My Dear Cornelia/Book 5/Chapter 5
After we had started toward Santo Espiritu, a delicate rosy afterglow succeeded the abrupt gray interval, but our backs were now turned upon it, and we only glanced at it now and then over our shoulders.
"The silence said to me," Cornelia resumed, "that I had been a very foolish woman, because I had expected of a human companionship an intimacy of sympathy and understanding which only a Divine companionship can give."
"How do you know, Cornelia? How do you know?"
"I don't know how it is with you—with men. Maybe a man can fill his life so full of the things he is doing—with work and ambition and the improvement of the world—that he doesn't have to have an 'inner life.' For me, for most women, there has to be an inner life. We live so much in our personal relations; and I, at any rate, can't live my life unless I feel every day, all the time, my relation to something that is peaceful and beautiful and good, and that doesn't change."
"Have you really found it? Are you really happy—Bluebird?"
"I like to have you call me Bluebird," she said. "I feel like one. I have never been so happy in my life as in this last month, since I have learned to keep the mood, the adorable mood, of the silence here by the sea."
"I guess," I said, "I caught a bit of it—your mood, to-night. But I know it won't stay. It's a mood that I can't count on. And I don't have it—often. Perhaps my setting isn't right. At any rate I don't seem able to establish the relations which you think are so important. So, with me, the mood is a lovely fugitive."
"I have it all the time," said Cornelia eagerly, "since I began to fill, really fill, my life with the things I love, and to leave the rest out: walking alone on the mesa; and being with the children; and talking with my sister and Mr. Blakewell (he's really a most unusual young man); and going to church in the dear little church here in La Jolla. I always liked to go to church: it made everything seem so certain and peaceful afterward—till Oliver and the children began to argue. And I liked religious music and the little choir boys in white and the lovely procession of them singing. It put me into a frame of mind that I knew was right, because it harmonized perfectly with all the things that I wanted to have in my mind, and it shut the other things out."
"When did this new mood begin?" I questioned.
"It wasn't," she said, "a very serious matter with me till this last spring. Other things than attending church had put me in the same frame of mind. But after our trouble began and especially after Oliver—went to Paris, and I felt so desperately isolated, isolated inside, I mean, I went to church very regularly, and I began to attend early communion, and often to go into the cathedral and sit for half an hour when no one was there. And by and by the horrible sense of isolation left me. Something came in and filled up the vacancy. I couldn't see just why—nothing had changed; and in the first month after he left, I hadn't heard a word from Oliver except by his postcards to the children, but somehow I didn't care whether I heard from Oliver or not; and somehow I was growing happy, positively happy, and clear and certain in my own mind. The 'mood' stayed. I know why, now; and now—you may think I am foolish, but now—I have only to go into our little church and touch anything there, or just sit still alone in the dusk, to feel ecstatically happy."
"How do you explain it? I have never felt ecstatically happy, in those circumstances."
"I can't tell you," she replied. "The children want me to discuss it. I don't want to discuss it. The beautiful thing about it is that it doesn't have to be discussed. All I know is, that in this fixed and blessed mood of mine I feel my life in relation with what hasn't changed and won't change; and if one can only keep one's life there, what actually becomes of one, in ordinary personal relations, doesn't matter, simply doesn't matter."
"I felt that way once," I said, "or something like that. It was when I had ended a labor of ten years, and had written the last page of my Roman Epigraphy. I didn't care for several days whether I lived or died, after that. 'All the best of me,' I said to myself, 'is there, exempted from time, safe in that book.' But I found that I couldn't get my table companions at the University Club to take that view. When it was published, not a soul of them read a word of my 'best.' They seemed still to prefer the worst of me, the mere empty shell from which the oyster had been extracted—and canned."
Cornelia looked at me gravely. "You are jesting," she said. "Please don't. I am in earnest. When I step into our little church, I say to myself, 'Cornelia, what you really care for is safe here. You don't need to worry because other people don't agree with you, and don't value what you value.' And then the final responsibility, for everything, seems to slip so blissfully from my shoulders, and to be accepted by a Power so much stronger and surer than myself, that sometimes I envy the white-cowled peaceful-faced women who have gone into the Church and closed the door behind them."
"You would have to leave Dorothy and Oliver behind you," I said, "if you did that; and they are worth saving, too. My dear Cornelia, I am afraid this 'blessed mood' is a little dangerous to you, and very dangerous to the rest of us. Don't wrap it too closely around you. I knew a woman once who never gave her husband any occasion for anxiety about any other man, but she fell so much in love with her clothes that she became inaccessible to him, and finally made him frantically jealous—jealous of her necklace and of her gowns."
"Do you think I am really like that?"
"No, but that is a parable. You are becoming very fond of Church clothes. You are so 'dressy' that you have become a little inaccessible to the children, already—to their sympathies, I mean. They are essentially so informal, you see. They don't understand you. I do understand you—somewhat. And what I understand chills me a little. I understand you to be on the verge of losing heart over the problem of reconciling yourself to the undistinguished mixture of life. Your son would say that you have the 'retreat-complex.'"
"I'm sure I don't know what he would mean by that. What do you mean by it?"
"I understand you to be on the point of making a mystical surrender of your personality—on the verge of lapsing into a beatific mood which will separate you still farther from Oliver—and from me, and will ensure you against the pain and bitterness of reality. If you should surrender and really become spiritual, like Father Blakewell, or saintly, like no one of my acquaintance, you would drop out and desert us. If you became saintly, which Heaven forbid, your character would melt away like a little cloud in the moonlight. Your charm for me, for all of us, is in the definiteness of your personality, the clearness and distinction of your individuality. You are piquant and delightful because you are a challenge, a whiff of the wind, a counterblast. You have the 'fighting edge.'"
Cornelia smiled as if she were recalling something sweet. "I am a little tired just now," she said, "of fighting. There are pleasanter things than that. I want to surrender and repent."
"Repent of what?"
"Oh, of being worldly, you might call it."
"Please postpone that till you are ninety. You mustn't repent yet. Do you know, I used to think scornfully of deathbed repentances, but now I think I was wrong; a deathbed is the place for repentance; and the Catholic Church and the Gospels are right in welcoming those who turn up at the eleventh hour. In fact, I half suspect—if we were put into the world to see what we can make of it, and I don't know any other good reason for our presence here—I half suspect that God Himself admires most those who 'surrender' to Him only with their last breath."
"How perfectly shocking!" exclaimed Cornelia. "What can you mean by such absurdity?"
"By surrendering, I mean throwing yourself on God before you have exhausted every possibility of making sense out of the world for yourself. Perhaps there will come a time for you and for me when there will be wisdom in such a surrender. But for young people, and for people at our time of life, too, there is, there ought to be, something repugnant in losing one's intellectual grip, in letting go, in abandoning the effort to find right relations with realities, in giving up the attempt to make a little cosmos out of the chaotic materials at hand. To my mind, it is the unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost to desert that fine heartbreaking task in order to take refuge in a mood of mystical 'peace without victory,' peace without substance. Your son would smile at my use of religious phraseology and 'mythological bunk.' But he would understand, I think,—with a little explanation, anyway,—precisely what I mean by not surrendering to God till the last breath."
"The children's ideas of religion at present," said Cornelia, "are simply heathenish. Will you believe what Oliver said to Mr. Blakewell the other day? He said something like this: 'God? What is God? God is a short word composed of three sounds: a guttural, a vowel, and a dental!'"
"It's true, isn't it?" I ventured.
"I'm sure I don't know. But just imagine a boy of nineteen saying a thing like that! No wonder everyone is dismayed at the disappearance of religion among the younger generation."
"My dear Cornelia," I replied, "religion itself, as some one has said, is one of the most lovable things in the world. The word sometimes becomes obnoxious and is avoided by young people; the thing itself doesn't disappear. The word 'God' is a symbol for one of the great ideas in the world. The word sometimes acquires obnoxious associations; but young people do not lose interest in the idea which it represents. God and religion are, and always will be, popular, in the best sense, because they come, offering to do for young and old what old and young desire above everything else should be done for them."
"Well? What horrid paradox next?"
"Not a paradox at all. What everyone desires most in the world is: to be taken seriously. That is what I want, from you. That is what Oliver wants, from his parents. That is what His Excellency wants, perhaps from someone else. That is what you wanted, I suppose, from His Excellency. But none of us, apparently, is quite willing to perform that great boon for any of the others. God and religion take all men and every man seriously. That is why they have such power of conferring happiness that they could never fall into disrespect if the guttural and vowel and dental which we have just referred to did not, when uttered together, often call into consciousness the obnoxious things which we don't believe in instead of the desirable things which we do believe in."
"I don't quite understand you."
"Why, I mean that at various times of life and at various ages of the world people get together all the things that they believe necessary and desirable, and then they say that God, meaning all the beneficent power anywhere in the universe, is interested in preserving and forwarding those things."
"Yes; and then what?"
"And then people acquire a fresh stock of information—about geology and hygiene and economics and slavery and intoxication and sovereignty and war and Asiatics and international relations and so forth. In consequence, they are forced gradually to revise, in the light of their new information, their lists of things which are necessary and desirable. Your son Oliver is busy at just that task now; and he needs a lot of help and sympathy."
"Oliver is really a dear boy," said Cornelia, "and I am helping him all I can. We are reading Newman; and I hope by and by to get him to listen to a little of the Imitation, at breakfast."
"You would do much better," I said, "to read with him John Morley's Compromise or Santayana's Poetry and Religion. Nothing will so decisively check, just now, the growth in him of a religious sense as any attempt to persuade him that the beneficent powers in the universe are pleased with ascetic withdrawals from life, or that they countenance authoritative limitations on the use of the intelligence."
"But isn't Morley an atheist?" inquired Cornelia.
I ignored the question, for it was growing dark between the walls of the little valley, and we were entering the deeper darkness of the trees on the domain of Santo Espiritu.
"Oliver," I said, "is reaching out into the real world, into his own times, and gathering up here and there, without very much high counsel, everything that, as he puts it, sounds good to him. That is going to be the substance of his religion; that will be what he believes in. Whether this collection of his beliefs will acquire for him the compulsion and animating power, the 'psychological efficacy' of the religions which possess a great history and a great poetry—that will depend on his imagination and on his susceptibility to high and noble emotions. At present he strikes me as a fairly cool-tempered and slightly cocky young positivist, unconscious that he is building an altar, certainly expecting no fire from heaven to light his sacrifice—rather disdainful, indeed, of all cults which profess that they have come down out of the skies."
"But why, why," cried Cornelia, "does he disdain what comes down out of the skies? That, for me, is the indispensable essence of religion. That is what makes the difference between a house and a church. Till it comes, there can be nothing sacramental. And unless the sacramental element enters, there is nothing really binding and obligatory and final in all this miscellaneous collection of beliefs. And everything gets so 'messy' and so confused. And everyone picks and chooses, and does just what he pleases. I don't wish to pick and choose—not about the really great things, I mean; I want those things decided."
We had been strolling slowly up through the deep night of the walnut grove along the path which ends at the gate in the walled garden. The darkness, which had made us almost invisible, had brought us physically nearer together. Cornelia seldom takes anyone's arm; she likes to be free when she walks. But, in the obscurity, our swinging hands occasionally brushed at our sides, with an effect—a mutual effect, I believe—of merely instinctive or "animal" sympathy, which, in me, was instantly heightened into a kind of aching tenderness. At the same time I was conscious that our minds—what we call our minds—had been moving at a widening distance. And now shafts of light from the windows of Santo Espiritu cut across the path, and as we neared the gate, we stepped into the soft radiant glow of the place, and the color in the bluebird gown lived again. We hesitated, then stopped, and a momentary silence fell on us once more. I pulled the crushed and wilted heliotrope from my buttonhole, and inhaled the faint fragrance, meant for my "time of day." Then I said, with my ultimate effort:—
"Cornelia, when one goes out at the church door, one enters the universe. The only blessed mood that I know comes when I feel that all the universe is holy. And a sacrament, as I understand it, makes not merely the difference between a house and a church; it makes also the difference between a house and a home. When the world is before one, where to choose, as it is for every one of us since Adam's day, don't we have to pick and choose—even about the 'really great things'? Like, for example, how we are going to spend what remains, at our time of life, of our poor little hungry human lives?"
"No," Cornelia replied. "No; for me, there is no choice at all about those things. Everything is perfectly clear to me now. I am going to spend mine with Oliver. The reason why Oliver and I rasped so upon one another last spring was that we were too near together, with no point of contact but our miserable nerves. I have been learning this summer how to 'carry on' with Oliver. When we are together again in the fall, I shall not live with him, any more than I have for years. I shall live in my blessed mood—in my secret garden. And I shall be happy again, perfectly happy."
"And I?"
"You are an old dear!" she said. "A very dear old dear! Come now, let's go in." She seized my hand gayly, like a child, and opened the gate, and led me through the walled garden, damp with the spraying fountain, into the bright colorful patio, fragrant with the cedar-wood fire. The mah jongg game was still in progress but Father Blakewell and Cornelia's sister relinquished their places and withdrew. We played for an hour with the children. Cornelia, who sat opposite me, drew all the "honors" and "wooed" with hands full of seasons and dragons, while I steadily failed to complete my sequences and ended the evening with four winds, one of each kind, on my hands.
When we broke up for the night, Cornelia unfolded a plan for my assisting Mr. Blakewell with tutoring the children several hours a day for the next two weeks; and, as a matter of fact, we adhered strictly to the programme.
They gave me a cool bed in the guest-chamber, with a couch, at my discretion, prepared on the flat roof above, to which a staircase inside my room gave access. I chose the bed on the roof. I lay awake there for a long time, studying the constellations and the star clusters of the Milky Way, and recalling how, in the summer before, after the little flurry over the bobbed hair had kindled in my heart a faint flicker of hope, I had gone out at midnight with a strong field-glass, and had lain for hours in the ferns, trying in vain what I had often heard could easily be accomplished—to disjoint and separate the double stars.
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