He told me that, when his wife was alive and he was in his study, absorbed in his books, taking notes, lost in thought as one might say, preparing to write his book on values that was to be his magnum opus, she used to come in there.
She would come in, put one arm about his neck, lean over him, kiss him, and with the other hand would punch him in the stomach.
He said she used to drag him out and make him play croquet on the lawn or help with the garden. It was her money, he said, that had built the house.
He said she always called him an old stick.
“Come on, you old stick, kiss me, make love to me,” she said to him sometimes. “You aren’t much good to me or anyone, but you’re all I’ve got.” She would have people in, worlds of people, just anyone. When the house was full of people and the scholar, that little wide-eyed man, was standing about among them, rather confused, trying, in the midst of the hubbub, to hang onto his thoughts on the subject of values, remembering the far dim reaches of thought that occasionally came to him when he was alone . . . In him a feeling that all of man’s notions of values, particularly in America, had got distorted, “perverted,” he said, and that, when he was alone, when his wife and the people she was always dragging into the house did not disturb him—he had a feeling sometimes, at moments, when he was undisturbed thus, that persistent mind of his reaching out, himself impersonal, untouched . . . “I almost thought sometimes,” he said, “that I had got something.”
“There was,” he said, “a kind of divine balance to all values to be found.”
You got, to be sure, the crude sense of values that every one understands, values in land, money, possessions.
Then you got more subtle values, feeling coming in.
You got a painting, let us say by Rembrandt, selling to a rich man for fifty thousand dollars.
That is enough money to raise a dozen poor families, add some fifty or sixty citizens to the State.
The citizens being, let us say, all worthy men and women, without question of value to the State, producers, let us say.
Then you got the Rembrandt painting, hanging on a wall, say in some rich man’s house, he having people into his house. He would stand before the painting.
He would brag about it as though he had himself painted it.
“I was pretty shrewd to get it at all,” he would say. He would tell how he got it. Another rich man had been after it.
He talked about it as he might have talked about getting control of some industry by a skillful maneuver in the stock market.
* * *
Just the same it, the painting, was, in some way, adding a kind of value to that rich man’s life.
It, the painting, was hanging on his wall, producing by hanging there nothing he could put his fingers on, producing no food, no clothes, nothing at all in the material world.
He himself being essentially a man of the material world. He had got rich being that.
Just the same . . .
* * *
My acquaintance, the scholar, wanted to be very just. No, that wasn’t it. He said he wanted truth.
His mind reached out. He got hold of things a little sometimes, or thought he did. He took notes, he prepared to write his book.
* * *
He adored his wife and sometimes, often, he said he hated her. She used to laugh at him. “Your old values,” she said. It seems he had been on that subject for years. He used to read papers before philosophical societies and afterward they were printed in little pamphlets by the societies. No one understood them, not even perhaps his fellow-philosophers, but he read them aloud to his wife.
“Kiss me, kiss me hard,” she would say. “Do it now. Don’t wait.”
He wanted to kill her sometimes, he said. He said he adored her.
* * *
She died. He was alone. He was bitterly lonely sometimes.
People, remembering his wife, came for a time to see him, but he was cold with them. It was because he was absorbed in thought. They talked to him and he replied absent-mindedly. “Yes, that’s so. Perhaps you’re right.” Remarks of that kind.
Wanting them just the same, he said.
* * *
Then, he said, the flood came. He said you couldn’t account for floods.
“What’s the use talking of balance?” he asked. “There is no balance.”
* * *
He couldn’t account for what happened during the Summer of that sabbatical year. He had a theory about life. I had heard it before.
“Everything in life comes in surges, floods, really. There is a whole city, thousands, even millions of people in it,” he said.
“They are all, let us say, dull; they are all stupid; they are coarse and crude.
“All of them have become bored with life; they are full of hatreds for each other.
“It is not only cities. Whole nations are like that sometimes.
“How else are you to account for wars?
“And then there are other times when whole neighborhoods, whole cities, whole nations become something else. They are all irreligious, and then suddenly, without any cause any one has ever understood, ever perhaps can understand, they become religious. They are proud and they become humble, full of hatred and then suddenly filled with love.
“The individual, trying to assert himself against the mass, always without success, is drowned in a flood.
“There is a lifetime of work and thought washed away thus.
“There are these little tragedies. Are they tragedies or are they merely amusing?”
He, my friend the scholar, was seeking, as I have said, a kind of impersonal delicate balance on the subject of values.
That, in solitude, to be transcribed into words. His book, that was to be his magnum opus, the work of a lifetime justified.
There was no wife to bother him now by dragging people into the house.
There was no wife to say, “Come on, old stick, kiss me quick, now, while I want your kisses.
“Get this, get what I have to offer you while I have it to offer.”
That sort of thing, of course, pitching him down off his mountain top of thought, thump.
He having to struggle for days afterwards, trying to get back up there again.
In his thinking he had, alone that Summer in his house, almost achieved the thing, the perfect balance of thought.
He said he struggled all through the Winter, Spring and early Summer. For years no one had come to see him.
Then suddenly his wife’s sister, a younger sister, came. She hadn’t even written him for a year, and then she telegraphed she was coming that way. It seems she was driving in a car, going to some place; he couldn’t remember where.
She brought a young woman, a cousin, with her. The cousin, like his wife’s sister, was another frivolous one.
And then the scholar’s brother came. He was a big boastful youngish man who was in business.
He only came to stay a day or two, but, like the scholar, he had lost his wife. He was attracted to the two young women.
He stayed on and on because of them. They may have stayed on and on because of him.
He was a man who had a big car. He brought other men into the house.
Suddenly the scholar’s house was filled with men and women. There was a good deal of gin-drinking.
There was a flood of people. The scholar’s brother brought in a phonograph and wanted to install a radio.
There were dances in the evening.
Even the old housekeeper caught it. She had always been rather quiet, a staid, sad old woman. One evening the scholar said, after a day, during the afternoon of which he had struggled and struggled, alone in his room, the door shut, sound coming in nevertheless, coarse sounds, he said, sound of women’s laughter, men’s voices.
He said the two young women who had come there and who he believed had stayed because of his brother—he having stayed because of them—the two had met other people of the town. They filled his h
ouse with people.
He had, however, almost got something he was after in spite of them.
“I swear I almost had it.”
“Had what?”
“Why, my definition of values. There had to be something, you see, at the very core of my book.”
“Yes, of course.”
“I mean one place in my book where everything was defined. In simple words, so that everyone could understand.”
“Of course.”
I shall never forget the scholar when he was telling me all this, the puzzled, half-hurt, look in his eyes.
He said they had even got his housekeeper going. “What do you think of it—she also drinking gin?”
There was a crash of sounds that afternoon in his house.
He was alone in his room upstairs in his house, in his study.
They had got the sad, staid old housekeeper going. He said his brother was very efficient. They had her dancing to the music of the phonograph. The scholar’s brother, that big blustering bragging man—he was a manufacturer of some sort—was dancing with the housekeeper—with that staid, sad old woman.
The others had got into a circle.
The phonograph was going.
What happened was that the wife’s sister—just, I imagine from all he said and from what others afterward said of her, a miniature edition, a new printing one might say, of his dead wife . . .
She, it seems, came running upstairs and burst into his room, her blond hair flying. She was laughing.
“I had almost got it,” he said.
“What? Oh, yes. Your definition.”
“Yes, just the definition I had been after for years.”
“I was about to write it down. It embraced all, everything I had to say.”
She burst in.
I gather the sister must have been at least a little in love with the man and that he, after all, did not want the bragging, blustering brother to have her. He admitted that.
She rushed in.
“Come on, you old stick,” she said to him.
He said he tried to explain to her. “I made a fight,” he said.
He got up from his desk and tried to reason with her. She had fairly taken possession of his house.
He tried to tell her what he was up to. He spoke of standing there, beside his desk, where he sat when he told me all this, trying to explain all this to her.
I thought the scholar got a bit vulgar when he told me of that moment.
“There was nothing doing,” he said. He had got that expression from the young woman, his wife’s sister.
She was laughing at him as his wife had formerly done; she wouldn’t have kissed him.
She wouldn’t have said, “Kiss me quick, you old stick, while I feel that way.”
I gathered she merely dragged him downstairs. He said he went with her, couldn’t help himself, couldn’t, of course, be rude to her, his wife’s sister.
He went with her and saw his staid, sad old housekeeper acting like that.
The housekeeper didn’t seem to care whether he saw or not. She had broken loose. The whole house had broken loose.
* * *
And so, in the end, my acquaintance, the scholar, didn’t care either.
“I was in the flood,” he said. “What was the use?”
He was a little afraid that, if he didn’t do something about it, his bragging brother, or some man like him, might get his wife’s sister.
He didn’t quite want that to happen. So that evening, when he was alone with her, he proposed to her.
He said she called him an old stick. “It must have been a family expression,” he said. Something of the scholar came back into him when he said that.
He had been caught in a flood. He had let go.
He had proposed to his wife’s sister, in the garden back of his house, under an apple tree, near the croquet grounds, and she had said . . .
He didn’t tell me what she said. I imagine she said, “Yes, you old stick.”
“Kiss me quick while I feel that way,” she said.
That, at least, gets a certain balance to my tale.
The scholar, however, says there is no balance.
“There are only floods, one flood following another,” he says. When I talked to him of all this he was a bit discouraged.
However, he seemed cheerful enough.
Why They Got Married
* * *
PEOPLE keep on getting married. Evidently hope is eternal in the human breast. Every one laughs about it. You cannot go to a show but that some comedian takes a shot at the institution of marriage—and gets a laugh. It is amusing to watch the faces of married couples at such moments.
But I had intended to speak about Will. Will is a painter. I had intended to tell you about a conversation that took place in Will’s apartment one night. Every man or woman who marries must wonder sometimes how it happened to be just that other one he or she married.
“You have to live so close to the other when you are married,” said Will.
“Yes, you do,” said Helen, his wife.
“I get awfully tired of it sometimes,” Will said.
“And don’t I?” said Helen.
“It is worse for me than it is for you.”
“No, I think it is worse for me.”
“Well, gracious sakes, I would like to know how you figure that out.”
“I was in New York, was a student there,” said Will. It was evident that he had risen above the little choppy matrimonial sea in which he had been swimming with Helen—conversational swimming—he was ready to tell how it happened. That is always an interesting moment.
* * *
“Well,” said Will, “as I said, there I was, in New York. I was a young bachelor. I was going to school. Then I got through school. I got a job. It wasn’t much of a job. I got thirty dollars a week. I was making advertising drawings. So I met a fellow named Bob. He was getting his seventy-five dollars a week. Think of that, Helen. Why didn’t you get that one?”
“But, Will, dear, you are now making more than he will ever make,” Helen said. “But it wasn’t only that. Will is such a sweet, gentle man. You can see that by just looking at him.” She walked across the room and took her husband’s hands.
“You can’t tell about that gentle-looking kind sometimes,” I said.
“I know it,” Helen said, smiling.
She was surely a very lovely thing at that moment. She had big gray eyes and was very slender and graceful.
Will said that the man Bob, he had met, had some relatives living over near Philadelphia. He was, Helen said, a large, rather mushy-looking man with white hands.
So they began going over there for week-ends. Will and Bob. Will’s own people lived in Kansas.
At the place where Bob had the relatives—it was in a suburb of Philadelphia—there were two girls. They were cousins of Bob’s.
Will said the girls were all right, and when he said it Helen smiled. He said their father was an advertising man. “They made us welcome at their house. They gave us grand beds to sleep in.” Will had got launched into his tale.
“We would get over there about five o’clock of a Saturday afternoon. The father’s name was J. G. Small. He had a swell-looking car.
“So he would be at home and he would take a look at us, the way an older man does look at two young fellows making up to the young women folks in his house. At first he looks at you as much as to say, ‘Hello, I envy you your youth, etc.,’ and then he takes another look and his eyes say, ‘What are you hanging around here for, you young squirt?’
“After dinner, of a Saturday night, we got the car, or rather the girls did. I sat on the back seat with one of them. Her name was Cynthia.
“She was a tall, heavy-looking girl with dark eyes. She embarrassed me. I don’t know why.”
Will went a bit aside from his subject to speak of men’s embarrassment with such women. “There is a certain kind that just get your goat,” he sai
d, speaking a bit inelegantly, I thought, for a painter. “They feel they ought to be up to their business, getting themselves a man, but maybe they have thought too much about it. They are self-conscious and, of course, they make you feel that way.
“Naturally, we made love. It seemed to be expected. Bob was at it with her sister on the front seat. Everybody does it nowadays, and I was glad enough for the chance. Just the same I kept wishing it came a little more natural with me—with that one I mean.”
When Will was saying all this to me he was sitting on a couch in his apartment in New York. I had dined with him and his wife. She was sitting on the couch beside him. When he spoke about the other woman, she crept a little nearer to him. She remarked casually that it was only a chance that she, instead of the woman Cynthia, got Will. When she said that, it was very hard to believe her. I doubt whether she wanted me to believe.
Will said that, with Cynthia, it was very hard indeed to get close. He said she never really did, what he called “melt.” The fellow on the front seat, that is to say his friend Bob, was usually in a playful mood during these drives. Of the two girls, his cousins, he always seemed to prefer, not the one named Cynthia, but a smaller, darker, livelier one named Grace. He used to stop the car sometimes, on a dark road in that country somewhere outside Philadelphia, and he and Grace would make up to each other.
It was simply amazing how the girl named Grace could talk. Will said she used to swear at Bob and that when he got, what she called “too gay,” she hit him. Sometimes Bob stopped the car and he and Grace got out and took a walk. They would be gone quite a long time. Will sat in the back seat with Cynthia. He said her hands were like men’s hands. “They looked like competent hands,” he thought. She was older than her sister Grace, and had taken a job in the city.
Apparently she was not very competent in love making; Will thought Grace and Bob would never come back. He was trying to think up things to say to Cynthia. One night they all went together to a dance. It was at a road-house, somewhere near Philadelphia.
It must have been a rather tough place. Will said it was, but when he said so, his wife, Helen, laughed. “What the devil were you doing there anyway?” Will suddenly said, turning and glaring at her as though it were the first time he had thought of asking the question.