn, I could see the humor of this sour adventure. Oh, I would be up at six-thirty!

Of course I wasn't. I overslept; and by the time I approached the house (the woodshed door was still locked) their breakfast was long over. I fully expected to fast until the midday meal, but Kathleen Somers relented. With her own hands she made me coffee over a little alcohol lamp. Bread and butter had been austerely left on the table. Miss Somers fetched me eggs, which I ate raw. Then I went out into the orchard to smoke.

When I came back, I found Miss Somers as she had been the day before, crouched listlessly in her long chair fondling her idol. I drew up a horsehair rocking-chair and plunged in.

"Why do you play with that silly thing?"

"This?" She stroked the idol. "It is rather lovely, Father got it in Benares. The carving is very cunningly done. Look at the nose and mouth. The rank Hinduism of the thing amuses me. Perhaps it was cruel to bring it up here where there are no other gods for it to play with. But it's all I've got. They had to sell everything, you know. When I get stronger, I'll send it back to New York and sell it too."

"Why did you keep it out of all the things you had?"

"I don't know. I think it was the first thing we ever bought in India. And I remember Benares with so much pleasure. Wasn't it a pity we couldn't have been there when everything happened?"

"Much better not, I should think. You needed surgeons."

"Just what I didn't need! I should have liked to die in a country that had something to say for itself. I don't feel as though this place had ever existed, except in some hideous dream."

"It's not hideous. It's even very beautiful--so wild and untouched; such lovely contours to the mountains."

"Yes, it's very untouched." She spoke of it with just the same scorn I had in old days heard her use for certain novelists. "Scarcely worth the trouble of touching I should think--shouldn't you?"

"The beauty of it last night and this morning has knocked me over," I replied hardily.

"Oh, really! How very interesting!" By which she meant that she was not interested at all.

"You mean that you would like it landscape-gardened?" Really, she was perverse. She had turned her back to the view--which was ripping, out of her northern window. I could tell that she habitually turned her back on it.

"Oh, landscape-gardened? Well, it would improve it, no doubt. But it would take generations to do it. The generations that have been here already don't seem to have accomplished much. Humanly speaking, they have hardly existed at all."

Kathleen Somers was no snob in the ordinary sense. She was an angel to peasants. I knew perfectly what she meant by "humanly." She meant there was no castle on the next hill.

"Are you incapable of caring for nature--just scenery?"

"Quite." She closed her eyes, and stopped her gentle, even stroking of the idol.

"Of course you never did see America first," I laughed.

Kathleen Somers opened her eyes and spoke vehemently. "I've seen all there is of it to see, in transit to better places. Seeing America first! That can be borne. It's seeing America last that kills me. Seeing nothing else forever, till I die."

"You don't care for just beauty, regardless," I mused.

"Not a bit. Not unless it has meant something to man. I'm a humanist, I'm afraid."

Whether she was gradually developing remorse for my night in the cobwebby barn, I do not know. But anyhow she grew more gentle, from this point on. She really condescended to expound.

"I've never loved nature--she's a brute, and crawly besides. It's what man has done with nature that counts; it's nature with a human past. Peaks that have been fought for, and fought on, crossed by the feet of men, stared at by poets and saints. Most of these peaks aren't even named. Did you know that? Nature! What is Nature good for, I should like to know, except to kill us all in the end? Don't Ruskinize to me, my dear man."

"I won't. I couldn't. But, all the same, beauty is beauty, wherever and whatever. And, look where you will here, your eyes can't go wrong."

"I never look. I looked when I first came, and the stupidity, the emptiness, the mere wood and dirt and rock of it seemed like a personal insult. I should prefer the worst huddle of a Chinese city, I verily believe."

"You've not precisely the spirit of the pioneer, I can see."

"I should hope not. 'But, God if a God there be, is the substance of men, which is man.' I have to stay in the man-made ruts. They're sacred to me. I'll look with pleasure at the Alps, if only for the sake of Hannibal and Goethe; but I never could look with pleasure at your untutored Rockies. They're so unintentional, you know. Nature is nothing until history has touched her. And as for this geological display outside my windows--you'll kindly permit me to turn my back on it. It's not peevishness." She lifted her hand protestingly. "Only, for weeks, I stared myself blind to see the beauty you talk of. I can't see it. That's honest. I've tried. But there is none that I can see. I am very conventional, you know, very self-distrustful. I have to wait for a Byron to show it to me. American mountains--poor hulking things--have never had a poet to look at them. At least, Poe never wasted his time that way. I don't imagine that Poe would have been much happier here than I am. I haven't even the thrill of the explorer, for I'm not the first one to see them. A few thin generations of people have stared at these hills--and much the hills have done for them! Melora Meigs is the child of these mountains; and Melora's sense of beauty is amply expressed in the Orthodox church in Hebron. This landscape, I assure you"--she smiled--"hasn't made good. So much for the view. It's no use to me, absolutely no use. I give you full and free leave to take it away with you if you want it. And I don't think the house is much better. But I'm afraid I shall have to keep that for Melora Meigs and me to live in." It was her old smile. The bitterness was all in the words. No, it was not bitterness, precisely, for it was fundamentally as impersonal as criticism can be. You would have thought that the mountains were low-brows. I forebore to mention her ancestors who had lived here: it would have seemed like quibbling. They had created the situation; but they had only in the most literal sense created her.

"Why don't you get out?"

"I simply haven't money enough to live anywhere else. Not money enough for a hall bedroom. This place belongs to me. The taxes are nothing. The good farming land that went with it was sold long since. And I'm afraid I haven't the strength to go out and work for a living. I'm very ineffectual, besides. What could I do even if health returned to me? I've decided it's more decent to stay here and die on three dollars a year than to sink my capital in learning stenography."

"You could, I suppose, be a companion." Of course I did not mean it, but she took it up very seriously.

"The people who want companions wouldn't want me. And the one thing this place gives me is freedom--freedom to hate it, to see it intelligently for what it is. I couldn't afford my blessed hatreds if I were a companion. And there's no money in it, so that I couldn't even plan for release. It simply wouldn't do."

Well, of course it wouldn't do. I had never thought it would. I tried another opening.

"When is Withrow coming back?"

"I don't know. I haven't heard from him." She might have been telling a squirrel that she didn't know where the other squirrel's nuts were.

"He has been far beyond civilization, I know. But I dare say he'll be back soon. I hope you won't put him in the barn. I don't mind, of course, but his feelings might be hurt."

"I shall certainly not let him come," she retorted. "He would have the grace to ask first, you know."

"I shall make a point of telling him you want him." But even that could strike no spark from her. She was too completely at odds with life to care. I realized, too, after an hour's talk with her, that I had better go--take back my fine proposition about making a long visit. She reacted to nothing I could offer. I talked of books and plays, visiting virtuosos and picture exhibitions. Her comments were what they would always have been, except that she was already groping for the cue. She had been out of it for months; she had given up the fight. The best things she said sounded a little stale and precious. Her wit perished in the face of Nature's stare. Nature was a lady she didn't recognize: a country cousin she'd never met. She couldn't even "sit and play with similes." If she lived, she would be an old lady with a clever past: an intolerable bore. But there was no need to look so far ahead. Kathleen Somers would die.