Chapter IV (1)

In the bright warm room, so alive inside the bleak November dark, before the fire burning briskly and stoutly, Professor Grosbeake’s three beautiful daughters gave me tea, in their parents’ absence. Among the elegant and slender spindles of the legs and rungs of the English furniture, which seemed blacker and stronger-sinewed, as if they had been brought to a sharper focus, than American mahogany--which, as in the case of the Queen Anne secretary, with its narrow shape, its dark dense grain, its close-laid shelves above, hooded with a double-loaf top, and its close-packed drawers below, diminishing in thickness toward the bottom, its air of having always contained sealed letters and legal papers, all safely and neatly locked away, seemed designed for a tighter, compacter, and more downright civilization; among the late pale autumnal flowers, the roses and the bowl of white cosmos; the white ruffle-bordered curtains against the black of the winter panes and the patches of confused pink and green made by the modest modernist paintings--Magda, Frieda, and Rosamond, themselves in fresh light frocks like the flowers, enchanted me with their loveliness and candor.

They were all very smooth and blond; they had never bobbed their hair, and Frieda and Magda wore theirs brushed abundantly down their backs, like Alice in the Alice books. Rosamond, who was older than the twins, had hers up: it was parted in the middle and tightly wound behind in a blond and young-womanly knot, so that, if one thought only of her hair, she seemed like a young German fräulein (Mrs. Grosbeake was German), whereas, if one thought of her blue eyes, her straight nose, her long oval face and her long and graceful neck, she seemed like an English girl. She served the tea with nice shy manners. Rosamond was dressed in pale blue; and one of the twins, Magda, wore white, and Frieda, a kind of lilac, with stockings a kind of lavender, lighter than the frock. The twins seemed rather German than English: they had plump round cheeks and round noses, and were maturely developed for fourteen.

Frieda had golden-red hair, which gave a singular effect of richness as it came down over her purple dress; Magda was more heavily built and slower-moving and slower-thinking than her sister: she was the blondest of all--her hair was the palest, purest flaxen I had ever seen. And her blondness made me think of Daisy, whom I expected to see the next day.

(I had lately come back from abroad. My aunt had left me a small legacy, and very soon after the night at Sue Borglum’s, I had gone to Europe and had stayed there till fall. When I had returned, I had been eager to see Grosbeake, one of whose books I had bought in England and had been reading on the boat, and in whom I now felt a new interest. I had also planned to visit Daisy and Pete Bird, who had left New York, even before I had, and were now living together in the country, not far out of my way back to town. Since I had been back, I had written to Daisy, and she had invited me to come to see them.)

I liked the English voices of the young Grosbeakes: they had a soft flurried way of speaking, and a maidenly innocence of timbre, quite unlike young American girls (though the twins were beginning already to acquire American slang). “I don’t like this kind of crackers,” said Magda. “We couldn’t get the regular biscuits,” Rosamond explained. “The grocer’s all out of them.--I’m sorry,” she went on seriously to me. “I’m afraid they’re not very good!” “You always say ‘biscuits,’” said Frieda, “and Magda always says ‘crackers.’ I think we all ought to say the same thing!” “What do you say?” queried Magda. “Sometimes I say one,” said Frieda, “and sometimes I say the other. But I like ‘biscuits’ best!” “I think these are really crackers,” said Rosamond, who did not want my feelings hurt by a discrimination in favor of ‘biscuits,’ “because they crackle so when you break them.” “That’s why I think ‘biscuits’ is better,” insisted Frieda, “--because ‘crackers’ sounds as if they _all_ crackled--but _some_ biscuits just bend, you know!” “They’re not biscuits,” said Rosamond. “They’re cakes.--Won’t you have some more tea?” she urged me. “No,” said Frieda, “you know those little soft ones that we had in the country last summer, that you can almost bend in two!” “They were little cakes,” said Rosamond.--We heard some one come in at the front door. “There’s Father,” Magda announced.

I could see Grosbeake taking off his black coat and his low-crowned black hat and setting his stick in the stand, before he appeared in the doorway. He had the rounded back of the scholar, a back, indeed, almost humped--of which I always used to feel that the exceptional extent to which it was bowed was an index to the degree of the difficulty of his researches. But Grosbeake, beyond this, had nothing of the physical deficiency--the weak eyes or the feeble figure--ordinarily attributed to the scholar. On the contrary, he seemed to have sprung from some tough ruddy-cheeked English stock which not even a lifetime of universities could enervate or fade. Despite the fineness of his features, he had something of Mr. Pickwick and even something of Mr. Punch. And upon an American who had been living in New York, he produced a curious and gratifying impression: it was as if one were surprised and rejoiced, after seeing a horde of depersonalized masks, at finding some one who possessed a face. With his fair cheeks flushed rosy by the cold, his salient nose and chin, his slanting Henry VIII eyes and his look of having been carved by hand out of some very sound kind of wood by a wood-carver of the days before machinery, he gave the impression of being a product, by way of the generations which had preceded him, of a constant hand-to-hand encounter with the turbulence of the elements and with the occasions of human life. He wore black English clothes and his stiff white cuffs were very white: his collar and his cravat, and his white locks which came down over his collar, seemed to me very old-fashioned. He always carried a thickish dark stick, with a brass top of interlocked apes, which a brother had brought him from India.

He greeted me with his charming courtesy and peered up at me with wise and subtle bird-lidded eyes. “I’m sorry,” he explained, “not to have been able to be here for tea. But there was a meeting of the examination committee at precisely a quarter to five--something which would be unthinkable in England, you know.” He lifted sparse old eyebrows in a smile. “Rather than make the dons miss their tea, they’d allow the examination to be prepared without adequate consultation!--I had proposed holding the meeting in a tea-room, but they didn’t seem to care for the suggestion--or to take the hint!” He spoke slowly and very deliberately, and his voice had fine up-and-down inflections of sweetness and irony: his nostrils had inflections, too, and vibrated while he spoke.

“I’m afraid the tea’s cold,” said Rosamond. “I’ll have some fresh made.” “No: never mind!” said Grosbeake. He stood before the fire, his hands clasped just above his stomach. “I think we shall have snow,” he announced. “I think we shall have snow!--The Dean was very sure we shouldn’t--but I believe that we shall!” I remarked that we had had no frost and that the afternoon had been warm. “That was what the Dean pointed out,” he replied. “He even insisted on making a bet with me. He bet me a bottle of Scotch whiskey against a bottle of my sherry. I think he’ll get the better of the bargain: the sherry is very good: it was given me by a friend in the Embassy, who had the privilege of bringing it in!”

He took the cup of tepid tea from Rosamond and sat down in an arm-chair before the fire. He asked me about myself and what I had been writing. I was ashamed to be obliged to tell him that, even while I had been abroad, I had really not written anything--I said that my literary morale had been low, or something equally silly.

“I was just thinking,” he replied, “in the Dean’s room, in looking at the portraits of the college presidents there--that it may be from certain points of view as much of a misfortune to have too much character, too well-sustained a morale, as to have too little. When I looked at the early presidents, especially the seventeenth-century ones, I said to myself, ‘There are men whose character has been overdeveloped!’ It’s a very special combination of qualities, you know, that’s required for a mind capable of original work. A man mustn’t have his character too vigorously developed, because he must be able to experiment with ideas. It’s like going to buy a hat, you know--first you try one on and wear it for a bit to see how it goes, and then you try on another. But a man with a strongly developed character is unable to do that.--But, on the other hand, of course, he must still have character enough not simply to drift about without preferring one idea to another.”

Grosbeake had a curious irony, which was always at the same time benign. It was the irony--one sees it seldom--of a mind which is at once innocent and subtle, and which has, in consequence, something divine about it: an irony without malice. He had a touch perhaps of the vanity, or rather, of the dandyism, of the modern mathematical philosopher, who finds himself provided with paradoxes at once so surprising, so attractive and so sound. I have heard him comment with his calm amusement on the mistakes of unmathematical philosophers when they attempted to invoke mathematics: “It’s curious,” he would say, “how peculiarly unfortunate they are in their choice of mathematical examples! They always seem to hit upon something which isn’t necessarily true at all--which might quite as well be the other way, you know! Bradley, for example, in his _Logic_, when he wants to give an illustration of a particularly indisputable truth--something we must accept as self-evident--that, if B is to the left of C, and if A is to the left of B, then A must be to the left of C, also--when, of course, that’s not true at all!--if you prolong a straight line indefinitely, you come back on the other side!” Though, when Bradley’s _Logic_ was written, non-Euclidean geometry could hardly have been widely known. (There may have entered, also, into Grosbeake’s attitude, in this particular instance, some traditional opposition between the points of view of Cambridge and Oxford.)

But no one could have been farther than Grosbeake from the essential triviality of mind which academic arrogance or complacency so often tries to disguise. For if Hugo Bamman and his father were the modern type of saints, Grosbeake was a modern type of sage, who taught wisdom in casual conversation and virtue only by example. I had felt his influence even in college, at a time when I as yet knew nothing of his philosophical ideas. For Grosbeake had the most comprehensive mind, at home in the most varied fields, with which I had ever come into contact. For him, philosophy was an attempt to take account of all the aspects of the universe, and to find in them coherence and a meaning; so that Grosbeake’s comment on any subject had a special significance and value, and, despite the fact that he never made an effort to expostulate or convert, was likely to present itself long afterwards as something to be seriously considered in making up one’s own mind on the subject. And though he detested every sort of preaching (Mr. Bamman had been a born preacher), and though even the study of Ethics was inconceivable to him, he had the effect, more than any one else I had known, of making moral distinction attractive. I remember his saying once of some student, a student of whose abilities he thought well, but who, as punishment for some escapade, had had his chapel cuts taken away from him, so that he couldn’t go out of town over Sundays, that it would “do him good,” because he would now work during the week-ends. “So you do believe in doing people good!” some one present had caught him up. “I thought you didn’t believe in that!” “That’s an object,” Grosbeake had replied, a little taken aback, “which I believe is best promoted indirectly.”

Mrs. Grosbeake came in before dinner: she was a broad, handsome, placid German woman, very thoroughly educated and very practical. One always felt that she was a kind of base upon which Grosbeake’s metaphysics rested; for he was more sensitive and nervous than he appeared, and, although intellectually imperturbable, was in other ways easily disorganized.

We had dinner in the white-walled dining-room--it was a solid and attractive Colonial house. The Grosbeakes had brought over their own silver, as well as their own furniture, and the pieces had always seemed to me to possess plainly discernible personalities, even physiognomies: there was a squarish silver tea-pot which squatted flat upon the table and had a very sharp emphatic spout that jutted straight out from the base and was balanced on the other side by a long straight high-cocked handle. And the cream-pitcher, the sauce-boat, and even the little salt-cellars straddled sturdily on three tiny legs, like some sort of blunt-beaked beetles, or rather, it occurred to me to-night, like the snouted and potbellied demons of Bruegel or Callot. Even the color and substance of the food seemed to have a special richness and density, as if they had been painted in a still-life: the bread and the boiled potatoes looked particularly white and firm, the mound of currant jelly particularly lucent and red, and the beefsteak particularly vivid in its contrasts of red and brown. The Ambassador’s sherry was delicious. In spite, however, of the satisfaction which Grosbeake had seemed to feel in it, his epicurean tastes were really indulged almost exclusively in the things of the intellect, so that I have heard him relish a page of Hume as if it had been a wine, whereas food and drink themselves, as well as other material comforts, he usually disregarded. Now he dominated the table, talking tranquilly and blandly; and in the presence of their father and mother, the three lovely Grosbeake girls--unlike young American girls, who usually dominate their parents--were entirely in abeyance, with only an occasional low rapid interchange between the twins, who were sitting together.

“I’ve been reading Sinclair Lewis’s _Babbitt_,” Grosbeake remarked. I asked him what he thought of it. “Oh, very good,” he replied. “Though a little unfair to Babbitt, I think. Of course, I know very little about the American cities of the Middle West--I can’t pretend to speak. But from the students from the West whom I’ve had in my courses, I get rather a different impression. They’re very alert, you know--very eager to learn. And they do well: they grasp things very quickly. So I don’t think that the families they come from can be quite so uniformly benighted as Lewis represents them in _Babbitt_.--And I feel, in reading your friend Hugo Bamman, that he paints a little too sombre a picture of the business men and their families in much the same way.

“It seems to me rather a mistake, you know, to hold the business men up to ridicule for their Rotary Clubs and their fraternal organizations. Under conditions of that kind, where the city is quite new and the people have no institutions, they have to create some sort of institutions in order to hold the community together. Rotary Clubs and societies of that sort, imperfect as they may be, fulfil a very necessary function.

“It seems to me that, from some points of view, the most unfortunate feature of American business is its failure to provide real leaders. Professor Pittinger, who has been making a study of the subject, tells me that it has become impossible, for example, for the president or one of the directors of a large corporation to leave a controlling interest to his son. He can only leave him an investment, and the son can spend the money as he pleases; but he inherits no responsibility and no power, and the surviving officers of the company don’t recognize his right to any. That seems to me unfortunate, because where the father has to make his own way, largely without advantages, to a position of importance, the son, who has had the advantages, finds himself with no power. You often find in England that the squire who has lived in the country, and has had to deal at first-hand with his tenants, and with his animals and land, has a far stronger sense of realities than the more enlightened Londoner.”

“But he sometimes mistreats his tenants and mismanages his estate abominably,” Mrs. Grosbeake interjected.

“If he does,” continued Grosbeake, “he knows better what he’s doing, nevertheless, than the average Liberal member of Parliament, say, who has the best intentions in the world, but who lives between his club, and certain houses to which he goes, and the House of Commons--always seeing the same people, who are all people of precisely his way of thinking, who are living in precisely the same way--so that he never at any point really comes into contact with realities--and so never really knows what he is talking about. Even Morley was a little like that.

“I wonder whether it mightn’t be an advantage, both to the sons of business men and to the businesses themselves, if the second generation could take over some responsibility in connection with their fathers’ work. They seem to me very intelligent--so far as I’ve been able to judge from those I meet in my classes--and the effect on trade and industry of even one generation of such men might, I should think, be enormous. In that event, the Rotary Clubs might become very important institutions--they might provide the moral leadership for business.”

I had so long been taking it for granted that no good could come out of business, that this idea of Grosbeake’s seemed to me a very queer and foreign one; but I reflected on what he had said.

I always listened with interest and respect to Grosbeake’s opinions on American matters. He had studied American affairs with the attention, at once sympathetic and detached, which he applied to everything, and he often succeeded in illumining them with that uncanny divination which he displayed in all sorts of fields quite outside his special province. At that time, it had become the custom for Englishmen who visited America--we encouraged it, of course, ourselves--to edify us with generalizations about American life and institutions--generalizations often based on a round of cocktail parties in New York, or, at most, on a lecture tour. So many of the prizes in America always went to the third and second-rate, that we had become, especially since the War, a paradise for British mediocrities--poets, novelists, and universal critics, who had often great success as lecturers. They went about patronizing the Americans with a gusto and a giddy elation which suggested that they might themselves have been patronized at home; and they would sometimes tour the country from coast to coast and return again and again. It was, therefore, peculiarly gratifying for an American to discover in Grosbeake those qualities of toughness, richness, eccentricity, and independence which one had admired in English literature and history, but of which one had so often been disappointed in the English celebrities who visited us.

After dinner, we sat before the fire. Mrs. Grosbeake seemed to contribute a ground-tone of infinite repose: she made one feel that the body of humanity was invulnerably solid and sound, and that it was deep and contained many treasures which had never been brought to birth. She sat with her feet side by side, resting squarely on the floor, and she wore some sort of leather sandals, with very wide blunt toes. These sandals, like the modernist paintings (which Grosbeake had bought from a former student, in financial difficulties), were one of the odd notes of unconventionality in the tranquil conventional household; and they surprised me in the same unwarranted way as when one found Grosbeake, in certain of his writings, carrying his philosophical principles through morals into the field of political criticism and bringing in an indictment against nationalism or capitalism.

I had never, as an undergraduate, read anything which Grosbeake had written, and I had never taken any of his courses. I had, however, in my senior year, sometimes gone to his house. After meeting him once or twice at teas, I had run into him one day in the hallway of one of the recitation buildings: he had recognized me and had talked to me about an article which I had just written for the college magazine, and which had aroused a certain amount of controversy. I had attacked wholesale, as a sinister conspiracy against freedom of action and thought, the policy of the English Department, the administration of the Dean’s office, football mass-meetings, compulsory chapel, and the custom of compelling freshmen to wear little black caps; and I was surprised and rather embarrassed by Grosbeake’s expression of friendly interest. I replied almost apologetically--I had been dismayed by the rumpus I had roused--that I seemed to have laid myself open to a good deal of adverse criticism. “Ah, well,” Grosbeake had reassured me, “one can’t take up any position, can one? without doing that.” My complaints had been made in resentment, and they had been answered with resentment by the faculty, the alumni, the editors of the college daily, the officers of the athletic association, and some of the more ardent and articulate freshmen, who insisted that they asked nothing better than to pay homage to the college tradition by continuing to wear their little black caps: it had never occurred to me, at the time, that I was engaged in doing anything so dignified as taking up a position, and I had felt that I must be careful, in the future, to conduct the controversy with more scrupulousness and sobriety, that I must remember my intellectual responsibilities. And half my bitterness and indignation against the college authorities was gone at finding an elderly and important professor willing to consider without heat what I had said.

He had invited me then to his house, and I used to go there on Sunday evenings, when the Grosbeakes received faculty and students. I rarely heard him talk about his subject, and did not understand him when he did: I had only the vaguest notion what it was. I figured him as eternally occupied with solving the same sort of problems with which I had struggled in Trigonometry and Permutations and Combinations. I did not know that those strings of puzzles were not the whole of mathematics, but merely multiplied illustrations of general mathematical laws, in which no one had attempted to interest us. And still less did I realize that Grosbeake had passed beyond Mathematics proper to Symbolic Logic (it was principally the fact that we had in our faculty another of the small but infatuated band of the students of Symbolic Logic--a man with whom he wished to collaborate--which had brought him to the United States and which had kept him there so long). I did not know that Symbolic Logic was an attempt to provide a universal language for all the branches of science, and that this attempt to formulate relations common to different departments of thought was itself a deeper expression of the same genius which had given rise to Grosbeake’s interest in such varied fields of human activity, and of his extraordinary instinct for tracing their inter-relations. Aside from his personal distinction and charm, it was this gift which had fascinated me: he had usually talked to me about literature, but, aside from his appreciation of poetry, plays, and novels as such--which was in itself remarkable--he had also a brilliant faculty for reading into them social and moral history and revealing their philosophic implications. He was the first person, since Hugo’s father, who had helped me toward the kind of education which I had begun when Mr. Bamman had talked to me at school about Shakespeare.

I had, however, never guessed at Grosbeake’s real importance--and indeed his importance outside his special field had never really appeared until a year or two before the War, when he had turned from mathematics to philosophy. When I came to read his books, I was astonished. First of all, Grosbeake’s tone and style, in his philosophical writings, were not at all what I should have expected. His manner in conversation was rather urbane, dispassionate, and dry: he seemed, as I have said, to approach ideas with a certain epicureanism of the intellect. But his writing had a close tough grain: it was crystalline, in the sense that it gave an effect of the hardness and clarity of crystals rather than of the limpidity of crystal; it had a peculiar earnestness and intensity, and a kind of incandescence. But what had surprised me most--I had already had some idea of the universal scope of his mind--were the power of his imagination and the boldness and stoutness of his spirit.

Grosbeake was one of the first modern philosophers, really competent to understand the new physics of relativity and quantum theory, who had made an attempt, on the full scale, to trace the consequences of these discoveries for the concepts of general philosophy, and to construct a system which should admit them. This had brought him to a drastic rejection of the philosophical assumptions of old-fashioned mechanistic science.

Since my recent encounters with the world in New York, which had made me feel my own weakness and baseness, I had myself been haunted and oppressed, as on the night of Sue Borglum’s party, by the thought that humanity, after all, was merely another race of animals, whose behavior was fixed by their environment, and by the cells which they had had from their parents, and that the earth and all its creatures was only a complicated interaction of hard little particles like bullets. I now learned that it had lately become possible, in the light of scientific research--that it had even become inevitable (though I was far from being able to follow all Grosbeake’s arguments) to regard the universe, not as a machine, which had once been wound up and was still running, but as an organism in course of development. The unit was no longer a bullet, but something called an event; and the world was a flux of events. The relativity of time and space and the anomalous behavior of electrons, in undermining the “iron laws” of nature, had opened flood-gates of speculation which the ordinary reasonable mind, the kind of mind which respected science without examining its assumptions or attempting to force them to their consequences, had long tended to regard as closed. And despite the surprise and disapproval of other mathematicians who, capable of practising only one trade, prided themselves on sticking to their lasts, Professor Grosbeake had late in his career emerged as a metaphysician.

I wanted to make him talk on this subject, and I inquired vaguely about the congress of a scientific association which he had attended the summer before. He told me briefly of some of its proceedings, then added, after a pause, with his bland and serious irony: “If you want to see the sort of men that the mediæval church must have been made up of, you should study an assemblage of modern scientists. I thought about them last summer that they must be very like the mediæval doctors. They’re all more or less internationally minded, you know, and they’re men of strong character and conviction--and they’re all authoritarians: they subscribe to a body of dogma and they won’t countenance any heresy. If a scientist has evolved an hypothesis which runs counter to the established hypothesis, they won’t give it a serious hearing--if he’s performed an experiment, you know, which conflicts with accepted experiments, they refuse to look at it!”----

At this point in the conversation, Magda and Frieda, who had to go to bed, came in to say good-night. They kissed their mother, who spoke to them in a low voice, but they hesitated about kissing their father--in the midst of solemn discourse and with a visitor present. Magda hung back by her mother’s couch, but Frieda cut the knot by dashing forward, diving for his bald brow--I saw her own beautiful hair over her shoulders, like some spilling of gold by the gods--and running abruptly out of the room. “Oh, good-night, my dear!” said Grosbeake.--“They have never executed any one,” he continued--Magda kissed him on the cheek, more diffidently: “Good-night, my dear!--But there are other methods of suppression even more expedient and effective; for burning calls attention to the victim.”

His criticism of contemporary science soon led him into metaphysics.--The entrance of those gold and white girls--the offspring, so late in life, of that old bald round-shouldered man who had spent long years in the obstinate plumbing (by means of formulas so difficult and abstract that they excluded even ideas of number, so far beyond the ordinary reaches of even scientific minds that they dismayed even mathematicians) of that mysterious reality which is at once what we find outside us and what we think about it--the entrance of Grosbeake’s lovely daughters had had the effect on me of a revelation of the human vitality, the creative force of flesh and blood, which is embodied in abstract thought. It was as if my imagination had fully conceived for the first time that the logician’s chain of propositions, no less than the astronomer’s systems and the physicist’s analysis of the invisible, was as much the ripened fruit of rich natures as the poetry of Shakespeare and Dante, or as those beautiful long-limbed children, the breed of the Kentish seas and of the forests of the Rhineland, who had brusquely embraced their father.

He talked to me about the book he was writing. All that I had ever learned at college of philosophy had been a conception of the external world as a colorless and soundless wilderness whose true nature one could never know, which one could not even imagine--but which I did, none the less, imagine as a vast landscape of polar spaces in whose eternal twilight one wandered, preoccupied and deluded by a flicker of magic-lantern pictures which danced inside one’s mind and forever remained private to oneself. I had now learned, however, from Grosbeake that since, for example, the high flush of Rita’s cheeks and the sound of her voice reciting poetry had so radically affected my behavior, they must belong as much to reality, to that Nature which was no longer outside one, as the blood corpuscles and the light-waves, the sound-waves and the vocal organs which were assumed to have produced them. And it now appeared that Grosbeake admitted as belonging, also, to reality those æsthetic values which, for example, had made Rita, when she wrote her poems, feel that the pavements of the Village were harsh and the sound of the river musical. And so, finally, he told me, moral values, which he identified with æsthetic values, must be equally a part of that reality which he found it impossible to split into two divisions of mind and matter, body and soul. Those moral judgments, then, I reflected, which had given rise to my disgust and despair the night of Sue Borghum’s party had been, after all, as real, as much to be taken seriously, as the biological and neurological processes to which I had tended to reduce them.

What astonished me most, however, was that Grosbeake now crowned his system with a new conception of God: he brought God back into the universe of science, under what appeared to me at first an unfamiliar form. For Grosbeake’s God was as different as possible from the tolerant and moderate Great Spirit, the enlightened parliamentary monarch, of the modern liberal theologian. God, for Grosbeake, was the ultimate harmony implied by the æsthetic and moral values of which men were aware in the universe; and our moments of divine revelation were simply those when we realized most indubitably the necessity of this harmony and order, when we became most acutely conscious of this creative purpose of God. And it was, then, this creative purpose which, in the interest of the ultimate harmony, determined which possibilities, among the infinite possibilities of the constant flux of events--the development of the universal organism--should make themselves actual.

I listened to Grosbeake with excitement. He seemed to me at that moment to justify to me those instincts and those beliefs which--suspicious of all the world and uncertain of myself most of all--I had lately come to doubt. And I was moved by what seemed to me the greatness of his mind and the boldness of his spirit amidst the modesty and mildness of his home.--I mustn’t keep him up, then, and tire him: Mrs. Grosbeake had already gone to bed.

I said that I must go, and he got up and brought a bowl of nuts, which we cracked in front of the fire. He told me some Victorian anecdote about Gladstone and Disraeli, whom he always called “Dizzy.”

As I finally came out of the warm house into the white-framed glass-sided porch which enclosed the front door, I felt a tinge of crispness in the air, as when the first ice-splinters web a pond, and I caught the chilly fragrance of the roses and the white and daisylike cosmos, which had been set out in vases for the night--and as I took leave of Grosbeake--gazing out through the glass at the pavement lightly dappled with leaves and the dark grass glittering with wet--my mind bemused with a vision of God as a vast crystal fixing its symmetry from a liquefied universe--I felt a delicious delicacy of iciness, glossy fall-leaf slivers and black rain-glinting glass.

“It’s beginning to snow,” said Grosbeake. It was true: it was not raining, but snowing. A great flake alighted on my sleeve. “So I win my bet with the Dean,” he said. “I shall have his Scotch whiskey and not he my sherry!--You know, the weather’s the only subject on which I really regard myself as infallible. It comes from being bred on the Kentish coast--learning about one’s weather from the narrow seas! What does Dean Mosely know of the weather?--coming from an inland city like Indianapolis!”

Grosbeake stood in the outside door and regarded the large flakes with satisfaction. “Dean Mosely kept insisting,” he continued, “that there were none of the signs of snow--and when he came to enumerate them, I saw that it was true: there were none of the signs. But I knew it was going to snow!”

* * * * *

It was a heavy snowstorm for November. It had snowed, and then rained, and then frozen: on the train, the next afternoon, when I scraped a peep-hole in the frost-glazed window, I disclosed a vignette of fences, strung with wires of ice, and tree-branches decked with crystals, like glittering chandeliers.

But it was late when I arrived at my station: the falling darkness and the cold lay heavy on the little town. I finally succeeded in getting a taxi, which had no cushions on the seat and which bucked over the frozen ruts. There were nice white houses on the road and all the people seemed to be inside them: the windows were orange against the snow, which was bluing and graying with the night.

To the east, when we had left behind the town, an army of corn-stacks in the grayness were frozen to their posts; and to the west, the skies were split across with the tragic gold and black of a late November sunset. The grandeur of the winter landscape--since Grosbeake had predicted the snowfall--had associated itself in my mind with the grandeur of the philosophic mind; and as I gazed at those last gigantic cracks of a light beyond human skies, I remembered the fiery walls of the world of which Lucretius had said that the thinker, in sending his intellect beyond them, had broken Nature’s locks and won the freedom of the universe: they seemed to speak to me of bold and lonely thought.

The house, when we finally pulled in to it, was so low that it seemed sunk in the snow--deep-embedded in the winter ground, which held it fast: there was a single yellow square of light.

Pete Bird hurried cordially out--I could see Daisy standing in the doorway. Pete insisted on my not paying for the taxi: “Just put it on my bill!” he told the man.

Inside, I found Daisy transformed: she greeted me with her frank American smile, but it was this time unmistakably the smile of the young American girls of my boyhood, who had never used lipstick or rouge. I was surprised to see her wholly without make-up: her lips were a pale coral-pink and her hair, which at Sue Borglum’s party had been mongrel, muddy and dull, was now an even flaxen yellow. She was wearing a neat white apron over a pretty blue dress, and looked exactly like some model little housewife in a bright-colored American advertisement, smiling sunnily over the lightness of a new kind of pancake-flour or the flavor of a can of baked beans.

She apologized for the apron--she was just getting dinner, she said--and I thought that she knew she looked well in it. I told her how healthy and lovely she looked. “Just feel this!” she invited me, hooking up her little short-sleeved elbow: I found it studded with solid bulging muscles. “Good Heavens!” I exclaimed. “How did you ever get like that?” “Just working!” Daisy explained. “We fixed the place all up ourselves. When we came, it was just a dump!”

Pete himself, to my surprise, with his slight erect figure, seemed wiry, effective and hardy. He wore a khaki shirt with a smartly tied navy-blue tie, which gave to his old gray trousers and his old Norfolk jacket which did not match them, a gentlemanly air of roughing it.

Daisy amiably excused herself and went to attend to the dinner on the stove. Pete Bird--a casual and cordial host--invited me in before the fire.

The hall had been a little nondescript, a cross between a work-shed and a hall-closet; but the living-room was orderly and cheerful. There was a bright rag-rug on the floor, and there were bright prints and maps on the walls--Pete was a great hand at making maps--and lamps with warmly glowing lampshades, also the work of Pete. And there was a large old-fashioned fireplace, where big logs were roaring and snapping on tall black old-fashioned andirons, still stiff-necked, though lame and leaning crooked.

I expressed my enthusiasm for the fire, and admired the fireplace and the room. Pete received my compliments with the easy nod and brief word of the owner of an Adirondack camp: he made one feel that the spacious fireplace was something he had had specially built, and evoked a vision of moose-horns and bear-heads under heavy darkling rafters.

“That black log’s not burning well,” he announced. “Either it’s frozen in the cracks or it’s cranky!” He hooked it and wrenched it with a poker and an old rickety pair of tongs which did not come together: he had a master’s way with the logs. “Get over there, you old alligator!” he commanded. “You _will_ be hard-boiled, _will_ you!”

“I’m sorry,” he remarked, as he stood up in front of the mantelpiece, which was almost as high as his head, and invited me to sit down before the fire--“I’m sorry that I can’t offer you a drink--but the only things you can get around here are apple and alcohol, and both of them are vile. We’ve finally come to the conclusion that it’s really more considerate to the guests not to offer them anything at all!”--“We hoped you might bring something with you,” said Daisy, looking up with her sweet candid smile: she was dealing out white plates around a table in the middle of the room. I apologized for not having thought of it. “We never think of it ourselves--if you can believe me,” Pete insisted. “It’s almost impossible now to get any kind of decent liquor, in New York or anywhere else--and the kind of drinks that you _can_ get just don’t interest me!” I agreed with him heartily, and added that the trouble with New York was that everybody there drank far too much bad liquor. “That’s why we came to the country,” said Daisy. “We decided that it was that or the drunkard’s home!”

“Now, good people!” Daisy invited us, mimicking the kind of women who say, “Now good people!”--“The dinner is all ready!--if you’ll just sit down and fly at it!”

The dinner was an admirable pot-roast, with onions, potatoes and carrots. We all ate a great deal and did very little talking while we ate.

The table was thick-legged and long: it seemed that Pete had made it himself--and that he had also made or made over most of the other pieces of furniture. When they had moved in, the place had been desolate--full of rubbish, mould and rats. It had taken them all summer to make it habitable: Pete had rummaged in old barns and houses and unearthed many mutilated antiques, which he had then, with great patience, repaired. He seemed to know a great deal about antiques. The principal prize was a comb-backed rocking-chair, for which Pete had himself supplied new rockers; but they warned me not to try to sit in it, because it always went over backwards. I told Pete about the Grosbeakes’ furniture, and he remembered that there was a Queen Anne secretary something like the one I was describing, in the Metropolitan Museum.

For dessert, we ate golden canned peaches, and we drank a great deal of black coffee. “Now, don’t worry about the dishes,” said Pete to Daisy. “Just stack them in the kitchen, and I’ll do them later myself!” “If that doesn’t mean,” replied Daisy, “that _I_’ll have to do them in the morning, when they’re all greasy and cold.” “Don’t be silly!” said Pete, indignantly.

After dinner, we sat around the fire. I asked them what they did in the evenings. “We just do this!” said Pete. “We read aloud,” supplemented Daisy. “We’ve read Bulwer-Lytton’s novels almost entirely through.” “Is he any good?” I inquired. “Fine,” said Daisy. “Besides, he’s the only novelist that they’ve got in the village library.” I was amazed at the idea of Daisy spending long winter evenings over Bulwer-Lytton; but as I had talked to her, I soon discovered that she had always been addicted to novel-reading and had excellent sense and taste--it had apparently been only Ray Coleman’s reading aloud to her out of the _Oxford Book of English Verse_ that she hadn’t been able to stand.

I saw now that her ordinary vocabulary was partly literary, and that it was the combination of literary words with slang which gave her speech its peculiar charm--as when she had said, at the time I had first talked to her, that the horse she had seen in her delirium had been “leering” at her, or when she had told me that Ray Coleman in Paris had seemed “pretty affluent.”

I asked her what writers she liked best. “Well,” she said, “when I was a girl at school, I used to think that Compton Mackenzie was the swellest thing in the world--I thought that that was what life ought to be like--that was what I thought Phil and I were like, when we ran away from Pittsburgh. But I soon found out that the old racket was more like a Russian novel!”

Russian novels reminded me of Larry Mickler, and I asked Pete and Daisy about him. I had never seen him before or since the night of Sue Borglum’s party, and I had never been able to explain him: he had come to seem to me--like the elephantine creature whom I had encountered in the doorway on Thirty-fourth Street--a sort of demon who had fleetingly materialized out of the infernal fumes of the evening. “Oh,” said Daisy, “he’s perfectly harmless--he’s just a fool, that’s all. He’s usually controlled by Alice, his wife. He was just acting up that night because Alice wasn’t along. He’s always threatening to do something desperate, but he usually ends up with Alice administering triple-bromides.” I asked what Alice was like. “She’s just a clean stalwart college girl,” said Daisy. “She doesn’t know quite what a genius is,” Pete Bird contributed, “but she thinks that Larry is a genius. He wrote a novel once which he was never able to get published, and he’s always threatening to write another. In the meantime, he’s in the advertising business, which he says he can never respect.”

“I don’t like Larry Mickler,” Pete added, after a pause. “He cheats at limericks!” I asked him what he meant. “Why, he gets you to play this game where you both have to take the same first line and make up a limerick to fit it. But he’s got the limericks all made up beforehand. When I finally got wise and supplied the first line myself, he couldn’t do a thing--he got sullen and wouldn’t play. Our relations have never been cordial since.--That’s why he tried to make out that I gypped him on those liverwurst sandwiches.”

I had been watching Daisy follow the talk with a childlike seriousness and candor. Though it was cold, she wore no stockings--for reasons of economy, she said--and she shifted her slim and pretty legs, with their straw-colored sharp-toed slippers, in the movements of a good little girl listening restlessly but attentively to the conversation of her elders. As we spoke humorously or gravely, told limericks or deplored the demoralizing effects of the city, she would respond with gravity or humor, turning her eyes from one speaker to the other. She seemed sober-minded, shy and nice: I felt that some of the limericks embarrassed her: I came to think of her almost as a _jeune fille_ and vaguely confused her in my mind with Grosbeake’s golden-haired daughters.

Like all people who live in the country, they commenced about ten to yawn: when I suggested that they must be tired they confessed it with little protestation.

“Now,” said Pete, “we have a guest-room which is always at the disposal of the guests--but it’s as cold as a fiddler’s bitch to-night, and if you really want to keep warm, you’d better sleep here on the couch.” “But what about you?” I asked. “If you can stand the cold, I can.” “Oh, we sleep in here!” replied Pete--and opening the door into the next room, which had the aspect of a store-room--barren as an attic and littered with all kinds of junk--he produced a gigantic set of bed-springs, which he manœuvred through the door with nonchalance and set out on a pair of trestles.

I explored the regions beyond: there was a bedroom behind the living-room, like a plunge into a cold black lake. Through the little low square-paned window, I saw the moon, cut in brightest coldest silver over the lonely and frozen fields. There had been something almost miraculous about Grosbeake’s predicting the snowfall--as if Nature had admitted him to her secrets!

I returned to the smell of wood-smoke and the yellow-shaded lamps of the living-room, and announced that I would sleep on the couch.

How jolly it was, I reflected, back amid the warmth again, to go to bed in front of a fire, in the country, in the winter-time, in the house of friends! And as I undressed in the dark and grisly store-room, which evidently represented the house as they had originally found it--before they had taken it in hand--I was moved by admiration for what seemed to me their pioneering heroism. They had established, with no help and little money, in the midst of that hard rural wilderness--if but in a single room--these amenities and decencies--this core of civilization!

And they were right! Who should know it by this time--all the more since my visit to Grosbeake!--better than I? All that dignified mankind, all that kept them from the brawling and the squalor which, the night of Sue Borglum’s party, had seemed to me the universal fate, had been built up through endurance and patience, through steadiness of purpose and good faith, through property well administered, through families standing together, through lovers true to their pledges! How had I ever been taken in by that foolish and shallow philosophy of living only for the moment?--that philosophy I had learned from a woman, which was possible only for a woman, given up, by her woman’s nature, to her impulses, passions and moods! I remembered how I had once used to wonder at Rita’s constant preoccupation with death, both in her poetry and in conversation, and I could see now how such a life as Rita’s, looking always upon the image of itself, must be ridden by the terror of death, because death meant for it the end of the world.

When Daisy was in bed, Pete Bird summoned me back into the living-room, and I wrapped myself up in blankets and lay down before the fire on the couch. But the coffee had made us wakeful and we went on talking in bed. At first, we told funny stories, till we had obviously exhausted our best and had begun to fall back on second-rate ones. Then Pete regaled me with reminiscences of eccentric Greenwich Village characters who had flourished before my day--there had been one uncompromising prophet, who had made a practice of robbing fur-stores: he would hide himself among the furs at the back, till the shop had been closed for the night, then climb out with his booty, through a window: he had, however, never profited by these activities, but had given everything he stole to the poor, and had lived himself in the direst privation.

We agreed that the great days were passing. I tried to remember some of the songs which Bobby Edwards had used to sing in the restaurants. Pete, it turned out, knew them all by heart and could sing them from beginning to end. We agreed that there had been something remarkable about Bobby Edwards. I said it was the curious prestige which very clever people sometimes acquire by pretending to be stupid. Pete said that this was not quite it, because Bobby Edwards did not look stupid: the thing was that he never changed his face and consequently had everybody buffaloed.

These songs led to other songs: Pete and I finally got to the point of singing _My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean_ and _There Is a Tavern in the Town_. “I suppose this burns you up,” I said to Daisy, who had for some time been lying silent. “I suppose you want to go to sleep.” “Oh, I guess I can bear it!” she answered--then added, after a pause: “_My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean_ always reminds me of when I was a girl in Yarmouth--in Canada. My uncle used to sing it.--And he used to sing _The Girl I Left Behind Me_, too. I used to love to hearum sing that!” Her voice, as she lay in the darkness, divested of the emphasis of day, had almost the timbre of a child’s--and it moved me with the charming pathos of young girls’ voices, the pathos of frailness and freshness. “Did you come from Canada?” I asked. “I thought you came from Pittsburgh!” “My mother came from there,” she explained. “My aunt still lives up there. I used to be up there a lot when I was a kid.--Yes, I’m really just a country girl!” she said, burlesquing herself. “That’s why I take so easily to living out here. My other aunt,” she went on, after a moment’s recollection, “married some kind of a nobleman.--I always thought there must have been something wrong withum--he must have had syphilis or something. But he was a real nobleman, it seemed!”

When we were tired of singing ballads, we experimented with hymns: I rendered, with what I felt at the time was an impressive solemnity and resonance, _Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past_, and _The Starry Firmament on High_.--But the second of these was met by silence--I received no response from the bed. And when Pete and Daisy replied to my good-night, it was plain they had been asleep.

Those magnificent hymns! I went on thinking. What a first-rate poet Watts had been! And that grandeur of the universe, of the moral principle it implied--did one not feel it, also, even, in the calm complacent firmament of Addison?