My Dear Cornelia/Book 3/Chapter 1
I have always looked with admiring astonishment on parents who have daughters on their minds, and yet are not broken by the responsibility; and next to the weight of immediate responsibility for a daughter I should place the burden, which some mothers still take upon themselves, of choosing a daughter-in-law. In my callous moods, I say that the ordinary run of children make as good matches for themselves as they deserve, and that they had better be left to their own devices. But if I were a parent and had successfully brought up to the "magnetic age" two such delightful children as Cornelia's, I suspect that I myself shouldn't be able to resist attempting to be a Providence to them. Over a daughter, especially, I suppose I should make a particular fool of myself. I should probably try to keep her for the most part like a bird-of-paradise in a cage, and when I let her out, should endeavor to control her flight by "a thread of my own heart's weaving." And I am positive that any youth who presented himself as a candidate for her hand would, unless he were the possessor of incredible perfections, have desperate difficulty in winning mine.
I did feel reasonably competent, nevertheless, to discuss eligible sons-in-law with Cornelia. The young men of to-day are not notably better or worse than the young men of twenty years ago, nor is the problem of choice among them essentially altered. I know a good man when I see him, as well as Cornelia does. But what is a good daughter or a good daughter-in-law nowadays? It is a horrid question. It leads one into the hot air of clashing ideals.
With respect to girls, I admit at once that I am in a state of confusion and uncertainty, and that I may appear to be in a place where the light is dim, not merely because girls, between the period of George Sand and the period of Miss Amy Lowell, are said to have changed rapidly and essentially, but also because in the vast and engrossing literature of this subject I have remained homo unius libri, a man of one book—of strictly limited experience. As I remarked to Cornelia in all humility, only a day or two ago, if there is one thing of which I am more densely ignorant than another, it is women, including girls. If I were suddenly called upon to indicate to a son my notion of the ideal woman for a lifelong companion, I fear that I should not get beyond faltering forth a vague and most likely quite unpersuasive description of the virtues of Cornelia; and he, if he were as acute as I should like a son of my own to be, would doubtless inform me that it isn't the virtues of Cornelia that take me, but her charm, which I don't understand. At any rate, my personal curiosity was so happily and completely arrested by my first discovery of perfection that, in the twenty years which have elapsed since that time, I have never felt impelled to explore any further.
I recall, for example, that when a few years ago I visited England in order to look up the baptismal record of an Elizabethan lawyer, I met on shipboard a vivacious young Frenchwoman who had compassion on my obviously lonely state and proposed one day that we make a couple of constitutional turns around the deck. At the end of the first turn, during which I had dallied a bit with the weather in my ingenious American fashion, she shrugged her shoulders—that is, I suppose she did, for she was very French—and exclaimed, "Allons donc, causons de la femme (Well, now, let's talk about women)!" I had read somewhere or other that Frenchwomen excel in the light discussion of serious themes and general ideas; and if she had proposed that we discuss palæography or epigraphy, I should have been delighted to observe how French feminine wit handles such subjects. But in the face of the topic proposed, I was aghast. I had no intention of talking Cornelia over with a perfect stranger; and feigning dizziness from the motion of the ship, I rather abruptly "saved myself," as the French say, and went below.
It is, curiously enough, Cornelia herself who in these later years is driving me to reopen the subject, investigate it, and "take a stand." I haven't, till lately, felt myself to be in an uncertain position or in a dim light, but rather in a very certain position and at the radiant centre of light. I don't wish to change my stand. Neither, of course, does she wish me to change it. Yet, if I alter, her own inflexibility will have been the prime mover.
It comes about in this way: she goes into the country as religious people go into a retreat—to escape from dusty contacts with the bustling democratic world, to collect her soul, to fortify her principles, and to renew her vows of allegiance to the conceptions of the good and the beautiful which she inherits from several generations of ancestors accustomed to giving the tone to the society in which they lived. It is utterly impossible to think of Cornelia at present as a grande dame—she is too young, there is too much of the morning clinging to her; and I cannot bear to dwell on the possibility of its ever deserting her; yet in the treasonable hours of the imagination I do occasionally steal forward on the straight highway of time, and I can see that, thirty years hence, if she holds her course, if she fulfills her destiny, she will be a beautiful and proud old lady, still giving the law to her children and to her grandchildren—what people call a grande dame.
But the tide of democratic vulgarity is running into the country havens and stealing insidiously into the securest retreats. One's own friends and neighbors are tainted with it. One's own husband brings a whiff of it up from the city at the week-end. One's own children, in spite of all segregation and antiseptic precautions, show a mild infection with it in their speech, in their manners, and even in their tastes. One doesn't compromise with it. One "stands firm"; but one stands ever more and more alone.
I admire Cornelia's ability to stand alone against the world, against her own times, and against the practice of the city and the tyrannies of fashion; and, when she is wholly right, as I think she often is, it is the pleasantest thing imaginable for me to stand with her. But I am beginning, at an advanced age, to develop skepticism, and to look with an uneasy skeptical eye upon a rectitude of taste which isolates one too sharply from one's own flesh and blood—such "pure and eloquent blood" as speaks in the faces of Cornelia's children. When she expects me to side instantaneously with her against the budding ferment of her own son and daughter, I hesitate. I reluct, like a man called from the roadside to leave the sweet intoxication of an orchard in May. I become curious and loath to close the windows of apprehension to the rumors and fragrance of another springtime.
On the morning—Friday it was—after our windy walk by the lake, Cornelia, contrary to my expectation, did not appear at mail time under the big elm which shades our little grove of R.F.D. boxes. This was a surprise, because she had virtually agreed to be there and she habitually performs with precision whatever she has agreed to do. Later in the day, however, I learned that her husband had unexpectedly arrived in a hydroplane, with an officer in the naval flying corps, and that he would stay over Sunday, which was Dorothy's birthday. We seldom make calls in our summer community, except, as we say, "on intimation." Accordingly I waited for an intimation. All day Saturday, to my increasing wonder, there was nothing but silence from His Excellency's household, and, in the phrase which high usage has now made classic, "damned little of that." But I quite anticipated a birthday party on Sunday—for Oliver Senior makes much of these occasions—and probably a fire on the beach in the evening, with the latest gossip and best stories of the city. There was no party, and there was no fire.
On Monday I went down my path to the mail boxes with acute curiosity. The carrier's Ford had apparently broken down on the mountain, for he was nowhere in sight. I found Cornelia sitting alone on the bench under the elm; the other pilgrims, weary of waiting, had scattered along the marshy lakeside in search of lady's-slippers, which were abundant this year. She was all in white, and she sat with her bronze-gold head leaning against the gray trunk, and with one hand, lying listlessly across her knee, holding her soft white hat. If I were not afraid of being called bookish and pedantic, I should admit that as I approached she reminded me of Ariadne in Naxos; as it is, I content myself with remarking that she seemed a little languid. She did not rise.
I observed the point, because listlessness is not her "note."
"I hoped you would come," she said.
"It's a lovely morning, isn't it," I exclaimed, in a sudden awareness of the truth of what I was saying.
"No, it isn't a lovely morning," she replied. "It's a horrid morning. Come and sit down. I want to be comforted." Looking into her cool gray eyes, I saw that I had been mistaken. It wasn't a lovely morning; there was a cloud in the sky.
"You, comforted?" I said incredulously, and seated myself at the other end of the bench, for I felt my hopeless inexperience with Ariadnes. "I thought you were always happy. Where is Oliver? I heard he came Friday night, but I haven't seen hoof or horn of him."
Cornelia looked out for a moment silently over the deep, still, intense blueness of our lake, mirroring the blueness of the morning sky. I suppose in that rapt moment—I haven't seen her look more purely poetic in years—she was deciding whether it was her duty to tell me a loyal lie or whether she might relax and tell the simple truth. As she was in one of her rare moments of languor, she decided for the truth.
"I am vexed with Oliver. I sent him back to town on Saturday. I told him that I didn't wish to see him again this summer."
"Why, Cornelia!" I cried, "What in the world has Oliver done? Is it proper for me to hear? Has he been flirting with his secretary? Or has he been beating you? Or what?"
"He has been beating me." Cornelia dabbed at the corner of one eye with her handkerchief; and I imagine there may have been some occasion for it, though I did not see it. She held her lower lip for an instant compressed under her perfect teeth. I noticed these things because in twenty years' acquaintance I had never witnessed them before—but once, and that was in the dark backward and abysm of time. Then she smiled faintly and repeated:—
"Yes, he has beaten me. Dreadfully."
"The monster! What have you done to merit blows? You don't look bruised, Cornelia. Now that you have wept, you look like a calla lily after rain."
"What have I done? I have done nothing but try to bring up my children as children should be brought up. And I am bruised and beaten. Oliver has betrayed me. I am fond of Oliver. I am his best friend. Oliver is—Oliver is a good deal of a dear—in his way. But it does seem as if, when it comes to the children, he acted like an irresponsible boy. Oliver is fifty-two. He acts as if he were fifteen, or as if he wished that he were."
"I don't doubt that he does," I said, "and I have always thought that his boyish gusto was a positive element in his charm, and the quality especially which makes his children so fond of him. But tell me, now, what he has done, and I'll try to judge him as he deserves."
Cornelia began doubtfully and far away from the main point, in accordance with the manual of tactics for women.
"Well, first of all," she said, "he came up here in an aeroplane. I have forbidden him to fly. At his age and with his family, he has no right to take such hazards merely to amuse himself."
"Perhaps not," I said, "but you know that you like Oliver because he is the sort of person who does take hazards. If he weren't, you would despise him."
"Of course," she replied. "If there were real occasion for it, I should despise him if he were not the first to risk his life. But he does it now—and these other things, I am convinced—mainly because he knows how much I dislike them. I don't see what possesses him."
"What other things does he do, Cornelia? Oliver is at one of the 'dangerous ages.' And perhaps his children are beginning to influence him. You mustn't forget that Dorothy and Oliver Junior have reached an age at which offspring frequently have a very unsettling effect upon their parents."
"Well, listen. You know how much I dislike what people call 'the modern girl' and all her works and ways?"
"Yes."
"And you know how hard I have tried to keep Dorothy in her old-fashioned sweetness and innocence?"
"I don't see what there is old-fashioned in Dorothy," I said. "But she is sweet. I supposed God had made her so, and that the work couldn't easily be changed, and that all you had to do was to stand aside and watch her blossoming. But since you say that has been a trial, I must believe that you have been tried by it."
"Yes, and so does Oliver—I mean, he knows perfectly that it isn't easy for me to keep the right influences here and the wrong ones away. But what do you suppose occurred to him as the most appropriate birthday present that he could send up here by express to his daughter, the day before he came last week? An expensive knicker-outfit, a handsome cigarette-case, and a big package of his own cigarettes."
"Oliver has to have his little jest."
"Little jest, indeed!" retorted Cornelia almost grimly. "When Dorothy opened the bundle, of course I supposed that Oliver had enclosed the cigarettes for his own use. But Dorothy said, 'No, mother, they are for me. Father promised them to me on my birthday.' She opened the box, and there was a poem from Oliver, addressed, 'To my daughter Dorothy with her first box of cigarettes,' with a lot of rigmarole warning her against the excess of smoking more than one at a time! I thought he had gone crazy, and I was so angry that I snatched the cigarettes and the case from her and threw them into the fireplace."
"If you take the jest seriously," I said, "I don't blame you for being perturbed. I haven't any clear moral principle on this point. Many girls do smoke; and I think we shall ultimately have to concede that smoking isn't a 'sex function.' But smoking and Dorothy don't go together, in my feeling for the fitness of things. It seems like offering snuff to Viola or a Manila cigar to Rosalind. (You ought not to forget, by the way, that those two girls did wear knickers.) But smoking—why, I should as soon think of offering a plug of tobacco to you, Cornelia."
"Ugh! Don't be disgusting," she pleaded.
"I'm not disgusting. I am only expressing my sense of the immeasurable gulf that lies between you and anything of questionable taste. But go on with your story."
"Well, Oliver arrived that night. When I asked him what he meant by the performance, he laughed in that infectious, irresistibly disarming way he has, and said, 'Oh, I have been reading Heywood Broun on the care and nurture of children. The young man has ideas. He thinks the way to equip youth for the battle of life is to gird upon them the sword of early experience, the buckler of knowingness, and the whole armor of sophistication. And I've decided to turn over a new leaf and meet my children halfway. Treat them like equals, instead of like superior beings. Dorothy will learn to smoke next fall, when she goes to college. It may be the only useful thing she will ever learn there. Qui sait? But if she waits till then, she will learn with a parcel of silly goslings who will think it is devilish. Let's try the effect of having her begin now at the domestic fireside with her own father and mother, who don't think it devilish."
I could seem to see a certain reckless experimental method in Oliver's madness—as in the serious proposal of some other reformers for "communal bathing" in the household, as an antidote to precocious sexual curiosity. It was an experiment which I should be willing to have tried on a dog. It had something in common, indeed, with an undeveloped notion of my own on the use of moral antitoxins. But I could also see that Cornelia saw nothing of the sort. So I merely asked, "And what did you say?"
"I said," she replied, "that Dorothy's mother did think it devilish—that Dorothy had never seen her mother smoking and never would. He laughed again and said, 'Then she will never learn to do it like a lady.' I inquired whether he were incapable of distinguishing between what is permissible in a man, perhaps pardonable in his typist, and what is undesirable in his seventeen-year-old daughter. He reminded me that three fourths of the ladies he knows smoke, and that Russian women, French women, and English women can't understand why we make a moral issue of it. I said, 'So much the worse for them. I am sick of having something obviously bad in America excused merely because something obviously worse exists elsewhere.' He said, 'Cornelia, you are a Little American. You are out of step.' And I lost my temper, and exclaimed, 'Oliver, you are a great idiot! Dorothy hasn't smoked yet, and she wouldn't think of smoking now, if she hadn't a fool for a father.'"