Chapter VIII: Part 8

When he first arrived in Hope’s Corner for one of his visits to his brother’s family, his face would be as handsome as ever; but the contented smile would give way slowly to a look of pleading. He was afraid that one of those on the farm would accuse him of having given up the ministry for mere love of luxury and idleness; he was afraid of discovering by accident what they thought.... Knowing that his nephew Alwyn had as little taste as he for the life of poor farmers, he would talk to him by the hour about his melancholy as a widower, about his problems which were insoluble though already solved; and would be depressed by the boy’s avid, noncommittal interest, unable to judge from it what account of his avowals would be given Ralph and Marianne. Then he would go back gladly to Chicago, to his family by marriage, his family by death, among whom at any rate he was not blamed, if not highly appreciated.

In the rich house he passed the rest of his life quietly. He sometimes thought of himself as a commoner with secret liberal views in the villa of an old queen, having been married to one of the ladies-in-waiting. Still in awe of its sluggish and sumptuous power, and wistfully eager to be admired by the younger generation, such as Alwyn, he thought of dedicating it to worthy, modern causes; but he was not certain what they were, and had no authority in any case. For example, he would rouse his nephew’s interest in the large library: red leather editions, as large as dictionaries, of the Victorian poets and Shakespeare, uncut sets of George Eliot, Dr. van Dyke, and John Burroughs, and bound volumes of the best monthly magazines; but Mrs. Fielding would hide the keys of the bookcases lest a volume be “mislaid.”

As time passed he rarely spoke of anything but the Fieldings, rationalizing their prejudices, uneasily explaining and defending them, defending without explaining himself.... Alwyn saw him give up every least ambition save to go on being a good man and a gentleman, and saw a series of senseless duties invented by the ladies to discipline him, as Alwyn himself, the other farmer boy in the house, was being disciplined.

The most serious family problem during Mrs. Fielding’s later life was that of servants. The overfurnished mansion and its mistress both needed the attention of maids, seamstresses, coachmen, and janitors. As she grew older, she could not endure the presence of those whom her daughters could find to employ. Spying upon the face of a new cook, her fine, three-cornered eyes would discover a sort of modern insolence; the man who came to wax the floors would anger her by a radical smile. Present-day help had no respect for her, at least no reverence; worst of all, they regarded her requirements as the whims of an old lady who would soon be out of the way. It was as if she saw death making use of their eyes to intimidate her; and she, having death’s eyes, glared back at them, at their youth and strength which would not last even as long as hers had. Miss Anne and Miss Ada spent hours in interviewing applicants, whom she discharged in the twinkling of an eye; and finally, with great satisfaction, she reduced the members of her family to the duties of domestics.

One day a janitor, after helping himself to raspberry cordial, addressed her by the name of his former employer. Her son-in-law took his place, temporarily; but he gave satisfaction, and no other janitor was ever hired. He fed the hens, beat carpets, mowed the lawn, kept the flower beds clean and gaudy, stoked the furnaces, carried out ashes, and shoveled snow from the walks, saying that only a farmer’s son could do these things so well.

He did not seem to grow old. Organic weaknesses made their presence known by the vague melancholy of indigestion and the irritability of fatigue, but they did not insist; they were merely waiting until there should be need of them to complete his discipline. He thought, when he thought of it at all, that life with a firm, exquisite hand like that of a loving helpmate (his own) had put him in his place. He was not happy, but he was content; and when he visited the old farm, he looked back indulgently upon his ambitions: love, music, and the ministry--unwise wishes of a selfish boy.

He would have been less at ease in the farmhouse if he had remembered more clearly the morality and religion of his parents, or if he had understood his sister-in-law Marianne’s even sterner beliefs which now ruled where he had been a boy, and there prepared her children to condemn him--though she expected them to be too courteous ever to show it.

The religious atmosphere in which Alwyn grew up was inherited in large part from his grandmother Duff, though fundamentally her piety had been no more than a public attitude, assumed out of loneliness and defiance. The few people she admired were Christians, and it could never have been said that she was not as worthy of the name as they. But without any respect for the father of her children, her sorrows had grown too bitter to come under the jurisdiction of God the Father, a God of resignation and forgiveness. The steadfast refusal to surrender to either of them had given her spirit, as she had grown old, an infidel grandeur, a fortitude more stoic than Christian. Young or old, all that she had had by way of a personal religion had been a sort of poetry; its arbitrarily fixed rules happened to be Christian doctrine, but it was not at all the poetry of God--rather that of worldly dignity, disappointment, and vanity of the spirit, that of conducting herself properly and proudly.

Under the influence of this unhappy poetry, Marianne Tower’s strong, happy beliefs had been formulated: the same pattern of belief, but with peace in place of resentment, confidence instead of desperation, white where black had been--her mother’s disillusionment reversed. The very principles on which America was founded were the result; and like certain of the Pilgrims, she represented them with the competence and heedless ardor of a woman under an enchantment.

There was also about her religion, as there had been about her mother’s irreligion, a royal assurance and a slight suggestion of vainglory. She would have been willing to spread it by force, particularly in view of its importance to the nation as a whole, meanwhile coercing the doubtful with contempt and the lukewarm with enthusiasm, for lack of other sorts of authority. Like a state religion, it could not have existed without hypocrisy--plaster to hold the edifice together, many hypocrites around the few men and women of pure rock; a tribute to its power when faith--the tribute to its charm--was not forthcoming. But she did not complain of hypocrisy, preferring that people should pretend to be better than they are (which pretension is a sort of humility) than that they should acknowledge their failings and cease to be ashamed of them; and remembering that the only one of her father’s lies which her mother had never challenged was his prayer when they had knelt together on the kitchen or sitting-room floor.

Like Catholicism, her religion required adherence and obedience before faith--mere willingness to believe and reform before the unerring comprehension of God in detail. She thought that faith was a private, indeed a selfish experience which took place after a sort of sickness of curiosity about God, in a lonely bedroom, for example, with sighs and stammered prayers and many vague tears. She could imagine very well how it happened, that intellectual prodigy, there in secret. But secrecy was dangerous; in it temptations as well as God invested themselves with magic and dazzled the excited soul, the soul as vague as tears, and in it dangerous sensibilities came out as stars do in the darkness--which she had learned, indeed, to her sorrow.

So she did not overrate this or any other mystic experience, and was comparatively indifferent to the puzzles of what to believe and their theological answers. Giving herself to God meant merely being responsible for her life, her virtue, her usefulness to others and to the world as a whole--individually responsible to Him, not to the schoolmasters of faith, pastors or priests. Therefore she had to consider and believe only those doctrines which could help her to recognize her duties and overcome the discouragement which was almost the only temptation she ever encountered. It was sacrilegious to worry about the rest; only a bad scholar would turn to the back of the book to hunt for answers, or to play with problems which he could not yet profitably solve. Kept busy by divine forces--conjugal passion, poverty, good health and illness, motherhood--engaged not in fathoming God’s opinions but in the illustration of those she knew instinctively, she did not find much time to gaze in the direction of His face, or to wonder what human face it resembled.

Thus, though Protestantism is a branch of Christianity founded upon faith, Marianne Tower, like most American Protestants in this respect, was entirely concerned with works: with severities, kindnesses, abstinences, successes, which all the world could see; with prayers and testimonies which all the world could hear and understand; with sin instead of heresy, reform instead of repentance; with serving more than with loving God.

Her love of God was principally a sort of grateful admiration, and admiration for reasons which would have entitled other gods to a share in it. Doubting as little as poets and children do, she believed every miracle of virtue she heard about, no matter by what religious principles, with what sort of divine guidance, it had come to pass. Therefore she would have honored any god who, to her knowledge, was arrayed in the esteem of entire races, upon whom as on a corner stone families were founded, and by whom public morals were regulated. But her knowledge was limited by church magazines and tracts which libeled the religions of the countries to which missionaries were sent (the executives and propagandists of American Christianity having realized, perhaps, that it harbored the germs of polytheism); and she knew no other god but God, in whose veins there was Jewish blood--God of clean and respectable living, innocent thought, and industry.

One day when Alwyn had come back from school, full of what he had learned about heathen religions from other sources of information than hers, and was sitting on top of the flour barrel in the pantry where she was at work, he said that he did not believe in missionaries going to foreign lands to lead races away from their own deities and undermine the culture and customs which suited them.

She asked, “Tell me, Alwyn, are you beginning to lose your faith? Don’t you believe in God?” In the beginning she had hoped that he would become a minister.

“I do, mother,” he said, with a vague sense of being courageous. “But I don’t want Him to-- I don’t know, I’m not sure--that He isn’t the same as the others.”

Gazing into his eyes, she did not need to be told that he spoke of another god than God. She shed tears, wiped them away, and threw back her head. “Well, my son,” she said, “we shall see if your God can do for you what mine has done for me.”

Touched and troubled, Alwyn asked himself if in reality he had a god of his own, what help he needed, what help she had received; and in his confusion, he preferred to think of her beliefs....

Her religion--perhaps, Alwyn thought, American Christianity as a whole--was a religion of ideal prose; all the beauty it had was the elegance of a perfect law, a Napoleonic code. It deified Jesus, but deified Him as a social leader and teacher martyred for His virtue, a compassionate attorney at the right hand of God the judge, and a fulfillment of the half-political prophecies of the Old Testament--whose jurisprudence of hygiene, family relations, patriotism, and commerce, its morality resembled.

Even Alwyn’s mother was confused, in teaching her children, about the meaning of Christ’s strange parables. Perhaps He had not been a success as a teacher, not having laid down one precept which did not require interpretation before it could serve as a basis for conduct, or given one example whose significance could not be mistaken. But His ravishing voice was still more persuasive, not only to children but to herself, than the voices of those indecent, vindictive, but comprehensible men of genius, the Jews who had come before Him. So when she closed the Bible and continued in her own words, it was to repeat the Old Testament moral lesson (subtly modified by more civilized feeling, by changing customs, by a pure woman’s refinement, and by her nearly superstitious respect for education), but as if it had originated upon His lips.

In spite of its complex origins, her morality was not at all ambiguous. She believed that money was the result of ability, and was in itself an ability or talent (the money which in Christ’s parable the master had given his servants to multiply had actually been called talents). It was power for good; to waste even the smallest piece of it meant wasting potential charity, educational opportunities, and at its source, the dignity by which God’s kingdom on earth ought to be supported, made known, even advertised. More of it than could be spent painstakingly, painfully, she regarded with suspicion. An ardent desire for success proved the sincerity of one’s efforts, whatever they were--but Christ had failed; therefore, once any sort of success had been achieved, she regarded it suspiciously as well, and judged it by its fruits, which ought to be very nearly those of failure: humility, self-denial, pity for others.

She believed the human body to be sacred. Therefore all those things which disagree with it, or change its reactions and way of functioning--deforming shoes and clothes, alcohol, excess of other sorts of food and drink, idleness--were sacrilegious. Good health was the body’s virtue; and it also was a talent of the capital lent by the Master.

According to her, love, often as automatic in its influence as a drug, often wasteful of time, health, and money, existed only to bring men and women together in marriage. Trees and plants, because they had no responsible souls, had the right to put forth more flowers than fruit; but for men and women even one kiss given in vain laid waste the heart and blighted the fruit of the fruit-bearing kiss of marriage. Marriage existed to people the continent with witnesses for the Lord, who gave it--no, who lent it.

When she spoke of the continent of America to her children, it was as another talent, like the ability to sing or speak fluently, to tame animals or govern men or children. Alwyn saw it then in his imagination, a fantastic bird’s-eye view: lying by a miracle between the disastrous North and the sickening tropics; a vast mass of wood, fur, grains, metals, flesh, fish, fruit, electricity, and inspiration; flooded with milk and syrup; smelling of unemployed fertility; stained with rivers and refuse and the blood of the early settlers; rising into the sky in the West in young, red, weather-beaten wrinkles and wounds (and when the first missionaries saw the Rockies they named them the Blood of Christ Mountains).... A talent that a whole race had, just as an individual might have a talent for mathematics; and whatever the others were, it would always be the principal talent of Americans, as long as it lasted. Lent, not given; to be guarded and risked and multiplied and used to the glory of God, the owner.

Alwyn, thinking of what he had learned about history and its classifications, said to himself that his mother, though only a poor farmer’s wife, might be called an aristocrat. The lowest classes serving the whole of society (that is, the state) out of hunger and servility--but these did not count in America, where almost no one was hungry. The upper classes also serving it, to amuse themselves and to gain their ends of vanity and glory, usually bound up with the destiny of the state; prodigal enough to give away their sons, therefore making soldiers, priests, men of letters, orators, figureheads of them. The middle classes serving only themselves, bringing up sons in the interest of the family fortunes, seducing the sons of others if they had none of their own--the Fieldings were people of that sort. He thought of his uncle Jim among them, as timid as the last heir of a branch of deposed royalty--ashamed of its poverty and fanaticism, himself without either heirs or pretensions--in their grudgingly hospitable, merchant prince’s palace....

Then Alwyn thought (and it may have been the vanity he had inherited from his grandmother Duff which suggested it to him) that perhaps America’s only aristocracy existed--not among millionaires, trying to earn money and get the most out of money as if they were still poor--but in poor homes in the country, in the strong, ignorant imaginations of such women as his mother and grandmothers, who had a sense of responsibility to God before the nation, to the nation (though they had little to gain by its glory, little to lose by its ignominy) before the family, and to the family only before themselves; aristocratic because of a vague sense of having had actually aristocratic grandparents, many times removed, and because their religion happened to be public rather than private, putting good behavior above the joys and pains of faith, judging private virtue by the public good.... Thus Alwyn began to make his peace with the tormenting sense of having come down in the world, which was his birthright as a Tower.

It was true in any case that his grandmother Tower had been proud to give to the world her most gifted son, Jim, all that she could afford to give, and that his mother wanted to give all her children. The latter would say, “I sometimes think that I am like a stalk bearing a great many flowers, almost more than it can bear; when they get ready to open, perhaps it will break--I shall be willing. All your father and I will need in our old age will be a place to lie down to rest forever. I am giving my life for you children in order that you may give your lives to others....” She spoke as if she herself and her children had royal obligations to some sort of kingdom, and did so not merely out of maternal vanity, but because of her religion.

Perhaps, properly speaking, it was not a religion at all, but the jurisprudence of a moral commonwealth. She had no need for anything else after her marriage. Intimate emotions which seemed to her sacred, took the place of specifically religious exercises. Thanks to the former, she was not spiritually impoverished or chilled by a faith which was all ethics (as those whose lives were more placid, more prosperous, and less rich, might have been); so she was the perfect Protestant.

Alwyn’s uncle, the minister, felt this. During one of his visits Alwyn heard him say to his father: “Ralph, your wife is a saint on earth. We have been peculiarly blessed. Caroline was, too, while she lived.” Hearing his dead aunt called a saint as well, Alwyn was jealous for his mother.

It was in regard to him that her judgment upon spiritual matters showed itself as most evidently superior to that of her mother-in-law, who had no patience with hair-splitting, resented disapproval of Jim, and pronounced him perfect, though his way of life did pass her understanding. Alwyn’s mother was the more thoughtful of the two, and her beliefs had crystallized while teaching them to her children; whereas in the hard early days his grandmother had had little time to think, and had been able to teach her children only by means of the old belt without a buckle behind the kitchen door. Their differences of opinion were more important than profound, being merely those between taking for granted and knowing logically one and the same thing, between roughness and refinement in its expression, between one generation and that which followed it. They were particularly important to Alwyn, because it was his mother’s reasonable version of the faith of his fathers--more suitable to his nature because he was above all his mother’s son--which determined in large part the beliefs for which eventually he was to desert that faith altogether.

He enjoyed even her injustice toward his uncle Jim, for example, because at a time in his life when all that was inarticulate seemed merely stupid, and when opinions had more charm than they were ever to have again, a certain intolerance proved how faultless her opinions were. So he soon found himself obliged to agree with her about the minister, whom, because he was courteous, handsome, wealthy, and well educated, he instinctively preferred to his other relatives.

In fact, she blamed her brother-in-law less than she pitied him, blaming him only to point a moral for the children whom she was going to send out in the world as he had been sent. For their sake she insisted on the fact that he had wasted his opportunities, and exchanged the family birthright of anxiety, ambition, and loneliness, for the comfortable approval of a family that was not even his own. If music was his true calling, the sort of divine persuasion for which he was better fitted than for argument and prayer, he should not have given in to his father’s and brother’s disapproval. Having undertaken to be a preacher, he should not have ceased for the sake of domestic convenience. Coming from a poor family as its gift to the world and having retired from the ministry, he should have found something better to do than to indulge a rich family’s vanity and serve its petty needs.

In general she preferred the appearance of perfection and unity in the least distinguished lives to noble qualities--such as the self-control and self-sacrifice, devotion to the dead, and generosity, which Jim displayed--haphazardly thrown together in a life which seemed to have developed along the line of least resistance; and had no doubt that her husband, without great intelligence or any pretensions, was the greater man of the two. Furthermore, it was a Christian’s duty to give, not merely a good example, but one which could not be misinterpreted, which did not require explanations to be made by those who loved him, allowances by those who did not. Simple integrity was a duty as well as a source of happiness....

Alwyn himself, as scrupulous at least as his mother, did not want any religious faith compromised by devious individual behavior, and did not want to consent to one himself which he was likely to have to compromise. Immoderate like other Americans, other adolescents, he already believed in extreme positions and deliberate apostasy--not in accidental reaction, nor in vague decadence of the old toward the new. He was quite ready to reject, for himself, his family’s beliefs, but not on the basis of any less perfect embodiment than his mother’s life; it would indeed have been unfair to judge his uncle’s ideals by his representation of them.

Then the problem of formulating a set of beliefs which would be in harmony with as many of his instincts as were ineradicable (as his mother’s beliefs seemed to be with all her instincts) troubled him and gave him pleasure; and during his adolescence, many religions seemed to burst vaguely into bloom at once in his imagination.

He had learned that God was one and uniform; he felt that He was legion. “Thou shalt have no other gods before me....” He believed that he had seen the others already, under ordinary circumstances, very slightly disguised by the lives of ordinary men and women such as his relatives--thorough and shameless, as deaf to interruption, as busy as death.... They came to his attention also by way of pictures and books: the splendor of devout savages as he had heard about it, the bitter-sweet nobility of extinct races, the Greeks, for example, as it had been written about. “Thou shalt have no other gods....” And he fancied himself in love with them all.

He had learned that God, who created man, was the lesson man was to learn long after by his painful experiments, mistakes, misery, and contentment; the body of knowledge of what for most people in ordinary walks of life is likely to result from this or that course of action; God handed down from father to son, mother to son; God the law. Alwyn felt that He was also the breaking of the law. At any rate he had already formed a vague resolution to break it; could he break it as well as his mother had kept it?

Naturally timid, he realized that even to be an outlaw, a more or less effective exception, would require more strength than, by himself, he would have. “We shall see, my son, if your God can help you....” And if his God were gods? Would not his life, if he committed himself to them all, be a sort of Tower of Babel in which the divine workmen would merely dispute among themselves in all their tongues, and accomplish nothing? Each had power; had they any power in common? Could they, together, do what one of them could do--what, for his mother, one of them had done?

For her religion had indeed brought about a miracle of energy and peace; it was also true that marriage had made her religion what it was then. As mere doctrine it had been a birthright and a dowry; her husband, who had no talent for thought, had added nothing to it. But the evenly passionate years had changed its bearing upon experience, and as a method of living, it had been a sort of marriage settlement.

She not only believed, but felt, as by a physical instinct, that the curtain of death would not go down upon her drama of love; a drama of two characters with their children and their children’s children--by virtue of heredity and immortality the cast would never be changed. And when she compared it--its dignity of citizenship, its perfect and tender monotony, the brightness somehow continually shed upon its humble scene--with her girlhood, the latter seemed to have been a melodrama of insubstantial puppets, agitated by a hand which had trembled for many reasons, and for no reason at all.

The motives of that melodrama had been dread of the future (and now that she was a mother, each moment was very naturally the child of the one before); servile dependence upon others, her angry parents, for example (and now the entire world outside the four walls of her home might have been destroyed without leaving her in despair); loneliness (and she had given birth to children enough to begin a new race, companions for her on earth and in heaven); and the obscure need of emotions, caresses, pride, pain (and now, day for day, she was scarcely equal to the feast of feeling which was her daily bread).... So contented was she that, in retrospect, she regarded the thoughts of her girlhood as other women regard the dolls whose mothers they have pretended to be.

And marriage had swept away, with the mist of sadness, her springtime mysticism, which had been an imaginary communication (as it were by messages, signals, and amorous glances) with what was beyond understanding. Now, in the person of her husband, what was beyond understanding lived in her simple house; she slept within reach of its strong, however tired arms. Mystery was in God the equivalent of passion; from time to time it had taken (and would take) possession of her. But she would no more have thought of trying to rouse or control it--even by curiosity, speculation, or yearning--than if it had been a man’s passion; she did not even ask of the moody lover whom she had married the right to say yes or no. Thus all that was enigmatic in religion--the bitter effort to fathom God’s apparent indifference, to accept the evil which He permitted, the amorous effort to have the truth naked of its disguises, to reach the point where mortal desire leaves off and serene, immortal satiety begins--gradually wrapped itself in the same pure shame and darkness which hid away her marriage bed. Those riddles were for the sorrowful--the disappointed and disabled and victimized; as such at least she, when merely the Duffs’ daughter and Paul Fairchild’s fiancée, had been faced with them.

Paul Fairchild might never have existed; Ralph’s great hand, at its first touch, had obliterated the traces of him in her mind. Until she came to tell that story as a lesson to her grown children, she did not try to explain even to herself the evil rôle he had played in her youth; then, disdainfully overlooking his failings, she concluded that her own subservience had been at fault. Nor did her father, the diabolic, pitiful old man to whom she was as devoted as she could be, trouble her otherwise than practically. Thus it happened that out of her theory of life, as out of a picture (warm white on white against white) the devil, like a black shadow, had faded.

This was love’s negative work. Positively, it gave her strength and kept her young. (Indeed, it kept them both, and their love-making, young; for twenty years the farmhouse was electric with it; and even the youngest of their children grew up in the fragrant, restless atmosphere of a new marriage, as if in the heart of the lightning which cools a midsummer night in Wisconsin.) Repeatedly with child, a number of illnesses obviously in abeyance, thin and no taller than her children when they were adolescents, able to afford hired help only when actually ill--no one understood her vitality. On certain days, without warning, it would be exhausted; then, her face for the moment the color of old age, her voice dreamy, her quickened breathing scarcely to be divided into words, she would find herself unable to work, and would creep away to rest. Perhaps lying with her eyes closed all afternoon in the empty bed, she would draw strength there from her companion, who would be far off in the woods or fields among his little wild beasts and great domestic animals....

Ralph, a child even in manhood, and a child of nature, drew strength from those animals, from the land, from heat and cold, from physical experiences--but drew his spiritual strength from her. If obliged to think of any complex problem, he suffered from pains in his forehead; she thought for him. He was timid and conservative; all his abilities would have been handicapped by a deaf pessimism, but for her thoughtful speech which charmed him into action--that of being a good father, farmer, and citizen--charmed him like a sort of cheerful music. His passions were entangled in and blinded by melancholy; at the end of a few months of an unhappy marriage, one or the other--desire or discouragement--would have left him no better than a heavy, broken-hearted animal. A Christian as it was, without her help he would have been unable to conceive God except as a father’s tyranny, or as violent pleasure, or death. The light, steady wave of her character breaking constantly upon his temperament had worn away its roughness, given it brightness and another sort of distinction than its own: that of the wrath and force of instincts mixed with intellectual gentleness, that of animality the heart of which has been touched and not broken. Incompatibility of the sort which puts an end to fugitive affections was the basis of their permanent and essentially religious devotion to each other. Each, like a portion of a circle, found in the other what was needed to balance and perfect himself. Trait for trait, each was strong where the other was weak; each was the opposite of the other--an opposite as symmetrical as that between man and woman physically. The good-tempered years, as they passed, brought about an interweaving not only of their interests and affections, but their characteristics. Death, to take one of them, would have had to leave a part of that one behind, or mutilate the other to carry off its momentary share of the two, inextricably married.

This process, this mystery, constituted at last the family’s one enduring mysticism. Schooled by the discipline which in Marianne’s hands Christianity had become, her children were to inherit, as if it were a religion, a theory of love, which would probably be interpreted by them in terms of various religions, various kinds of good and bad behavior, and which, changing its form but keeping its vitality--as in transmigration a vast, vague soul, typically American--would probably be heard of for some time to come.

During one of Alwyn’s summer holidays he went with his parents to a Methodist camp meeting on the other side of the county. He and his mother drove a single horse, his father following in a carriage with the little girls; and they stopped for the noonday meal with a family of friends. There was a newborn baby in the house, and his mother shed tears as she held it in her arms.

When they were alone again, moving swiftly through the dust between the cloudy fields of timothy and waves of turning grain, he asked, “Why did you cry?”

“Because I want another baby.” At that time she knew that for accidental physical reasons she would not be a mother again. “I shall be glad when I am a grandmother, with your little ones at my knees. Before very long, you know....”

It was the first time she had noticed that he was almost a grown man, and he knew that he should be proud, but was embarrassed. “The people I pity most on earth,” she added, “are your uncle Jim and old Mrs. Fielding and her daughters. I don’t see how a woman can be religious without children.”

They reached their destination. The annual revival took place in a grove, along the edge of a deep ravine where, it was said, there had been rattlesnakes. On the camp grounds there were dormitories for men and for women, hidden from each other by a thicket; the auditorium, a sort of vast wooden tent; a dingy hall in which meals were served; and a number of cottages rented by particularly devout and prosperous families. There were quoits played with horseshoes by the old men, and exercises of physical prowess for the young in sweaty shirt sleeves and cloth caps too small for their heads. Between meetings the speakers, among whom were several bishops, balanced in rocking chairs beside their wives on the various porches. Certain rough but quite unexceptionable young couples played in the mossy gorge, the male faces red with the summer and with excitement, the girls disheveled and gay. A number of dry, gentle women tried to occupy everyone with Bible classes and games. This was one of the fountainheads of western Protestantism, and epitomized its mean amenities, its lack of mystery, its vast, somewhat emasculate, but primitive power.

Alwyn sat on a bench between his parents during the afternoon service. His uncle, the minister, had been expected to join them there; he had not come, presumably for family reasons. The hymns were miserable; he had heard one of the tunes in Chicago in a cheap theater.

Then a little man limped forward on the platform draped with flags. He was the founder and director of a school for lumberjacks in the north woods near Lake Superior, where Alwyn’s father had gone to hunt. In the simplest words he talked of his students, great brutes of all races, few of whom could read or write; how they worked by night in the basement of the little building making cement blocks, both to pay their individual expenses and to support the school; how their hard hearts were touched by love of the Lord; how, for lack of room, equipment, and funds, many had to be turned away. Then, tears shining on his sharp, lonely, cripple’s face, he recited: “The desert shall rejoice, and blossom as a rose.... Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart; for in the wilderness shall streams break out.... And an highway shall be there, and it shall be called the way of holiness--wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein.... No lion shall be there, nor any ravenous beast.... Sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”

Alwyn had never seen nor heard so moving a man. He compared him with the family minister, his uncle Jim; but almost in shame, he wished that he were beside the latter in the great, odious city mansion, rather than where he was; and suddenly thought of him not only with a certain lack of respect but with profound gratitude--he scarcely knew why....

There followed a testimony meeting. Most of the statements of faith were made by women and by men of the clergy, men poorly paid to do so, speaking for others or for others’ sake; most of them had evidently been made before, the very old, intoxicating, weak words falling into place as one expected, with a sound of satisfaction. Suddenly Alwyn’s father stood up beside him.

Alwyn trembled; he never knew what his emotion was--ignoble embarrassment, or terror of something present and invisible which was scarcely his friend, or the shock of intimacy with him who had, that which had, begotten him....

He saw his father gaze at his mother, as if she were all that the universe contained. His mother had forgotten herself and his father; she was quite pale, and made somehow homely by her humility. Alwyn saw her gaze back at his father, and realized that she believed that with eyes accustomed to fields, horizons, and deep woods, more farsighted than hers--he was looking at God.

His father’s voice shook. He said, “I know that my Redeemer liveth,” and sat down.

12. His Uncle Evan, the Deserter

When Alwyn was seven years old a man came to visit his grandmother, a rancher from New Mexico whose name was John Craig. He ran his brown finger in and out of the small boy’s hair and along his eyebrows, saying, “I had an uncle whose forehead was like that.”

Alwyn’s grandmother bent over him to see. “So it was,” she said.

He came again just before the death of Alwyn’s grandfather, and spent four or five afternoons at the farm, during which the old man stayed in the garden, not even coming to the house for his medicine or his usual nap on the sofa: apparently he did not like the stranger. Alwyn’s father seemed to have known him a long time, but not well; and they both seemed embarrassed, as if, under circumstances unknown to the boy, they ought to have liked each other perhaps more, perhaps less.

The stranger brought the children expensive presents. He was well dressed, and wore two rings on his delicate but calloused hands--one silver Indian ring and one set with a piece of onyx on which was carved a cupid astride a fish. His face had an appearance of weariness and controlled excitement: lean and smiling, but smiling only around his mouth--the eyes, with brown upper lids drawn tight across them, never ceased moving about the room or over the countryside, watchfully but without anxiety. He walked with a loose-jointed motion, and Alwyn’s grandmother said, “That is a regular horseback walk!”

Late in the afternoon she took her guest to the cemetery to see the new headstone on the grave of her two dead little girls. Alwyn stayed behind with his mother. “Who is Mr. Craig?” he asked.

His mother hesitated for a moment. “I don’t know why you shouldn’t be told. You are old enough now to keep the family secrets. You have heard us all speak of your father’s younger brother Evan--he is Mr. Craig. He changed his name.”

The small boy had never in his life been so astonished. He stared in the direction his grandmother and the stranger had gone, down the road toward the cemetery, staring over the head of the little old man in the garden who was the stranger’s father, but would not speak to him. “Why did he change his name?” he cried.

His mother told him the little that she had been told; but he did not understand it very well, and years were to pass before he actually found out why. After his grandmother’s death he went to New Mexico, and his uncle John Craig became a more intimate friend than his father had been able to be. This fact amused and touched the lonely, extraordinary man, for he himself had loved his uncle Leander more than his father.

During Evan’s boyhood--before anyone had dreamed of such a man as John Craig, though his father often prophesied for him a disgraceful future--Leander Tower, in the “old bachelor’s wing” of the house, led an idle and, to everyone but his youngest nephew, insignificant existence. Because he knew that the family would have been suffering extreme poverty but for his financial assistance, his brother’s evident scorn of his way of life did not embarrass him. His sister-in-law was devoted to his comfort--it was a long-established habit to love him; but the shadow that was left of his character, if she had met him then for the first time, would scarcely have attracted her attention, as in the community it attracted no attention at all. Only Evan took refuge in that shadow from the pain of being misunderstood, the fatigue of adolescence which is more painful though less serious than a man’s fatigue, and from his other troubles as they arose.

When Evan entered his room, interrupting his melancholy recollections, the old bachelor looked up with tender interest but no more eagerness. Another unhappy boy coming into the room, a third youngster coming into his life--he wanted neither to shut this one out nor to keep him there. “Sit down, my boy. What’s the trouble now?”

“He called me a loafer because I came in from the field half an hour before supper.”

“He” always meant his father. The relations between these two were going from bad to worse. The angrier Evan became the keener were his retorts, and there was something insulting about his eyes. He spoke in defense of things his father feared, criticized things which were all but sacred, and never wanted to go to church. The farm work always made him unhappy, and sometimes made him sick; he had to run away to the woods, for example, at butchering time. Whenever he spoke of running away altogether, he was pleased and tempted by the fact that his father looked afraid, grew more gentle, and talked of the evil and hardship of great cities. Their anger sobered the whole family for days at a time, as if it were sickness in the house. His mother whipped him once or twice, but he would not cry out, and said, “Why don’t you let him do his own whipping?”--which took away her courage.

“He called me a lazy rascal,” the boy complained to his uncle with an air of resentful satisfaction, as if, detail by detail, he were giving evidence to convict his father of a crime--the usual crime of fathers. “I plowed all day and my head ached. Ma wouldn’t listen when I told her.”

“Yes, yes, I see. Your mother is the finest woman I ever knew. Your pa ... You’ll find out some day, whether you like it or not, that you’re a chip off the old block. He always thought I was good for nothing. Maybe I was.”

He did not reproach the boy nor tell him what, on a given occasion, he ought to have done; a boy’s ignorance was a sort of wisdom, to which an unsuccessful old man could add nothing that would be useful. But little by little, as if his disappointment spoke with its own voice, against his will, he told Evan how he himself had lived and what he thought about life. He did not imagine that anyone could profit by that story, but it would distract the boy’s attention for a few hours from his monotonous, half-imaginary, immature troubles.

In this way Evan came to know the young Rose Hamilton better than he knew his mother, Hilary and his cousin Timothy better than his own brothers. As an adolescent invariably does, he envied Leander his distress and disappointment--they were experience at least; and there was no place for them in present day Wisconsin so far as he could see. His lucky brother Jim had had a chance to get away, the only chance there was in that family.... And he felt himself drawn, as a lover to a series of rendezvous, toward the places where his own life must have been waiting for him, though he had no idea where they were and scarcely cared what it was to be.

Thus Leander shaped this boy’s character as he had wanted to shape Timothy’s, as he might have shaped Hilary’s. But he had failed so often to exercise the power of his affection that he scarcely realized what was happening; in any case, he was now too old to take pleasure in it. He scarcely took notice of the breakdown in Evan’s mind of certain moral principles--for example, superstitious respect of law and order, love of work for its own sake, and, in a measure, the fear of God; but the boy’s father grew more and more suspicious of them both. Henry Tower had no power over his weak brother, but he had a right to determine that, while Evan was a minor living in his house, he should not have his own way about anything.

Then the newspapers brought to Wisconsin an account of the sinking of the _Maine_. Evan’s mother flung out her arms with a curious gesture, and cried, “Now we’ll have another war!”

She saw her son sitting round-shouldered over the papers every night and knew what he was making up his mind to do, but was afraid to speak of it, since he was a Tower--lest opposition give him the courage she hoped he would lack. War against Spain was declared.

Evan did not yet know what it was to be afraid. He came in to dinner one day after the others were seated, and stood behind his chair. “I’m going to enlist,” he said.

His hands gripped the chair-back as if it were a weapon, as if he might have to fight his way out of the room. His brother Ralph sighed, thinking perhaps of the harder work that would be left for him to do. His mother covered her face with a corner of her apron.

His uncle muttered, “Don’t you let him go, Henry.”

His father answered, “You ought to be ashamed, Leander. A boy can’t do a finer thing than serve his country. We need him on the farm, but we’ll have to get along.”

Evan did enlist. He enjoyed the months of novelty and excitement before they disembarked in a Cuban harbor. There the stale-smelling sea splashed over rocks and rotten wood. The large vegetation which was on top kept swelling while that which was underneath rotted. The sun was very yellow. He was lonely, but avoided the other men half involuntarily, and wanted to sleep more than ever before. At first he thought it was a fever about to begin, drank whisky, and took large doses of quinine, as he was advised to do; but he learned that he was sick only at heart.

One night he stood just above the level of the sea which glittered in front of the moon, at the corner of two roads full of ruts, between a high wall and a low wall, both crumbling away. He was thinking, it is time to get back to the barracks.... There was a lump in his throat as he remembered the leave-taking in Wisconsin.

Henry Tower had placed his hard hands on Evan’s shoulders, which were well above his own. “Don’t you forget,” he had said, “that five of your folks fought in the last war. You’re a strong boy; it won’t hurt you. Never turn back, whatever happens.” The light in his eyes had resembled, but had been too shining to be, that of affection.

Evan’s mother had come out of the kitchen where she had been crying quietly, and embraced him with great dignity, as if sending a son away to war were a ceremonial part of her womanly destiny, like a wedding or a funeral. Her air of pride and resignation had made him feel the impersonality of maternal love--he was only one of her sons, doing what she had given him birth to do. That night in Cuba, in the weak moonlight, Evan smiled a little bitterly, as one who has scarcely known his own mother smiles at mothers in general. “Be a good soldier,” she had said.

He wondered what his uncle was doing. Perhaps watching that same three-quarters moon, which looked full of milk like a breast; all alone in his room, perhaps, scribbling letters that he never mailed, or pretending to read. Evan’s mother had written that he had been sick in bed after the boy’s departure, and now planned to go to California; perhaps he was already on his way.

On that last morning in Wisconsin, Leander had preferred not to stand with the others around the horse and buggy; so Evan had gone to his room to say good-by. “Well, my boy,” he had said, “now you’re a soldier, as I was. It’s a good thing that you’re going alone, not with one of your brothers, the way I did. Write to your father sometimes as well as to your mother; it’ll be hard on him while you’re away, thinking maybe he hasn’t been a good father to you....”

A palm tree which leaned over one of the walls made a gesture of blessing Evan with its many-fingered hands. Over the other wall in regular breaths came the air of a garden, and up from the seashore, now loud and now faint, as it were a concertina in drunken hands, the singing of sailors....

Leander had talked a long time, somewhat like an old schoolmaster. Before going back to the barracks, Evan wanted to remember all he had said. “Well, maybe it’s good-by altogether for us. I’m getting old and my usefulness is over. You’ll live to see great days, the twentieth century--maybe everything will be different then. Be friendly, but not too friendly, and keep strong. And don’t get to doing things you don’t really want to do. And when you’ve made a mistake, and things go against you, and you can’t help it, don’t be ashamed to run away and leave them. Don’t be ashamed to do whatever you’ve got to do....”

Those were the words he had used, or very nearly his words. “Start all over again. You can, as long as you’re alone in the world. That’s my advice.”

No more time to remember. The barracks.... For a moment Evan thought he was homesick; no, it could not be that. He was not lonesome for Ralph or his mother; he was glad to be far away from his father. All his old uncle could give him was advice: how to live when he was away from his family, how to live by himself. “Don’t be ashamed to run away and leave things....” He wondered what he ought to do, what he genuinely wanted to do, and what he was going to be able to do.

For he had begun to hate the war, though he had seen nothing of it but barracks, horse stables to be cleaned, unemployed guns, and saloons--no horror, no rage, and no death. Why did he hate it? He tried desperately to think, but his mind, like a little mirror, only reflected its own desperation, ridiculous desperation.... He smiled at himself, but bit his lips until they bled.

The Americans, he thought, had no business to be there: it was a foreign country; it was the South. He had been told that they were there only to help in a war for liberty, because they loved liberty. But even if that were true, it meant interfering in a family quarrel, as if a stranger had come to his home in Wisconsin to help him hurt and defy his father.