My Dear Cornelia/Book 5/Chapter 1
It is not my intention to make public, in any detail, what I know of the means by which His Excellency got young Oliver out of his New Year's scrape in New York. In recording my conversations with Cornelia and her family, I have been animated throughout by a desire to increase popular respect for the members of our upper class as the suitable persons to give tone to the democracy; and this particular incident happens not to be altogether creditable to the ethical sense of His Excellency—if one uses as a criterion the ethical austerity of Jeanie Deans or George Washington of blessed memory. I am not sure that almost any other man in the same circumstances—even a member of our very moral middle-class—would not have strained a point to keep his own son from public punishment and disgrace. I mean only that we all talk about "equality before the law," until we find ourselves in personal need of special privileges; and that when His Excellency's withers were wrung, he took it as a matter of course that he should use his money and his persuasive tongue, his acquaintance with the police captain, his relationship with Judge Black, and his influence with the newspapers to smooth things over. The matter was adjusted out of court and without publicity, chiefly by the prepayment, while the recovery of the principal victim was in doubt, of the moderate sum which disinterested persons estimated the life of an eight-year-old boy of the laboring class to be worth. His Excellency himself wrote to me, in the latter part of March, as I remember, that everything had been "fixed up—Gott sei Dank; so that's over."
What immediate effect the accident and the reparation of it had upon the internal harmony of Cornelia's household, I did not know. In the occasional letters which I had received from her early in the year, she expressed considerable anxiety about the health of her son. She said that the accident was preying on his mind and making him nervous and listless about his school work—and perhaps she should have to take him out of school. In one letter, which she asked me to burn, I thought that I detected a hint of bitterness toward Oliver for concealing from her his knowledge that Oliver Junior had been less innocent of the tastes and follies of his age than she had imagined him to be. But in all the years of our acquaintance, both she and her husband had maintained a proud and—I had supposed—happy reticence regarding their more intimate relations; and except in the essentially comic incident, last summer, of Dorothy's bobbed hair, I had never been admitted to so much as a glimpse of anything like a domestic "difference." Being, myself, an old bachelor with perhaps somewhat idealistic notions of family life, it was quite beyond me to conceive that a serious misfortune, like the automobile accident, could have any other influence than to cement more closely the family unity.
I was even so guileless as to suspect nothing, when, in the middle of April, I received a letter from Cornelia, saying that Oliver had gone to Paris for some months to get material for his war book, Lying Abroad for One's Country; that she was taking the children to southern California for an indefinite sojourn; and that she hoped I might visit them when my college work was over—there was something which she wished very much to talk about. I searched through the letter to see if I could discover what it was. To my obtuse perceptions, the point of interest appeared not to be in the main news but in the incidental reference to Cornelia's religious bias, contained in the following paragraph:—
"Don't be afraid," she wrote, "of going to southern California in July. The climate is delightfully right, if only one stays near enough to the coast. I have been hoping for years to spend a summer there, but have always had to give it up because my cousin Ethelwyn lives there! Such a pity: she has a charming Spanish house—Spanish with American improvements—in a walnut grove, with a 'kitchen garden' of orange and fig trees, near a little village ten or fifteen miles north of San Diego. But she—I have told you something about her, haven't I?—she is a Theosophist or a Bahaist or one of those dreadful things that Boston Unitarians become infected with when they live long in California. And the people she has around her—well, fond as I am of her, I myself find them impossible; and Oliver always used to say that he would 'rather be dd to all eternity with Voltaire than spend ten minutes in Heaven with Ethelwyn.' Well, poor dear Ethelwyn has just had a chance to join a pilgrim ship, which is going by way of China and India to visit some 'saint' in—I think—Arabia; and she has offered me the place, together with all the servants, for a year. My sister Alice will go with me for company. We shall fumigate and air the place thoroughly! I have engaged an excellent tutor for the children—a young man from St. Luke's School; and we shall see what can be done to get them back again to their right minds before they go to college in the fall. So do come and help us!"
To anyone acquainted with either Cornelia or California, it should be needless to say that I went. How I went, may interest the curious. Members of the poor-professor class have, as they have frequently explained to the public, many tastes in common with respectable well-to-do-people—tastes which of course they are unable to gratify. But they have one expensive taste, which, with a little craft, they can indulge almost as fully as people with something to live on. I refer to their inclination for running about the country. I shall always remain in the teaching profession because, no matter whither a poor professor wishes to travel, there is always some group of kindly Americans ready to pay his expenses to and from his base, provided he will speak to them on any side of any subject he pleases—loudly and for not more than fifty minutes. There was, in July, a pretty warm educational convention in Los Angeles, designed to keep the State of California educationally well in the lead of Massachusetts. I spoke on three successive mornings, expanding an ancient club-paper into a three-day serial by presenting its platitudes more slowly and impressively than club custom permits. However, we are not now concerned with that.
As I left the auditorium platform on the third morning, and, in the anteroom, was receiving my fee, Dorothy and Oliver Junior, bareheaded and browned by southern sunshine, burst in. "Hello!" cried Oliver, "car's outside. This your dunnage?" Dorothy, on the impulse of the moment, kissed me, which made me think well of myself, and even better of her than ever, for twenty-four hours afterwards. I was wondering how Oliver felt about driving, when Dorothy jumped in and, taking the wheel, sent me to the rear seat with her brother.
We worked our way cautiously out of the congested somnolent city, which expands its amorphous immensity while it sleeps. Then the efficient young pilot whirled us along at high speed over the four- or five-hour trip, through orange groves and highways lined with palms, by sea and sandy waste, through pines and pale-gold grass, past San Juan Capistrano, gorgeous with flowers, across the mesa by the old Mission road, to the outskirts of La Jolla, then, with a sharp turn up a little valley, into a cool sea-freshened wilderness of green walnut trees among which, cream-yellow, flat-roofed, Santo Espiritu emerges, couched against the foothills of Mount Soledad.