My Dear Cornelia/Book 5/Chapter 4
It is a half hour's walk from Santo Espiritu to the sea.
As we went through the gate of the walled garden into the walnut grove, Cornelia patted my arm lightly, like a shy, affectionate, approving child, and said softly: "I'm so glad you came."
"And I."
"But let's not talk about that yet. Let's walk first. I do hope there will be a fine sunset. We have them here so seldom. This evening it looks right."
We walked on swiftly, chatting of nothings; through the trees; a short distance along the Santo Espiritu valley road; then up a steepish path to the tufted gopher-burrowed mesa; and across it and down it through zigzags among the sagebrush and thorny gray shrubs toward the ocean, over which hung a dull gray curtain of cloud. There was nothing bright in the scene but the "bluebird gown" of Cornelia, flitting down the gray-lichened slope ahead of me. But the dull blue expanse of the sea brightened a little as we crossed a strip of level ground at the foot of the mesa and came to a stand on the edge of a long crescent-shaped bluff. I looked out at the fishing boats anchored a quarter of a mile from shore.
"Look down!" said Cornelia. "This is one of our show places. And you'd better sit down, if you are dizzy at all."
We both sat and peered over the undercut rim of the bluff. Fifty feet below us was the sea, deep, still, emerald green, transparent and quivering with waves of pale green light, down into misty recesses where its depth rendered it opaque. Up through the floating foliage of the seaweed, goldfish were swimming idly, big ones in the grand style, tremendously decorative, and thoroughly conscious, I thought, of the stunning effect of their gold in the green water. I was fascinated by them. I stretched myself flat, face downward, and pulled myself to the rim and studied them. A damnable thought was swimming up to me out of submarine caverns of "the unplumbed salt estranging sea."
At first my thought had no shape. It merely stirred in dark obscurity, like an irritated squid or devilfish. Then it emerged—with a golden head, like a mermaid's. I am not ordinarily fanciful or figurative. I dislike fanciful people. But I have somehow got to convey the idea that, as I watched those goldfish, the wires in my mind became crossed and tangled and, for a moment, made some sort of horrid imaginative connection between goldfish and mermaids and the enchantingly girlish figure and golden head of the woman whose gray eyes I felt but could not see, playing over my prostrate body and working some charm at the back of my neck. Cornelia had everything—yes, everything: the virtues and the graces, and a beauty and blitheness which often seemed enough in themselves, they made one so immediately, unmistakably glad to be alive within their radius. But wouldn't she have profited—as Arnold once remarked of the ladies of the English aristocracy, whom Cornelia admires so much—wouldn't she have profited by "a shade more of soul"? Was there much—inside, under those golden scales? Wasn't she pretty near the surface? And was that her fault or her misadventure?
"Do you find them interesting?" asked Cornelia.
"Yes," I replied, continuing my study.
In spite of her nearly grown children, there was something virginal in Cornelia. Something curiously undeveloped; was it, perhaps, her heart? That would be like a mermaiden. She was no Circe, I mused, guilefully weaving subtle spells. She was an otherwise mature woman who had somehow remained essentially innocent and child-hearted, singing still to herself, in her "secret garden," the songs of seventeen. She herself did not know, she could not know, what strains of richer harmony had been lost to her ears—and to mine, because we had never emerged from the walled garden, had not dared to venture together into the "dark forest" of experience. She herself was an undeveloped theme, a divine fragment of melody, which the winds hummed and the sea sang, and which hovered all days and all nights in the tenebrous deeps of my enchanted heart.
"Look up now," said Cornelia softly.
I wriggled back from the verge of the bluff, and sat up, and looked up.
While I had been lying there in prone contemplation of the goldfish, the awaited sunset had arrived, and with a magnificence of splendor unparalleled in my memory. The sun itself was not visible. But the dull gray curtain, which, as we were descending the mesa, hung from the zenith to the sea, had vanished before the passionate resurgency of light. Overhead, extending from north to south, stretched a vast skyland of royal purple, its lower edge, or shore, tinged with deep rose color, where the waves of light beat against it. Near the "shore" was a bright clear crystalline tract, without any cloud; but elsewhere, farther out in that celestial sea, gleamed, glowed, burned an immense archipelago of golden islands. It looked like Polynesia transfigured with fire and praising God on the Day of Judgment.
It took my breath away. I gazed spellbound, like the spellbound color in the sky, to which Cornelia had called my attention just as it reached its brief period of seeming fixed and changeless and eternal. I turned to her. She was quietly watching my response to her sunset. Our eyes met; and for an instant they clinched. Then her lids drooped, and she said:—
"You were so good to come!"
"So good? So good?" I repeated gropingly. "I don't know whether I am good or not. I am happy that I came. I only know that I am very happy. Is that a sign of goodness, Cornelia?"
"Yes," she said, and her eyes met mine again and held them prisoners, while she went past them looking for something behind them, and I went past her eyes, also in search. We said nothing. The sea was still. There was not a sound from the bare brown land between us and the mesa.
Suddenly, out on the bare brown land, a meadowlark sent up her little bubbling fountain of song—once, twice. Then she was still. We smiled at each other as the echoes of the bird's good-night reverberated through our nerves and died away. Then the silence fell, deeper than before. It was delightful at first. Then it became oppressive, exciting. It clutched at one's heart and made it thud. Or was it something else—something that had stolen up, in the silence, between us?
Cornelia broke the spell. "Did you hear it?" she asked.
"The meadowlark, do you mean?"
"No. Of course you heard that!"
"What else—should I have heard?"
"Well, never mind that just now. I want you to tell me something else. How much—how much did the children tell you?"
"Everything."
"I hoped they would; I hoped they would."
"Then it's true, Cornelia?"
"What is true?"
"That you and Oliver have separated."
"Oh—that? That is a minor matter."
"Minor? How minor?" I exclaimed in some bewilderment.
"Why, compared with other experiences. I wasn't thinking about Oliver just now. It's a horrid thing to say; but I'm not interested in Oliver just now. We've always been separated—in a sense. And just now, I feel as if he didn't belong to me, nor I to him; as if he were someone that I had known once, and didn't know any more."
"How did it happen, Cornelia?—I don't mean what the children told me. But the rest of it—if you—if you want me to know."
"Yes," she said, "I do want you to know, because—well, I want you to understand. You know that I was not in love with Oliver when I married him. I liked him very much. I do now, in a way. But I married him because he offered me the life that I wanted, then, and that my father and mother thought suitable. And I gave him, at least for a long time, what he wanted—mainly—of a wife: a woman who would look well in public with him, and entertain his friends, and be the mother of his children. When the children were little, we were closer together, for a few years, than we have ever been since. Still, as time went on, of course we accumulated 'things in common'—actual things and experiences and acquaintances; and as many of them—nearly all of them—were nice things and pleasant acquaintances and agreeable experiences, I was not dissatisfied; and I began to believe there wasn't much more to be had from life than just the kind of satisfaction I had found. I believed, or pretended to believe, what you were saying last summer: that the 'inner life' is of small consequence, and that everything that is precious can be—what did you call it?—'externalized,' 'objectified.' Do you really believe it yourself?"
"I try to keep in mind," I explained, "all that can be said for that theory. It is a kind of compromise, a second-best sort of theory, which many of us have to accept, when we are starving, or when a death takes place in the inner chamber of our lives. That's what our wits are for, isn't it—to help us put up gracefully with what we have to put up with—grace or no grace?"
"But the theory is worthless," cried Cornelia; "it's absolutely worthless, when one is in trouble, in serious trouble! I suppose I have had less of it than anyone I know. As I look over my life before this year, it seems like a dream, it has been so easy and so fortunate. But when trouble does come,—illness, death, and that sort of thing,—one has to have inner resources. Oliver has no inner resources. Oliver hates trouble, and illness, and pain; and, whenever he can, he runs away from them. When he is sick himself, he acts like an untrained child. He is terrified and certain that he is going to die; he is really dreadfully afraid of death—his own death, or the death of anyone he is fond of."
"That is interesting," I said. "I didn't suppose that at bottom Oliver took anything seriously."
"He doesn't," said Cornelia, "except that—trouble to himself, I mean, and to a few others whom he regards as part of himself. As for anyone else, he is always saying, 'It is easy to bear the misfortunes of others.' Generally speaking, he isn't serious about anything. When he isn't in a fit of being pessimistic and panic-stricken about himself, he is just cynical and flippant. He doesn't believe that goodness is worth trying for. He laughs at all the principles which I was taught to regard as elementary. He calls them 'virtues of the bourgeoisie' and 'old maids' morality.' When I protest, Oliver says my humor is 'thin.' Sometimes he says I am 'devoid' of humor. I am not! Am I devoid of humor?"
"No, Cornelia," I said. "But humor isn't your strong point. In your lighter vein, you incline rather toward a gleeful gayety. Humor, in Oliver, results from a skepticism regarding first principles; and you are not skeptical about first principles."
"I am not, thank goodness. I do like to see people gay and light-hearted and happy, and I like to be that way myself. But I am light-hearted and gay only because I am clear about what you call 'first principles.' Life hasn't any dignity, any decorum, or justification, even, if one is constantly questioning or mocking at everything there is in it that is axiomatic. Oliver has no axioms except derisive ones that he makes for himself. To me, it isn't endurable to be with people who refuse to take serious things seriously. When one jests at serious things, one not merely destroys their seriousness, but one takes all the joy out of the joyous and light-hearted things—all the bloom from life."
"I suspect," I said, "there is a good deal of truth in that."
"And so," she continued, "when this dreadful accident happened on New Year's Eve, I didn't expect much of Oliver; but I hoped, hoped, hoped it might make him a little bit serious about the children. It did nothing for him, nothing. All he wanted was to put it out of his mind as quickly as possible. Whenever I tried to talk with him about anything serious—or anything sacred to me—he simply wasn't there."
"Many men," I said, "are shy about those things, and feel more deeply than they can bear to confess. Perhaps you don't quite understand Oliver." I put in this plea, partly because I thought it was true, and partly because I was curious to know the depth of Cornelia's disillusionment and estrangement.
"Often and often I remembered, this spring," she replied evasively, "how my sweet old grandmother used to talk to me, when I was a girl. 'Marry a man, my dear,' she would say, 'who will help you not to be afraid of death or anything that can happen to you in this world.' And then again she would say, 'Marry a man, my dear, who has a sacred place in his own heart; and then everything that is precious to you will be safe; and you will not be alone in the great joys and the great sorrows that life has in store for us all.' And I would ask, 'Was grandfather like that?' And the dear old soul would draw in her breath and say: 'Oh, he was high! He was high!' with an accent of adoration which made one feel that he must have been a beautiful spirit. 'I would have gone anywhere with him,' she always concluded when we talked about him, 'and I would have suffered anything with him gladly, because we were together in a place where nothing in this world could really touch our companionship.'"
"That is very lovely," I murmured. "That was such a union as one reads about in old romances, and dreams about, when one is young."
"And so," she continued, "when I was first married, I hoped that it might be like that with us. Oliver seemed to me then so strong and self-sufficient, and his personality seemed so various and flexible and so full of color and high spirits and charm. I thought that, when I knew him better, and had been taken into the innermost intimacy, I should find there a still serene place, such as my grandmother had described, with a kind of mysterious joy and rapture at the heart of it, because we should be united in loving together everything that had been almost too lovely and too sacred to speak of to anyone else. That is what I thought marriage was, the inner meaning of it—and not a barren desolate place, full of darkness and cynicism and the terror of death. Do you understand, a little, why I felt so alone, so helplessly alone early in the year? and why I wanted to talk with you this summer, and why I have just had to tell you these things to-night?"
She put out her hand toward mine; mine closed over it.
"Cornelia," I said, "I loved you twenty years ago, and—in some ways I haven't changed much since. Have you?"
"Please—please don't!" she said, gently withdrawing her hand.
"And when the silence fell around us here, a little while ago," I continued, "and the meadowlark sang in it, and then it was still again, didn't you feel, didn't you know—Cornelia, tell me what the silence said to you, when it grew too intense, and you broke it."
She lifted her head and seemed for a moment to be following the flight of a sea gull winging into the darkening West. Then she turned her cool gray eyes upon mine, steadily, steadily, till their flame burnt under my ribs and close about my heart.
"The silence said to me," she replied, "that I had been a very foolish woman—Isn't it strange how suddenly the color is leaving the sky! You can almost see it fade while you watch it—like the glow in an electric toaster, when you turn it off." She rose, as if talk were over, and we were going home. I followed, bent on a continuation.
"Yes," I said, "I suppose the sun over there behind the cloud bank has just sunk under the sea. You would think someone had pressed a button. It reminds me of the Ancient Mariner—'At one stride, came the dark.' But how have you been a 'foolish' woman?"
"Perhaps," said Cornelia, "we had better return the long way, by the road. The dusk does come fast, and I don't like the short cut over the mesa then. There are sometimes snakes."
"I don't mind snakes," I replied: "they add a spice. But if the way by the road is longer, I am for the road."