A Far Country, Book 3

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A FAR COUNTRY

By Winston Churchill


BOOK 3.



XVIII.

As the name of our city grew to be more and more a byword for sudden and
fabulous wealth, not only were the Huns and the Slavs, the Czechs and the
Greeks drawn to us, but it became the fashion for distinguished
Englishmen and Frenchmen and sometimes Germans and Italians to pay us a
visit when they made the grand tour of America. They had been told that
they must not miss us; scarcely a week went by in our community--so it
was said--in which a full-fledged millionaire was not turned out. Our
visitors did not always remain a week,--since their rapid journeyings
from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to the Gulf rarely occupied
more than four,--but in the books embodying their mature comments on the
manners, customs and crudities of American civilization no less than a
chapter was usually devoted to us; and most of the adjectives in their
various languages were exhausted in the attempt to prove how symptomatic
we were of the ambitions and ideals of the Republic. The fact that many
of these gentlemen--literary and otherwise--returned to their own shores
better fed and with larger balances in the banks than when they departed
is neither here nor there. Egyptians are proverbially created to be
spoiled.

The wiser and more fortunate of these travellers and students of life
brought letters to Mr. and Mrs. Hambleton Durrett. That household was
symptomatic--if they liked--of the new order of things; and it was rare
indeed when both members of it were at home to entertain them. If Mr.
Durrett were in the city, and they did not happen to be Britons with
sporting proclivities, they simply were not entertained: when Mrs.
Durrett received them dinners were given in their honour on the Durrett
gold plate, and they spent cosey and delightful hours conversing with her
in the little salon overlooking the garden, to return to their hotels and
jot down paragraphs on the superiority of the American women over the
men. These particular foreigners did not lay eyes on Mr. Durrett, who was
in Florida or in the East playing polo or engaged in some other pursuit.
One result of the lavishness and luxury that amazed them they wrote--had
been to raise the standard of culture of the women, who were our leisure
class. But the travellers did not remain long enough to arrive at any
conclusions of value on the effect of luxury and lavishness on the sacred
institution of marriage.

If Mr. Nathaniel Durrett could have returned to his native city after
fifteen years or so in the grave, not the least of the phenomena to
startle him would have been that which was taking place in his own house.
For he would have beheld serenely established in that former abode of
Calvinism one of the most reprehensible of exotic abominations, a
'mariage de convenance;' nor could he have failed to observe, moreover,
the complacency with which the descendants of his friends, the pew
holders in Dr. Pound's church, regarded the matter: and not only these,
but the city at large. The stronghold of Scotch Presbyterianism had
become a London or a Paris, a Gomorrah!

Mrs. Hambleton Durrett went her way, and Mr. Durrett his. The less said
about Mr. Durrett's way--even in this suddenly advanced age--the better.
As for Nancy, she seemed to the distant eye to be walking through life in
a stately and triumphant manner. I read in the newspapers of her doings,
her comings and goings; sometimes she was away for months together, often
abroad; and when she was at home I saw her, but infrequently, under
conditions more or less formal. Not that she was formal,--or I: our
intercourse seemed eloquent of an intimacy in a tantalizing state of
suspense. Would that intimacy ever be renewed? This was a question on
which I sometimes speculated. The situation that had suspended or put an
end to it, as the case might be, was never referred to by either of us.

One afternoon in the late winter of the year following that in which we
had given a dinner to the Scherers (where the Durretts had rather
marvellously appeared together) I left my office about three o'clock--a
most unusual occurrence. I was restless, unable to fix my mind on my
work, filled with unsatisfied yearnings the object of which I sought to
keep vague, and yet I directed my steps westward along Boyne Street until
I came to the Art Museum, where a loan exhibition was being held. I
entered, bought a catalogue, and presently found myself standing before
number 103, designated as a portrait of Mrs. Hambleton Durrett,--painted
in Paris the autumn before by a Polish artist then much in vogue,
Stanislaus Czesky. Nancy--was it Nancy?--was standing facing me, tall,
superb in the maturity of her beauty, with one hand resting on an antique
table, a smile upon her lips, a gentle mockery in her eyes as though
laughing at the world she adorned. With the smile and the
mockery--somehow significant, too, of an achieved inaccessibility--went
the sheen of her clinging gown and the glint of the heavy pearls drooping
from her high throat to her waist. These caught the eye, but failed at
length to hold it, for even as I looked the smile faded, the mockery
turned to wistfulness. So I thought, and looked again--to see the
wistfulness: the smile had gone, the pearls seemed heavier. Was it a
trick of the artist? had he seen what I saw, or thought I saw? or was it
that imagination which by now I might have learned to suspect and
distrust. Wild longings took possession of me, for the portrait had
seemed to emphasize at once how distant now she was from me, and yet how
near! I wanted to put that nearness to the test. Had she really changed?
did anyone really change? and had I not been a fool to accept the
presentment she had given me? I remembered those moments when our glances
had met as across barriers in flashes of understanding. After all, the
barriers were mere relics of the superstition of the past. What if I went
to her now? I felt that I needed her as I never had needed anyone in all
my life.... I was aroused by the sound of lowered voices beside me.

"That's Mrs. Hambleton Durrett," I heard a woman say. "Isn't she
beautiful?"

The note of envy struck me sharply--horribly. Without waiting to listen
to the comment of her companion I hurried out of the building into the
cold, white sunlight that threw into bold relief the mediocre houses of
the street. Here was everyday life, but the portrait had suggested that
which might have been--might be yet. What did I mean by this? I didn't
know, I didn't care to define it,--a renewal of her friendship, of our
intimacy. My being cried out for it, and in the world in which I lived we
took what we wanted--why not this? And yet for an instant I stood on the
sidewalk to discover that in new situations I was still subject to
unaccountable qualms of that thing I had been taught to call
"conscience"; whether it were conscience or not must be left to the
psychologists. I was married--terrible word! the shadow of that
Institution fell athwart me as the sun went under a cloud; but the sun
came out again as I found myself walking toward the Durrett house
reflecting that numbers of married men called on Nancy, and that what I
had in mind in regard to her was nothing that the court would have
pronounced an infringement upon the Institution.... I reached her steps,
the long steps still guarded by the curved wrought-iron railings
reminiscent of Nathaniel's day, though the "portals" were gone, a modern
vestibule having replaced them; I rang the bell; the butler, flung open
the doors. He, at any rate, did not seem surprised to see me here, he
greeted me with respectful cordiality and led me, as a favoured guest,
through the big drawing-room into the salon.

"Mr. Paret, Madam!"

Nancy, rose quickly from the low chair where she sat cutting the pages of
a French novel.

"Hugh!" she exclaimed. "I'm out if anyone calls. Bring tea," she added to
the man, who retired. For a moment we stood gazing at each other,
questioningly. "Well, won't you sit down and stay awhile?" she asked.

I took a chair on the opposite side of the fire.

"I just thought I'd drop in," I said.

"I am flattered," said Nancy, "that a person so affaire should find time
to call on an old friend. Why, I thought you never left your office until
seven o'clock."

"I don't, as a rule, but to-day I wasn't particularly busy, and I thought
I'd go round to the Art Museum and look at your portrait."

"More flattery! Hugh, you're getting quite human. What do you think of
it?"

"I like it. I think it quite remarkable."

"Have a cigarette!"

I took one.

"So you really like it," she said.

"Don't you?"

"Oh, I think it's a trifle--romantic," she replied "But that's Czesky. He
made me quite cross,--the feminine presentation of America, the spoiled
woman who has shed responsibilities and is beginning to have a
glimpse--just a little one--of the emptiness of it all."

I was stirred.

"Then why do you accept it, if it isn't you?" I demanded. "One doesn't
refuse Czesky's canvases," she replied. "And what difference does it
make? It amused him, and he was fairly subtle about it. Only those who
are looking for romance, like you, are able to guess what he meant, and
they would think they saw it anyway, even if he had painted me--extinct."

"Extinct!" I repeated.

She laughed.

"Hugh, you're a silly old goose!"

"That's why I came here, I think, to be told so," I said.

Tea was brought in. A sense of at-homeness stole over me,--I was more at
home here in this room with Nancy, than in any other place in the world;
here, where everything was at once soothing yet stimulating, expressive
of her, even the smaller objects that caught my eye,--the crystal
inkstand tipped with gold, the racks for the table books, her
paper-cutter. Nancy's was a discriminating luxury. And her talk! The
lightness with which she touched life, the unexplored depths of her,
guessed at but never fathomed! Did she feel a little the need of me as I
felt the need of her?

"Why, I believe you're incurably romantic, Hugh," she said laughingly,
when the men had left the room. "Here you are, what they call a paragon
of success, a future senator, Ambassador to England. I hear of those
remarkable things you have done--even in New York the other day a man was
asking me if I knew Mr. Paret, and spoke of you as one of the coming men.
I suppose you will be moving there, soon. A practical success! It always
surprises me when I think of it, I find it difficult to remember what a
dreamer you were and here you turn out to be still a dreamer! Have you
discovered, too, the emptiness of it all?" she inquired provokingly. "I
must say you don't look it"--she gave me a critical, quizzical
glance--"you look quite prosperous and contented, as though you enjoyed
your power."

I laughed uneasily.

"And then," she continued, "and then one day when your luncheon has
disagreed with you--you walk into a gallery and see a portrait of--of an
old friend for whom in youth, when you were a dreamer, you professed a
sentimental attachment, and you exclaim that the artist is a discerning
man who has discovered the secret that she has guarded so closely. She's
sorry that she ever tried to console herself with baubles it's what
you've suspected all along. But you'll just run around to see for
yourself--to be sure of it." And she handed me my tea. "Come now,
confess. Where are your wits--I hear you don't lack them in court."

"Well," I said, "if that amuses you--"

"It does amuse me," said Nancy, twining her fingers across her knee and
regarding me smilingly, with parted lips, "it amuses me a lot--it's so
characteristic."

"But it's not true, it's unjust," I protested vigorously, smiling, too,
because the attack was so characteristic of her.

"What then?" she demanded.

"Well, in the first place, my luncheon didn't disagree with me. It never
does."

She laughed. "But the sentiment--come now--the sentiment? Do you perceive
any hint of emptiness--despair?"

Our chairs were very close, and she leaned forward a little.

"Emptiness or no emptiness," I said a little tremulously, "I know that I
haven't been so contented, so happy for a long time."

She sat very still, but turned her gaze on the fire.

"You really wouldn't want to find that, Hugh," she said in another voice,
at which I exclaimed. "No, I'm not being sentimental. But, to be serious,
I really shouldn't care to think that of you. I'd like to think of you as
a friend--a good friend--although we don't see very much of one another."

"But that's why I came, Nancy," I explained. "It wasn't just an
impulse--that is, I've been thinking of you a great deal, all along. I
miss you, I miss the way you look at things--your point of view. I can't
see any reason why we shouldn't see something of each other--now--"

She continued to stare into the fire.

"No," she said at length, "I suppose there isn't any reason." Her mood
seemed suddenly to change as she bent over and extinguished the flame
under the kettle. "After all," she added gaily, "we live in a tolerant
age, we've reached the years of discretion, and we're both too
conventional to do anything silly--even if we wanted to--which we don't.
We're neither of us likely to quarrel with the world as it is, I think,
and we might as well make fun of it together. We'll begin with our
friends. What do you think of Mr. Scherer's palace?"

"I hear you're building it for him."

"I told him to get Eyre," said Nancy, laughingly, "I was afraid he'd
repeat the Gallatin Park monstrosity on a larger scale, and Eyre's the
only man in this country who understands the French. It's been rather
amusing," she went on, "I've had to fight Hilda, and she's no mean
antagonist. How she hates me! She wanted a monstrosity, of course, a
modernized German rock-grotto sort of an affair, I can imagine. She's
been so funny when I've met her at dinner. 'I understand you take a great
interest in the house, Mrs. Durrett.' Can't you hear her?"

"Well, you did get ahead of her," I said.

"I had to. I couldn't let our first citizen build a modern Rhine castle,
could I? I have some public spirit left. And besides, I expect to build
on Grant Avenue myself."

"And leave here?"

"Oh, it's too grubby, it's in the slums," said Nancy. "But I really owe
you a debt of gratitude, Hugh, for the Scherers."

"I'm told Adolf's lost his head over you."

"It's not only over me, but over everything. He's so ridiculously proud
of being on the board of the Children's Hospital.... You ought to hear
him talking to old Mrs. Ogilvy, who of course can't get used to him at
all,--she always has the air of inquiring what he's doing in that galley.
She still thinks of him as Mr. Durrett's foreman."

The time flew. Her presence was like a bracing, tingling atmosphere in
which I felt revived and exhilarated, self-restored. For Nancy did not
question--she took me as I was. We looked out on the world, as it were,
from the same window, and I could not help thinking that ours, after all,
was a large view. The topics didn't matter--our conversation was fragrant
with intimacy; and we were so close to each other it seemed incredible
that we ever should be parted again. At last the little clock on the
mantel chimed an hour, she started and looked up.

"Why, it's seven, Hugh!" she exclaimed, rising. "I'd no idea it was so
late, and I'm dining with the Dickinsons. I've only just time to dress."

"It's been like a reunion, hasn't it?--a reunion after many years," I
said. I held her hand unconsciously--she seemed to be drawing me to her,
I thought she swayed, and a sudden dizziness seized me. Then she drew
away abruptly, with a little cry. I couldn't be sure about the cry,
whether I heard it or not, a note was struck in the very depths of me.

"Come in again," she said, "whenever you're not too busy." And a minute
later I found myself on the street.

This was the beginning of a new intimacy with Nancy, resembling the old
intimacy yet differing from it. The emotional note of our parting on the
occasion I have just related was not again struck, and when I went
eagerly to see her again a few days later I was conscious of
limitations,--not too conscious: the freedom she offered and which I
gladly accepted was a large freedom, nor am I quite sure that even I
would have wished it larger, though there were naturally moments when I
thought so: when I asked myself what I did wish, I found no answer.
Though I sometimes chafed, it would have been absurd of me to object to a
certain timidity or caution I began to perceive in her that had been
absent in the old Nancy; but the old Nancy had ceased to exist, and here
instead was a highly developed, highly specialized creature in whom I
delighted; and after taking thought I would not have robbed her of fine
acquired attribute. As she had truly observed, we were both conventional;
conventionality was part of the price we had willingly paid for
membership in that rarer world we had both achieved. It was a world, to
be sure, in which we were rapidly learning to take the law into our own
hands without seeming to defy it, in order that the fear of it might
remain in those less fortunately placed and endowed: we had begun with
the appropriation of the material property of our fellow-citizens, which
we took legally; from this point it was, of course, merely a logical step
to take--legally, too other gentlemen's human property--their wives, in
short: the more progressive East had set us our example, but as yet we
had been chary to follow it.

About this time rebellious voices were beginning to make themselves heard
in the literary wilderness proclaiming liberty--liberty of the sexes.
There were Russian novels and French novels, and pioneer English novels
preaching liberty with Nietzschean stridency, or taking it for granted. I
picked these up on Nancy's table.

"Reading them?" she said, in answer to my query. "Of course I'm reading
them. I want to know what these clever people are thinking, even if I
don't always agree with them, and you ought to read them too. It's quite
true what foreigners say about our men,--that they live in a groove, that
they haven't any range of conversation."

"I'm quite willing to be educated," I replied. "I haven't a doubt that I
need it."

She was leaning back in her chair, her hands behind her head, a posture
she often assumed. She looked up at me amusedly.

"I'll acknowledge that you're more teachable than most of them," she
said. "Do you know, Hugh, sometimes you puzzle me greatly. When you are
here and we're talking together I can never think of you as you are out
in the world, fighting for power--and getting it. I suppose it's part of
your charm, that there is that side of you, but I never consciously
realize it. You're what they call a dual personality."

"That's a pretty hard name!" I exclaimed.

She laughed.

"I can't help it--you are. Oh, not disagreeably so, quite
normally--that's the odd thing about you. Sometimes I believe that you
were made for something different, that in spite of your success you have
missed your 'metier.'"

"What ought I to have been?"

"How can I tell? A Goethe, perhaps--a Goethe smothered by a
twentieth-century environment. Your love of adventure isn't dead, it's
been merely misdirected, real adventure, I mean, forth faring, straying
into unknown paths. Perhaps you haven't yet found yourself."

"How uncanny!" I said, stirred and startled.

"You have a taste for literature, you know, though you've buried it. Give
me Turgeniev. We'll begin with him...."

Her reading and the talks that followed it were exciting, amazingly
stimulating.... Once Nancy gave me an amusing account of a debate which
had taken place in the newly organized woman's discussion club to which
she belonged over a rather daring book by an English novelist. Mrs.
Dickinson had revolted.

"No, she wasn't really shocked, not in the way she thought she was," said
Nancy, in answer to a query of mine.

"How was she shocked, then?"

"As you and I are shocked."

"But I'm not shocked," I protested.

"Oh, yes, you are, and so am I--not on the moral side, nor is it the
moral aspect that troubles Lula Dickinson. She thinks it's the moral
aspect, but it's really the revolutionary aspect, the menace to those
precious institutions from which we derive our privileges and comforts."

I considered this, and laughed.

"What's the use of being a humbug about it," said Nancy.

"But you're talking like a revolutionary," I said.

"I may be talking like one, but I'm not one. I once had the makings of
one--of a good one,--a 'proper' one, as the English would say." She
sighed.

"You regret it?" I asked curiously.

"Of course I regret it!" she cried. "What woman worth her salt doesn't
regret it, doesn't want to live, even if she has to suffer for it? And
those people--the revolutionaries, I mean, the rebels--they live, they're
the only ones who do live. The rest of us degenerate in a painless
paralysis we think of as pleasure. Look at me! I'm incapable of
committing a single original act, even though I might conceive one. Well,
there was a time when I should have been equal to anything and wouldn't
have cared a--a damn."

I believed her....

I fell into the habit of dropping in on Nancy at least twice a week on my
way from the office, and I met her occasionally at other houses. I did
not tell Maude of that first impulsive visit; but one evening a few weeks
later she asked me where I had been, and when I told her she made no
comment. I came presently to the conclusion that this renewed intimacy
did not trouble her--which was what I wished to believe. Of course I had
gone to Nancy for a stimulation I failed to get at home, and it is the
more extraordinary, therefore, that I did not become more discontented
and restless: I suppose this was because I had grown to regard marriage
as most of the world regarded it, as something inevitable and humdrum, as
a kind of habit it is useless to try to shake off. But life is so full of
complexities and anomalies that I still had a real affection for Maude,
and I liked her the more because she didn't expect too much of me, and
because she didn't complain of my friendship with Nancy although I should
vehemently have denied there was anything to complain of. I respected
Maude. If she was not a squaw, she performed religiously the traditional
squaw duties, and made me comfortable: and the fact that we lived
separate mental existences did not trouble me because I never thought of
hers--or even that she had one. She had the children, and they seemed to
suffice. She never renewed her appeal for my confidence, and I forgot
that she had made it.

Nevertheless I always felt a tug at my heartstrings when June came around
and it was time for her and the children to go to Mattapoisett for the
summer; when I accompanied them, on the evening of their departure, to
the smoky, noisy station and saw deposited in the sleeping-car their
luggage and shawls and bundles. They always took the evening train to
Boston; it was the best. Tom and Susan were invariably there with candy
and toys to see them off--if Susan and her children had not already
gone--and at such moments my heart warmed to Tom. And I was astonished as
I clung to Matthew and Moreton and little Biddy at the affection that
welled up within me, saddened when I kissed Maude good-bye. She too was
sad, and always seemed to feel compunctions for deserting me.

"I feel so selfish in leaving you all alone!" she would say. "If it
weren't for the children--they need the sea air. But I know you don't
miss me as I miss you. A man doesn't, I suppose.... Please don't work so
hard, and promise me you'll come on and stay a long time. You can if you
want to. We shan't starve." She smiled. "That nice room, which is yours,
at the southeast corner, is always waiting for you. And you do like the
sea, and seeing the sail-boats in the morning."

I felt an emptiness when the train pulled out. I did love my family,
after all! I would go back to the deserted house, and I could not bear to
look in at the nursery door, at the little beds with covers flung over
them. Why couldn't I appreciate these joys when I had them?

One evening, as we went home in an open street-car together, after such a
departure, Tom blurted out:--"Hugh, I believe I care for your family as
much as for my own. I often wonder if you realize how wonderful these
children are! My boys are just plain ruffians--although I think they're
pretty decent ruffians, but Matthew has a mind--he's thoughtful--and an
imagination. He'll make a name for himself some day if he's steered
properly and allowed to develop naturally. Moreton's more like my boys.
And as for Chickabiddy!--" words failed him.

I put my hand on his knee. I actually loved him again as I had loved and
yearned for him as a child,--he was so human, so dependable. And why
couldn't this feeling last? He disapproved--foolishly, I thought--of my
professional career, and this was only one of his limitations. But I knew
that he was loyal. Why hadn't I been able to breathe and be reasonably
happy in that atmosphere of friendship and love in which I had been
placed--or rather in which I had placed myself?.... Before the summer was
a day or two older I had grown accustomed to being alone, and enjoyed the
liberty; and when Maude and the children returned in the autumn,
similarly, it took me some days to get used to the restrictions imposed
by a household. I run the risk of shocking those who read this by
declaring that if my family had been taken permanently out of my life, I
should not long have missed them. But on the whole, in those years my
marriage relation might be called a negative one. There were moments, as
I have described, when I warmed to Maude, moments when I felt something
akin to a violent antagonism aroused by little mannerisms and tricks she
had. The fact that we got along as well as we did was probably due to the
orthodox teaching with which we had been inoculated,--to the effect that
matrimony was a moral trial, a shaking-down process. But moral trials
were ceasing to appeal to people, and more and more of them were refusing
to be shaken down. We didn't cut the Gordian knot, but we managed to
loosen it considerably.