Part 24
"All I meant to say was that you must never take Ambo _au pied de la lettre_. I'm not in the least as he's hymned me--but that, surely, you've guessed between the lines. What is much more important is that he's not in the least as he has painted himself. But unless I were to rewrite his whole book for him--which wouldn't be tactful in an otherwise spoiled and contented wife--I could never make this clear, or do my strange, too sensitive man the full justice he deserves. He's--oh, but what's the use! There isn't anybody in the world like Ambo."
XII
More than a year has already passed since those dark-bright days, the spring of 1918. Down here in quiet, silvery Provence, at our nursing-home for children--I call it ours--the last of the cherry blossoms are falling now in our walled orchard close. As I write, James Aulard Kane sits--none too steadily--among a snow of petals, and sweeps them together in miniature drifts with two very grubby little hands. He is a likely infant and knows definitely what he wants from life, which is mostly food. He talks nothing but French--that is, he emits the usual baby grunts and snortings in a funny harsh accent caught from his Marseillaise nurse. Susan is far too busy to improve this accent as she would like to do: perhaps it would be simpler to say that she is far too busy. She is the queen-bee of this country hive; and I--I am a harmless enough drone. They let me dawdle about here and do this and that; but the sun grows more powerful daily, and I sleep a good deal now through the warmer hours. I am haunted by fewer mysterious twinges, here and there, when I sleep....
Meanwhile, the world-cauldron bubbles, and the bubbles keep bursting, and I read of their bursting and shake my head. When a man begins shaking his head over the news of the day, he is done for; a back number. Susan never shakes her head; and it's rather hard on her, I think, to be the wife of a back number. But she's far too thoughtful of me ever to seem to mind.
Only yesterday I quoted some lines to her, from Coventry Patmore. Susan doesn't like Coventry Patmore; the mystical Unknown Eros he celebrates strikes her as--well, perhaps I had better not go into that. But the lines I quoted--they had been much in my mind lately--were these:
_For want of me the world's course will not fail; When all its work is done the lie shall rot; The truth is great and shall prevail When none cares whether it prevail or not._
"Stuff! We do care!" said Susan. "And it won't prevail, either, unless we make it. Who's working harder than you to make it prevail, I should like to know!"
You see how she includes me.... So this book is my poor tribute to her thoughtfulness, this Book of Susan.
* * * * *
But sometimes I sit and wonder. Shall we ever, I wonder, go back to my ancestral mansion on Hillhouse Avenue and quietly settle down there to the old securities, the old, slightly disdainful calm? I doubt it. Tumps, ancient valetudinarian, softened by age; Togo, rheumatic, but steeped in his deeply racial, his Oriental indifferentism--they are the inheritors of that august tradition, and they become it worthily. For them it exists and is enough; for us it is shattered. Phil, a later Waring, is lost in Russia. Jimmy is gone. But Susan will do, I know, more than one woman's part to help in creating a more livable world for his son, and I shall gain some little strength for that coming labor, spending it as I can. It will be an interesting world for those who survive; a dusk chaos just paling eastward. I shall hardly see even the beginnings of dawn. But--with Susan beside me--I shall have lived.
* * * * *
Farewell, then, Hillhouse Avenue!... Make way for Birch Street!
(THE END)