My Dear Cornelia/Book 5/Chapter 2
I did not see these things which I have just mentioned; I only remembered them vaguely afterward. Almost as soon as we had seated ourselves in the car, we began to talk about a subject which put landscape quite out of my head. Young Oliver, I might say in passing, is a ready talker with something of the startling candor of his father. I should perhaps add that his preparation for college along with his sister, who is two years younger, is due to the irregularity of his preparatory-school work—interrupted by a period of nearly two years' service as His Excellency's private secretary in Europe.
Ruminating on the possible length of my visit at Santo Espiritu, I had remarked, "I suppose your father will come out later in the year."
"I suppose he won't," said Oliver. "I suspect he intends to live in Paris."
"Intends to do what?" I exclaimed.
"To live abroad somewhere. I suppose you know that my father and mother have separated."
"Nonsense, Ollie," Dorothy shouted back over her shoulder. "You know you don't believe that! They always separate in the summer."
"That's true," said her brother. "Dad always had to have a vacation from the family. He always took one whenever, as he used to say to us, 'Your mother is growing too good to be true. I've got to have a rest.' But other summers they have agreed to separate—peaceably—by collusion. This time father went off in a flaming huff. And I don't think my mother is in a mood to ask him back again. Their relations have been severely strained."
"Oliver," I said, "you are your father over again for diabolical badinage. Cut it out, please. Tell me seriously what you are talking about."
"I'm as serious," he replied, "as a great horned owl. Dolly and I have reasoned earnestly with them both. But our parents are hard people to deal with on a rational basis. My mother has principles, you know; and it's no use talking to people with principles. And my father, when he gets in a huff, is as obstinate as a mule."
"Come now," I urged with a little irritation, "is there anything in this, at all? What was the huff about?"
"Well—a huff, you know," instructed the wise youth, "is just the kettle boiling over, after it has been heated a long time. I'm afraid it all goes back to my New Year's scrape; but it goes back of that to other sins of mine—and maybe Dorothy's—that father knew about and she didn't; and it goes back of that to the big quarrel between the ancients and the moderns. Father is on the modern side—at least he wants to be. My mother is all for the good old ways. So, you see, there's a fundamental incompatibility."
"Yes," I said, "I understand all that; but tell me about the huff."
Oliver leaned forward and spoke in his sister's ear. She nodded. Then he said:—
"Well, the fact is that he and mother hadn't been hitting it off at all this spring. Dolly and I both noticed it months ago. We were all more or less strung up; and they got on each other's nerves—noticeably. My mother is—well you know how my mother is, ordinarily."
"Yes, I do," I said; "your mother has the most perfect temper in the world. Go on."
"Ordinarily, yes," testified her son; "but when she gets a thing on her mind, or her conscience, or wherever it is, she never lets it rest. She is that way. She gets sort of keyed up or wound up or whatever it is, and then she goes off like an alarm clock. When she gets excited, father begins to jest, and he keeps his head for a while. But she sticks at him till he stops jesting; and then he gets more excited than she is; and then—it's all up."
"Well?"
"Well, all spring mother had been dinning at him—"
"Oh, get out!" I exclaimed, "Your mother doesn't 'din.'"
"Oh, doesn't she! Doesn't she! Very well. All spring, mother had been gently speaking to dad at rather frequent intervals about his not backing her up in her ideas for Dolly's and my salvation. Of course you understand that young people of our age are always in danger of heading for the City of Destruction."
"Yes, that's obvious enough," I said.
"Well, one day I overheard them at it—overheard my mother gently reminding my father about me. She said to him: 'I warned you and warned you and warned you, that if you didn't take a father's part and back me up, Oliver would get into trouble; but you just laughed and encouraged him. Now see what you have brought on us.' That subject wasn't very pleasant to any of us in the first place; and my father had got sick of it in the form of cold hash. Dad said: 'Here beginneth the ninety-ninth lesson!' Mother said: 'But you have got to take a father's part.' Dad said: 'As it was in the beginning: I don't want to hear any more about that.' Mother repeated precisely the same thing in different words. He said: 'Look here! I thought we had agreed to let that subject rest.' Mother varied the phrase and presented her thought again. Father exclaimed: 'Don't repeat that! Are you crazy?' Mother instantly replied: 'You never, never, back me up. You never do a father's part. And now see this horrible, horrible thing you have got us into!' Father began to lose his temper; and as soon as he does that, she seems possessed with a desire to see how far she can make him go."
"I don't believe it."
"All right, you needn't. But you wouldn't forget if you had ever heard it. Mother said it again—the same thing identically, only with a little more sting in it. Then dad began to swear; but he always hates himself for a week afterward when he does, so he pulled himself up, and told her to stop or he didn't know what he'd do. Well, I sat still and counted, and my mother jabbed him in the wound nine times in all by actual count with that identical taunt. Then poor old dad, who had been stalking back and forth like the tiger over in Balboa Park, bolted without a word. He went down to Washington for a couple of days. When he came back, he just quietly announced that he was going to Paris. 'You may say, to work on my book—for an indefinite period.' Mother said in her most impervious manner: 'Very well, then: go.' Father replied,—as frosty as a wedding cake,—'Thank you, I will.' Then they both bowed. It was like a play. Dorothy and I came in from the wings and offered friendly mediation; in vain. Father packed up and went. Dolly and I don't think either of them is quite sensible."
"H-m," I said reflectively, "h-m-m—What is your mother doing now?"
"Why she's done—we've all done—California from Mount Shasta to Tia Juana, specializing on the Missions and the juniper trees from Palestine that the padres planted. But now we're doing religion. We've settled down in Santo Espiritu with Aunt Alice and our tutor,—Dolly and I call him Father Blakewell to his face and the Holy Father behind his back; he's going to be an Anglican monk, you know,—we've settled down to do religion, mainly, and get ready for college, incidentally. Mother is really 'doing' it; Dolly and I—well, we 'assist,' in the French sense. We study a little, and go to church a lot, and swim in the afternoon, and play mah jongg after dinner; and the Holy Father reads prayers in the morning on week days and twice on Sundays; and Mother is reading Newman's Idea of a University aloud, and she goes to early communion, and fasts on saints' days, and is a member of the altar guild—and she is taking in laundry."
"Taking in what?" I ejaculated.
"Taking in laundry. She has consecrated her hands to the Church. She washes the rector's vestments and things. You know she always had a kind of passion for keeping things clean—souls and bodies and so on. So this job just hits her fancy now, and 'fills her life,' you know. When we started for Los Angeles this morning, she was ironing the vestments, and, believe me, when I saw her bending over the ironing-board, she looked so perfectly blissful that I—I pitied her. It seems kind of daffy to me."
Though the painter was satirical, the picture, to my fond imagination, was delightful. I saw her—herself all in white—bending her golden head over the snowy linen, her hands moving smoothly; it would be a very special iron, silver perhaps. She would do it beautifully, adorably. I should be reminded of some early Italian saint; and all the æsthetic Christianity in me would enjoy a kind of Pre-Raphaelite resurrection.
"H-m," I repeated helplessly. I hadn't the faintest notion how to treat the idea with any profit to a young fellow of Oliver's age and point of view. It simply wasn't in his experience, and I didn't see how to put it there. His fondness for his mother, his complete detachment from her religious interests, his absolute incomprehension of her position appalled me. One can reason with an earnest young intellectual rebel, occasionally to some effect. But an amused young seraph in Oliver's state, contemplating his mother with kindly compassion from his pinnacle of intellectual certitude and religious inexperience—one can't even draw such a person to the portals of argument.
"I hope," I said, "you and Dorothy are behaving yourselves at home, as well as you know how."
"Oh yes," he replied, "we are being good, aren't we, Dolly? Wait till you hear us after dinner discussing with the Holy Father about the existence of angels, and the Apostolic Succession, and the priority of Persons in the Blessed Trinity. Dorothy and I got together and decided it was up to us to mortify our sinful flesh by holding our tongues this summer. Even father used to do that, most of the time, so far as religion is concerned; and it was harder for him than it is for us."
"How was that?"
"Oh, father, you know, doesn't believe in anything. He calls himself an 'old Voltairean,' and he reads Herbert Spencer and Nietzsche and Henry Adams. But he really doesn't believe in anything but chaos and the 'struggle for survival' and the 'degradation of energy.' We believe in plenty of things."
"Do you really!" I exclaimed, genuinely delighted. "That's good. Tell me what they are."
"Well, in religious matters we agree with father as little as with mother. He is always talking about 'jungle ethics' and 'the law of survival.' He thinks he is the only realist. But that is old stuff, and it doesn't sound good to us. We don't fall for the cave-man line of aristocracy that Dreiser and Mencken and Lawrence and those fellows are trying to bring in."
"Where do you get your line?"
"Oh, out of books and talk and out of the air; some of it we think out ourselves, and a little of it we get from Hoover and Lane and what father calls the 'Western roughneck crowd.' Since January, we're teetotalers; and father, of course, is only a prohibitionist. Then we're sick of war—we don't think it's sensible; and we're sick of supermen; and we're sick of belonging to the 'privileged class.' We believe in the real square deal and good sportsmanship and common sense and common decency and health and hygiene and science and beauty—and a lot of things like that. Of course, father and mother pretend that they do, too—in a way. But we are radical democrats, I guess; and father and mother are both snobs."
Dorothy, listening to as much as she could catch from the steering wheel, called back:—
"Father isn't a snob—mother is."
"You are wrong, Dolly," said her brother; "they are both snobs. We are really interested in the People. Neither of them cares two straws for anyone outside their own class—except, of course, that father has a personal friend here and there among the cab-drivers and the police. He thinks that he is being like Roosevelt. And that he's like Roosevelt when he goes around among the 'peasantry,' as he calls them, whooping it up for big families, and patting them on the back for having eighteen little morons, and making it a crime to tell them how to get a chance to live like civilized beings."
"I've heard your father say very sensible things about that. You do him an injustice."
"No, I don't. We believe in telling people the truth; and in finding out first what it is. Father believes in making a Federal statute first, to keep the peasantry peasants, and busy propagating mill-hands and soldiers; and then in violating it himself as he sees fit. Father is personally interested in the truth, and he really knows a lot about it; but he wouldn't dream of telling it to anyone but an intimate friend—he doesn't think it's safe. And mother doesn't think it's decent. Besides, she hates like sin to admit even to herself the existence of any fact that doesn't fit into her vision of a 'nice' world. She likes to sit on the shore and order the sea back. She really enjoys deceiving herself, and is pretty good at it. Father isn't like that."
"So you side with him there?"
"Yes, except that father is a sort of double personality. Privately, you know, dad is a cynical cosmopolitan, and he thinks America is a hick joint except for half a dozen of his own cronies. But you know how he stands in public, wrapping the flag around him, and doing the big bowwow at Japan and Mexico, and standing pat with the pattest element of the Grand Old Party's patriots. Dad knows who cuts the melons. Dolly and I are sick of that. We want to come in on the ground floor and on the square. We want to have careers that we have made for ourselves, and not be handed something on a silver plate by one of father's friends. Then we are sort of sick of this 'cosmopolitan' stuff—which means only that you hate your own things and can't even smoke American tobacco unless it's been imported from England. We've got so tired of it that we are going to organize a new party with Flapjacks and Ham and Eggs for our slogan. The fact is, we get a sort of kick out of our feeling for the country—as our own, you know, a poor thing but our own; and we want to try and see if we can't be honest-to-goodness Americans before we die—if you understand what I mean."
"Bully for you!" I cried, in spite of my neutral intentions.
"But mother," he continued, "has been reading the Barsetshire novels all summer, and Trollope always makes her homesick for the 'old home.' She is crazy anyway over the English cathedral towns, and hopes to be buried in one when she dies. And just now she's got a kind of Golden-Age complex. She hopes to save me from the democracy by sending me to one of the old Eastern colleges, where I shall associate with 'young gentlemen' from Anglicized prep schools, and live in a Gothic dormitory, and be tutored by Rhodes scholars, who are mostly nuts. Dorothy and I have decided that we want to go to a State University and get acquainted with the Plain People. And so mother carries us off to Santo Espiritu and segregates us with the Holy Father, in the hope that the seeds of grace and exclusiveness will take root in our unsanctified hearts."
"She is 'getting results'!" I said to myself; and then aloud: "But don't you like California?"
"Sure!" he said, with his father's flickering smile. "Who wouldn't? It's just the place to go to Heaven in. But it doesn't seem like our own old Yankee Land out here. No one hurries. No one but the Japanese farmer does a lick of work—that's why they hate him so. The white people just sit around and wait for the Mid-Westerners to bring them their savings. Unless you are descended from a Forty-niner, no one cares who your grandfather was, or whether you are a Mormon or a Christian Scientist or a Presbyterian or a Seventh Day Adventist. All the best things in the State are public property and are out of doors where everyone can get at them. There isn't any 'Main Street.' A few of them keep office hours, but they picnic going to and fro; and up in San Francisco the business men take a sea trip every morning and evening. It all feels like a late afternoon in Arcadia."
I glanced at my watch and remarked that we must be near Santo Espiritu.
"Yes," said Oliver; "but let me tell you a little more about the Native Sons. They are having an influence on Dolly's and my religious beliefs. They get so much harmless pleasure out of the world. They sit around eating apricots and looking at the poppy fields most of the time. When they are very energetic, they get up and recite their own verses, or they go into the redwoods and stage a forest play, or, maybe, do some Greek dances in the almost-altogether, interpreting the Song of Solomon or the Eden story. When they weary of improving their minds with art and song, the whole white population goes camping up around Tahoe or hiking in the high Sierras or motoring down to Coronado or sword-fishing over at Catalina. Easterners and Midlanders who come here late in life easily get mixed up, they tell me, in these new religions, the way Cousin Ethelwyn did; but the real Californian doesn't take interest in the future life. The present is good enough for him. 'Wasn't it too bad,' I heard one of them say, 'that Saint John didn't see Santa Barbara before he wrote Revelation'! And Dorothy and I have sort of reasoned it out that the so-called decay of religion in our generation is rather complimentary to Providence, indicating that we haven't got such a grouch as some of those old boys had against the land that the Lord gave to our fathers."
"That is a discussible point of view," I admitted.
"But here," he said, "is where we turn off from the main road. It's only a little way now. You'll see, before you've been five minutes in Santo Espiritu, what a colony of aliens we are, practising our austerities in our august retreat on the outskirts of these careless worldlings."