My Dear Cornelia/Book 4/Chapter 1
The smooth order of Cornelia's life was interrupted on New Year's Eve by a distressing occurrence which I—which all of us who possess a rudimentary sense of tact—insist on calling an accident. It was not the sort of thing that I had ever thought of as likely to intrude upon the felicity of that household. My own convulsive unuttered response to the shock was: "That it should have happened to them!" But as it, or something very like it, actually happens every day,—once, twice, three times a day all through the year in every big city,—there was really no reason for assuming that they would remain indefinitely immune. The circumstance which seemed at the moment to point the accident with a piercing significance, a chilling personal meaning for us, was, I suppose, the mere coincidence that we were arguing in the abstract about just such occurrences when the brutal reality of the thing burst in among us with the effrontery of a bandit in a Pullman car. Of course it admits of the natural explanation which I shall give, leading up to the mishap in the order of my own approach.
Cornelia spends the winter months in the city, in a desirable apartment near the lower end of the Park—an apartment so spacious and so desirable that an old New Yorker once amused himself at my small-town ideas by asking me to guess the annual rental. As her children, Dorothy and Oliver Junior,—the centre of her summer solicitude,—are at their preparatory schools except during the holidays, she devotes this season to her women friends, to her husband, and to her husband's friends. I group in this way the people whom she entertains, first, because she has no men friends who are not her husband's friends, and, second, because her husband has an endless string of interesting official and unofficial personages whom he gets up—or brings up—from Washington for conferences or for exhibitionary or other mysterious diplomatic purposes.
As an ancient admirer—to put it discreetly—who has sunk through the incalculable accidents of life to the level of an educational counselor or referee, I confess that I find Cornelia just a shade more perfectly herself in the country, where she is comparatively alone with the children and nature and her books, than in the city, where, on my occasional expeditions, I see her but seldom and then usually so beset with husband, friends, and personages that there is little opportunity for the long educational tête-à-têtes of the summer. Of these conversations, be it admitted once for all, the secret excitement is in listening for the occasional lilt of Cornelia's lyric youth amid the finished certainty and assurance of her later manner. Her own mature authoritativeness I can deal with in a fashion and even relish; but in the winter, in the daily proximity of her husband, she has an intolerable habit of throwing out flying buttresses, of quoting Oliver—"Oliver says," and so forth—as if she were referring a country lawyer to a decision of the Supreme Court. It is a little painful.
Still, in the winter holidays I like to call on the two of them in their own characteristic setting, for a variety of reasons which will be obvious enough to all those provincials who spend the gray season quietly sitting in silent, snowbound prairie towns and villages, dreaming, like waifs in a Scandinavian fairy tale, of the bright commotion of crowded streets and thronged foyers and Duse and Pavlowa and grand opera and Conrad and Lloyd George and Swinnerton and windows full of new books and golden gowns and cut flowers. I remember once remarking to them, after they had taken me into one of their theatre parties in the grand style: "Art for the upper classes; morality for men of moderate incomes; religion for the poor." "No"; retorted Oliver, with his instantaneous eye for the weak spot in my armor: "Art for the cities; morality for the towns; religion for the villages."
We provincials are, it is true, fairly well disciplined to the stoic "apathy"—a kind of cultivated hardening of the heart towards everything beyond the reach of our hands and the range of our eyes. Through month after month the rosy knuckles of temptation may knock on our hardened hearts in vain. But recent investigation proves that under constant percussion and strain the hardest substances yield: steel girders buckle, flywheels burst, and bridges wear out and give way to a malady known to science as "the fatigue of metals." An analogous malady, attacking even the most firmly tempered of hearts, accounts for the popularity of Charles Lamb's "moral holiday," that excursion from the moral macadam which nowadays we call a detour. It explains, too, in my own case, the sharp nostalgia for the city which afflicts me annually on the depressing morning after Christmas. On that spiritless day-after, I feel like a camel that has ruminated on its last cud and can no longer batten on the desert and the west wind. I feel like a wretched silkworm in a glass jar, which will swiftly perish of inanition if not supplied with fresh mulberry leaves. That explains why I pack my bag and, by the first Limited train, creep to the city, under the pretext of reading a paper before one of the learned associations.
What I am coming to is the rather curious fact that the attraction of Cornelia's winter establishment is perhaps due less directly to her than to her husband, and to the refreshing and—for me—delightfully relaxing air of worldliness which circulates around him. Cornelia wonderfully incarnates the Eternal Feminine, which is supposed to draw us upward. But in the interim between Christmas and the New Year's Resolutions one doesn't desire to be drawn upward. All one wants is to escape from ennui and suffocation. In the colloquial idiom of our section, one "wants out." And Oliver, in the negligee of old acquaintance, is a most agreeable, realistic, and sometimes rather witty Mephistopheles, letting one out of conventional and cloistral habits of thought, and leading one by sharp detours into the heart of things as they are. Clearly, I don't dislike Oliver: I envy him, and, like his other familiars, call him "Excellency," a title which I believe few persons except the Governor of Massachusetts have any right to use officially. Nor do I think that Oliver really dislikes me: he pities me, and calls me "Professor," a title which he has also conferred, in my presence, upon the learned Greek who polishes his shoes. I tell him that both the Greek and I have a better right to our titles than he, for Oliver is now writing his reminiscences of the war, and has at present no official Washington connection whatever, busy as he seems to be there.
I envy him the variety of his life, the interest and importance of his personal relations, his position inside the façade of public affairs, his understanding of the huge subterranean dynamos which operate the puppet-show of politics, his familiarity with the little hairsprings which govern the dynamos, his chatter of Wall Street and the Departments and the Legations, and his inexhaustible stock of unpublished anecdote. In public he has had the reputation of a strong team-worker, a sound administrative man; and in the newspapers he passes as a champion of the common people, friend of the farmer and the laboring man, and the rest.
But twenty-five years of more or less public life have not stereotyped his mind. In private, indiscretions bubble from him like water from a spring. He utters the most profane and contemptuous condemnation of major enterprises of his party. In a friendly circle he will even repudiate, with perfect recklessness, the "asininities" to which he has been constrained by various public considerations to subscribe. I twit him on the essential duplicity of the official character. I call him what he seems to my academic sense to be—"a tough little Yankee crab apple, coated with the wax of European diplomacy"; "a hard-shelled individualist steeped in Nietzschean philosophy and merely dipped in democratic shellac." I insist that there is no more milk in him than there is in a billiard ball; and that he values the plain people as a professional golf-player values his caddies.
In revenge, Oliver blandly replies: "The only trouble with you professors is that you know absolutely nothing about life"—a charge which I always admit; and then pump him for information. He responds with the—I think—sincere conviction, shared by many Eastern statesmen, that we Mid-Westerners are of an unsubjugated alien race, ominously multiplying within the borders of the otherwise United States, and mainly occupied with the propagation of miscellaneous fanaticisms. He has not yet forgiven me "the pacifism of the Mississippi Valley when the seaboard was aflame." He ascribes to me the "bolshevism" of North Dakota, and is always inquiring solicitously: "By the way, how did you come out with your investments in the Dakota bonds?" Sometimes he pretends that, as I am from "Puritan Kansas," I may have scruples against breakfasting with them "on the Sabbath"; if I accept, he turns to Cornelia and gravely warns her not to forget "the Nebraskan's grape-juice." Or he will ask my permission to light a cigarette, remarking, "As you are from Utah, I feared it might be offensive to you." His mocking compassion is often excited by my provincial residence and by my profession. I don't mind his designating me as "Pascal," nor his reference to my correspondence with Cornelia as Les lettres provinciales. But, in one of his sharper moods, I remember his saluting me as "Calpurnia." I asked him to enlarge a little on the idea. "Oh, it's nothing," he replied, "only I hear that nowadays they are dismissing all the men from university faculties and manning them with Cæsar's wives—with persons 'above suspicion.' I always think of you professors as Cæsar's wives."
Cæsar's wives? Oliver's immediate implication, I suppose, was merely that the public expects on the part of instructors of youth a quasi-priestly character, a many-sided and inhuman exemplariness of opinion and conduct such as neither the youth in our charge nor their parents require of themselves. But Oliver meant more than that. He meant to suggest the absurdity to the realistic mind—the practical invalidity—of the entire professional and schoolmasterly point of view, and the Utopian insubstantiality of our ethical and social vision. Cæsar's wives! The sting of that quip, which he planted in me last summer, was still rankling a bit on a gray hungry morning a few days after Christmas, the poison of it being its truth; and a doubt was stealing insidiously into my mind, like the snake into the Garden of Eden, whether perhaps the influence of the secular priesthood over the democracy might not be greater if the priesthood abandoned its attempts to appear so supremely untouched by the gross human infirmities of the democracy, when I received a note from Cornelia, and, half an hour later, a telegram from Oliver. Like all government officials and even private citizens who have much breathed the air of official Washington, Oliver scorns the post office, even for personal correspondence. For brevity's sake, I give the telegram:—
Cornelia notices you speak here Saturday stop dine with us Monday at eight thirty stop nobody else but your novelist friend Vernon Willys stop watch the year out discuss fundamentalism and bury Bacchus stop semiofficial stop we want Midwestern point of view stop regard as imperative
I packed my old suit into my old suit-case, slipped into my inside pocket the old club-paper which was to pay my expenses, snatched a book of Gilbert Murray's to read on the train, and crept slowly eastward on the Limited. My diary shows that my occupations during my first forty-eight hours in the city were about as follows:—
Read my paper, "A Much Higher Education," before the Saturday Afternoon Club. Cornelia was present and I spoke with her for two minutes afterward. Saw Cyrano Saturday night and college friends in the stockbroking business for three hours following. Slept Sunday morning till cathedral service. Lunched with a poet in the baking-powder business who read me his free verse on an affair between a Jewess and a Chinese laundryman. Spent the afternoon looking at the pseudo-Rembrandts in the Metropolitan, and the evening at a concert. Saw journalistic friends downtown Monday morning. Afternoon; at rehearsal of a Little Theatre play called "Self-Realization"—lively. Publishing friend at his club till six: showed me manuscript of "Petronius Enamored" and put his collection of suppressed novels at my disposal. Walked in Riverside Park till seven, then went to hotel and dressed for dinner. As I was leaving for the West on the 2.37 in the morning, I packed my bag, and checked out. Oliver and Willys might want to talk till daybreak.