My Dear Cornelia/Book 4/Chapter 2
Mulberry leaves! These details I include in order to indicate briefly how I reduced the unmannerliness of my provincial appetite before I put in my appearance at Oliver's, and, leaving my bag at the office, went up one flight to their apartment. I don't like to seem too eager.
As I stepped into the clear soft blueness of the candlelit apartment, Cornelia rose, a silvery shimmer, from the settee where she had been chatting with Oliver Junior, and, approaching with Artemisian stride, greeted me with her finished graciousness. The artistic perfection of it might subtly pain a sensitive heart, were it not for the intimate reassurance imparted by the rippling overtones of her voice, which resolves art into intoxication and curiously persuades a man in evening dress, in the heart of the city, that he is standing in the midst of a garden full of flowers. I muse.
Cornelia swiftly explained that Oliver Junior, though festively attired, would not dine with us. That spirited and well-groomed youth would, in a few minutes, drive his sister and two of their friends to a young people's party in Scarborough. After I had asked him a few banal questions about his school, a topic which did not appear greatly to "intrigue" him, he edged into the adjoining room and diddled with the piano till his sister Dorothy skipped in, looking like an adolescent Bacchante,—she is a little over seventeen,—and they disappeared together.
Cornelia in the meantime had also explained that Oliver Senior was in the library with Vernon Willys. "I don't like him much," she added, "in fact, I think him rather horrid. He is very happy to-night over his separation from his wife. He could hardly wait to get inside the door to tell us about it. But I believe you have discovered something precious in his books, and Oliver seems infatuated with him. They have been running around together all the fall. He is doing a political novel now, and I accuse Oliver of sitting for the portrait of the hero. But here they are."
The two men came in from the library with red buds in their buttonholes. Oliver as usual saluted me with a volley of questions, which he gave me no time to answer, and with an animating smile, in which I always feel a slightly satirical edge. Willys, whom I had met once or twice before, nipped my arm, smacked his lips, and murmured with a communicative flicker in his eyes that I must be sure to see His Excellency's library before I left. As we moved toward the dining-room, Oliver's quick fire continued: "Did you get my telegram? Get the point about Bacchus? I'm feeling the pulse of the country on this prohibition business. Willys here has convictions, I find—just as many convictions as you have, but different. I got you two together in the hope of hearing you beat each other's brains out. I hope you'll do it in good style. Give him the Mid-Western gospel. I'll hold the coats. I've arranged the proper setting. But be human, Professor! Be human—just for to-night!"
It is not my intention to describe the dinner in detail. The excellence of a dinner à quatre, for any but a quartet of gourmands, is merely to provide a soft-footed ministration of successive felicities to the appetitive nature while the higher faculties, stimulated by the æsthetic accessories of the feast, nimbly engage in the discourse of reason. Of the material details, my memory is as indistinct as an impressionist poet's. I recall only the tall silver of candlesticks on an immaculate whiteness which was doubtless linen; and a soothing greenness which may have been holly; and a dark rich redness which was certainly roses; and a fragrance, mingled, various, which was partly roses and partly, well, I sat at Cornelia's right hand, and in that dazzling proximity—she carries her head so proudly that Time has hardly ventured to touch a wisp of her bronze-gold hair or to breathe near her shoulder—in that proximity I did not notice, honestly did not notice till some seconds after we were seated, that in front of each plate was a half-moon formed of three delicate glasses, glowing with candlelight reflected from the varicolored souls of old vineyards.
Vernon Willys quite audibly drew in his breath, which after the visit to His Excellency's library was a discreet enough thing to do with it. Oliver, glancing at me, repeated: "Remember, Professor—be human." Then he raised his ruby-colored glass toward the novelist and said: "Let us drink to the death of Bacchus." The two men clinked and instantly drained their glasses. Cornelia lifted hers in my direction, just touched it with her lips, and then replaced it in the semicircle. I was thinking of Ben Jonson's old song, that Anacreontic thing about the thirst that rises from the soul. But what I did with my glass, since whatever I did would grievously offend many persons' notion of the right thing to have done, I absolutely refuse to disclose. That point is of quite subsidiary relevance.
The thing which engaged my attention as a Mid-Western ethicist and one of "Cæsar's wives" was not the content of the glasses nor the number of times they were filled by the chocolate-colored Caribbean cupbearer. A person of my long practice in the ascetic philosophy actually doesn't much attend to these matters. I merely—let us say—became aware of Oliver's Machiavellian plot to seduce me. Then what leaped to my sense as worthy of exploration was just the personal feeling, the intimate private attitude of my friends, of precisely this sort of people, toward the ethical question, or complex group of questions, which the alleged death of Dionysus and his active posthumous life have forced into the foreground of our consciousness. In my own circle at home no one ever says anything of the faintest interest on the subject. When it is mentioned, there may be some talk of law-enforcement; but the heart of the matter is regarded as perfectly dead. Here, there was willingness and desire to discuss the original question.
His Excellency, I knew, had publicly advocated the passage of the obnoxious measure, and had recently given to the press a "strong" statement on the necessity of enforcing the law. In the intimacy of friendship, however, and in the circumstances which he himself had arranged, that was only a provocation to my remarking, as he set down his glass:—
"It is obvious that you support the Eighteenth Amendment with reservations."
"With a diplomatic reserve," he corrected, chuckling. Willys, who had penetrated the "reserve," laughed. And Cornelia, crushing a smile between her lips, entered into a rather needless explanation, of which the intention, I perceived, was to dissipate any uneasiness which a Mid-Western Puritan might be conceived to feel on his abrupt introduction to a wet New Year's Eve.
"Monsieur"—meaning Oliver—"is a little naughty," she said, "and he likes to make himself appear worse than he is. You must remember that he is practically a European."
"Oh, nonsense!" I exclaimed. "Oliver a European! Then so was Andy Jackson."
"Yes," Cornelia insisted, "his tastes and habits were formed in the earlier part of his life, when he was almost constantly abroad. His best friends in Washington are men in the legations who aren't obliged to adopt our reforms. Naturally, when he entertains them here, he doesn't wish to seem inhospitable or absurd, like poor dear Mr. Bryan. We don't ordinarily have wine on the table for our own guests—I mean outside the semiofficial connection. But just for to-night, as it's a holiday, and one of you is a pilgrim from the Mid-West, Oliver thought—we thought—that you would appreciate it if ambassadorial privileges were extended to you."
"I get the point perfectly," I said; "that's Oliver's point of view—or one of his points of view. But please let Janus defend himself. He will need practice before we Puritans are done with him. But now that the theme is before us, Cornelia, won't you give us the benefit of your own point of view?"
"My point of view?" Cornelia smiled her Mona Lisa smile. "I—oh, I am Oliver's wife!"
"I have often regretted that," I replied with a consciously provincial affectation of urban daring; "but knowing your strict old-fashioned convictions about marriage, I stifle my regrets. I can't quite reconcile your indulgent humor this evening with your rigorously prohibitive principles regarding—well, the moral fluidity of such novels as Willys writes. I had hoped that your conservatism, your Puritanism, as they call it, on the marriage question would bring you around to our position on prohibition, and so, in that respect at least, detach you from Oliver."
"You are dead wrong, Professor," Willys interjected, "you are muddled. Prohibition isn't conservatism. It is radical innovation. It isn't Puritanism. As you yourself have admirably demonstrated, the Puritans drank like fishes. I am a Puritan. So is His Excellency. We are Conservatives. So is our hostess."
"Your don't read my articles, Willys," I said, "as carefully as I read your novels. What I demonstrated was, that the Puritan is a radical innovator. The Puritan of our day says, 'Let the dry land appear.' You are not a Puritan; you are a Fundamentalist. You wish to return to the Flood. You are a Diluvian."
"Now you are at it!" cried Oliver gleefully. "Go to it!"
"Excuse me," I objected; "we haven't heard Cornelia's point of view yet. I was about to say, when Willys broke in, that we educators don't attach any great importance to the opinions of disillusioned politicians and satirical novelists—cynics like you and Willys. The national culture is in process of fundamental change and regeneration; and you belong to an order that will soon be obsolete, with none to mourn its extinction. The future of the country is in the hands of the young people and such of the rest of us as keep up with them. I am totally indifferent, Cornelia, to what you think of prohibition as His Excellency's wife. In that capacity I doubt if you think at all; you merely accept the situation. I am curious only about your attitude as a parent of the new order, as Oliver Junior's mother. Won't you, for example, psychologize—analyze your feelings and tell us just why you kissed the glass and set it down untasted?"
A hint of rose—pride or some deeper emotion—appeared in Cornelia's face when I mentioned her son. He is her religion—the substance of it. Her husband is the church which she attends from old habit, repeating her belief in him with her lips, like the phrases of an ancient creed. But what she really believes in, with a fervor of prayer and faith, is her son. I suspected that Willys and Oliver would think me guilty of bad taste for bringing into the conversation a subject, as a Restoration hero remarks of his wife, "so foreign and yet so domestic." Somehow children seem out of place when one is celebrating a moral holiday! But if one wishes to break down the guard of a woman who says, "My point of view? I—oh, I am Oliver's wife!" one must risk bad taste. Cornelia's voice glided softly from gay to grave as she answered:—
"I kissed the glass for auld lang syne. I set it down untasted for the sake of the new times and the children. I used to enjoy it, as I used to enjoy being twenty years old. It isn't much to relinquish, is it?—compared with what one has to relinquish."
When Cornelia talks in this vein about age, she seems to me—well, just ravishingly young; and I murmured, for our angle of the table only, "You've relinquished nothing!" But she completely ignored me and continued:—
"As my son's mother, I am very happy, under present conditions, to know that he doesn't drink or even feel any temptation to drink. We refrain, my son and I, more as a matter of taste than as a matter of conscience. Besides, he is too young. In my own home the boys had a glass of wine on their twenty-first birthday as a part of the family celebration. And the girls—I can't remember that I tasted wine, except in Italy, till after I was married. Oliver is only nineteen. If, when he is of age, he is at Oxford, as I hope he may be, or if he were able at home to have his wine in a natural atmosphere, simply and innocently, with gentlemen, I should not wish to deprive him of what I was brought up to regard as a proper element of social festivity."
"Bravo!" cried Willys.
"But, alas," she concluded, "all that is gone now. And it's all so furtive and mean that I have a horrid feeling. And one hears so many hateful stories about the secret drinking of mere boys and girls, at school and at their parties, treating one another in their cars by the roadside,—and the consequences of it,—that it's odious, just odious. And I—I just sigh a bit for the age of innocence, and bid it all adieu."
"Admirable speech!" cried the novelist, as the Caribbean attendant refilled his glasses. "Beautiful speech: full of sweet reasonableness—all but the conclusion. But why adieu? Why turn down the empty glass? You fill me with lyrical melancholy. 'Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?' You look too steadily on the small dark side of the question. There is a soul of goodness in things evil. Watch and wait! I maintain that the prohibitionists builded better than they knew: they have driven drinking out of the barroom and are bringing it back to the home, where it belongs, and where as Burke says—doesn't he?—it loses all its evil by losing all its grossness, or something like that. You and His Excellency are performing a service to posterity by preserving through this destructive period the purity of a fine old tradition."