Glenway Wescott

“ As a servant of God he felt exceedingly humble, so humble in fact that he did not feel ashamed—not of having disappointed them, nor of being about to disappoint Irene, nor of the likelihood of disappointing himself all the rest of his life. Ralph, though younger, was more of a man than he; as he stood up, Jim saw how his body was one hard, thick knot from head to foot, which would never be untied. Love in Ralph's heart was the passion which he had pretended to feel, which he might pretend to feel again, and perhaps never would. ”

“ 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 ”

“ She was a married woman now, and her marriage was like a return from childhood of the father she could scarcely remember. He too had been kind. But she was tired of Missouri, tired and terrified. She had heard of a man named Cleaver who was starting north in a few days with a team and overland wagon; if only the doctor had loved Wisconsin as she did. . . . But he had never been there. So she would have to stay always on the frontier between the North and the South, with a war breaking out between the two. She dreamed of the war, the lifting of row on row of mournful trumpets, far away. ”

“ For he was a liar. Diligently he turned the poor past into a golden age in which he had stridden, triumphed, above all persuaded; and still in his old age he labored to persuade man, woman, and child. On summer evenings Alwyn would see him in the pale-green garden like a stage setting, urging upon a neighbor his version of his life, and acting out its roles. Between the beds of beets and onions he would stagger a little with the bearlike motion of a large man when he is old, and speak louder and gesticulate weirdly as the gathering dusk hid him from his audience. ”

“ She talked to her grandson with a startling sardonic gayety about these people and others like them who were dead: relatives whom she had happened not to love, his grandfather's friends, the friends of her friends. The disastrous comedies of their lives diverted her from the grief which was all that was left of hers; she could be as brave about their troubles as she had once been about her own. She dwelt without pity on their paradoxical characters, their avowals and frauds, their astonishing whims and failures; and at Alwyn's request identified among her photographs many of their faces. ”

“ JESSE.
Henry asked Nancy, "When do you plan to go back to Iowa ?"
She smiled half-heartedly, as if to distract his attention from her miserable eyes. "Why, don't you want me to stay any longer?"
"It's not that, sister. I wish you'd never had to leave home. But we can't do what we like in this life. There's your duty to Jesse. Have you anything to complain of in his behavior?"
"Oh, Jesse. . . ." she cried with apparent relief. "He's a born bachelor. I guess he's a lot happier without a woman there to nag him."
Henry said to Rose: "Nancy must be prevailed on to go back home. ”

“ The evidently poor land kept its wealth secret, like a young mother who thinks herself a virgin. It was the land which God had given them, and it was poor. So God was poverty, but He was poverty which would become wealth. He was a precept by which poverty would be changed into wealth; He was a law. There were songs and talk about sin, but few transgressions. Preachers of genius painted evil in such perfect colors that men vomited and women fainted in the churches; they made the agony of some seem sweeter than love. ”

“ For one whose eyelids droop and whose eyes ache, the world itself seems to be shrunken and inflamed; so the atmosphere of her home grew even more sinister than it had been when, but for its unhappiness, she would have been happy. It would not be difficult, now that she knew the sickness love produced, to keep her virtue perfect; but with her heart so stripped of its indifference, so stimulated as if by a drug, she began to fear for her faith, dreading the influence upon it of her mother's loveless irony, her father's piety and lies. ”

“ Rose understood him. "He is what my brothers ought to have been," she said.
Henry muttered, "That boy won't amount to much."
Leander was content. So many anxious hopes of their family given up at last; one pair of Tower eyes which refused to look into the future; one flower not fertilized by hopeless ambition; one less regret to wither on the family tree. No embarrassment, no vanity, no resentment or covetousness or haste. . . . Timothy reversed the family formula, which was to be proud in anticipation, ashamed in retrospect. ”

“ The officer kept looking at Evan as if to tell him to go.
Evan's arms lay very heavily on the dirty table; inside his stiff boots his heels were asleep, and tingled. He foresaw, with the extravagance of an innocent mind, the rest of the night on the narrow bed without sheets in the back room. Disgusted at the way another man succeeded in doing what he had wanted to do, he realized that his disgust was jealousy and his jealousy was mixed with shame. Shame of Americans—he was an American; this was war—he was a soldier; love—an hour ago he had been making love to the same girl. ”

“ As they went back in the little slow train, the German aunt who believed that a prompt marriage must have been arranged, peering into their gloomy faces, congratulated herself aloud on the fact that she was an old maid.
Jim never told Irene that the visit had failed, that his father and brother were stronger than he; she did not need to be told. A flood of tears seemed to run into her heart whenever she thought of it, whenever she sang; but all her friends and even she herself observed that it gave her voice a new beauty, which encouraged her to go on with her career alone. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Leander had not wanted her, but she was acceptable to the Towers.
It was her duty not to let her husband see how she grieved for his brother; he could not comfort her. She did not hope to be loved, and she realized once more how rough and homely she must appear beside the memory of Serena. She continued to grow heavier; the coarse roses did not disappear from her cheeks, but came to resemble dead rose leaves, covered with a network of tiny veins.
Life was not sad, though Henry was obstinate and sad. She never understood him. Would she have understood Leander? She often found him unreasonable ”

“ America had as yet nothing worth remembering—no palaces, no enchanting antiquity, even the plunder of Tenochtitlan or whatever the city was called, had been taken away. The past was by nature tragic. No tragic arts ought to flourish; tragedy was treason, the betrayal of state secrets to the enemy, even the enemy in one's self. Memory was incest. . . .
The fact that Alwyn had thought so fanatically about the past of others during those summer months, always and only in relation to his own future, meant, he supposed, that he had lost interest in it, temporarily at least. ”

“ Flora imagined that she lay in it, safe from human intrusion as if it were a deathbed, and remembered her monotonous life, moment by moment—the moments of the past mingling with those of that very twilight, and resembling all those there would be in the future. She stared idly at the lights dying upon cloud after cloud, upon empty ether. Life no less could be transfigured but not transformed; life no less was a sky full of colors, whose future was to fade. ”

“ At the church funeral his mother had sat in the family pew in her ruffled black silk and veils, holding her grandson Alwyn's hand, with a look of mystic satisfaction. When the widow had cried out and flung herself on the coffin among the cut flowers, the aged woman had looked on without dismay, as if it were a natural occurrence; and when the mixed quartet had sung, "Beyond the smiling and the weeping, I shall be soon," the glance of her bright eyes amid their wrinkles had seemed to leap gayly up to heaven. Perhaps she had not realized that the dead man was her son ”

“ All around him, as he sat dangling his feet over the edge, lay the magazines which his cousins sent from Milwaukee, full of editorials, love stories, advertisements of steamships and hotels, portraits of diplomats and actresses—the materials of every imaginable future. Between the chimney cupboard and his future, there were to be so many transitions; causes and effects which one was not even expected to understand; alarms, changes of heart, and hesitations; everything to be endured, and nothing prepared for. ”

“ Autumn had stood there before, its great sleeves flapping in the wind; and birds in October never know which way they are going. Across the road, like a large dry-goods box, stood the district school which he attended, where, before the Civil War, the dead woman's sister Eliza had taught. In Eliza Harris's day it was a hard school. The pupils had to stand around the stove in winter, three or four at a time, to keep their ears from freezing. Girls with full breasts and wild boys in their teens founded friendships and flirtations on plans to shame her and make her cry before the class. ”

“ Tedious danger day after day, as if the war had never come to an end. There Leander had made fun of all the spells which had been laid uselessly on his youth, even Hilary's spell. In the lamplight, with one of Rose's children on his knees, the ascetic man often shook his head incomprehensibly, having heard in his own mind a venal whimper, or a curse, or a mouthful of obscene song. Only the fact that after Hilary's death his heart never could be warm again had saved him from dissolution. ”

“ But could she, with courage and intelligence, hold herself at a certain altitude above all evil, including death—as the wings of a bird hold it for a moment in the air after a bullet has lodged in its heart, opened its heart? Could such a moment last as long as her life? She spread out in imagination her youth and her bravery as if they were wings. Suddenly she felt that she was ready—that is, ready to marry Paul Fairchild. And he should not discover what was in her heart; Ralph should not either, nor, perhaps, should God. She would lie to them faithfully by the way she would live ”

“ Alwyn said, "She lived with us when I was a child. I watched them all closely then, much too closely. . . ."
As he remembered his childhood, it seemed that much of it had been spent in the center of a carpeted floor; and all about in a circle of rocking-chairs there had been women and men—-grandparents, and their friends, and old cousins, and great-aunts, and uncles; and behind each one a life had extended into the past like a corridor—poorly lighted, long corridors winding away in every direction, through reticence and forgetfulness, to their youth ”

“ For he would always be a deserter. A boy hiding inside a man, an outlaw hiding inside a man who at last, at least, would abide by the law. If he liked, a homeless, lonely man in a foreign land might wear his disgrace as if it were nothing more than a shirt or a coat out of fashion. A lonely man surrounded by friends and family, a naturally homeless man at home, an expatriate resident in his own country, would have to wear it next the skin, like a tattooed rose, or star, or Marbury's blue heart in a circle. ”

“ Flora feared and adored him; and as she stared at his tough body, she saw in its place another creature, dark and dappled by the moon. Clinging to the gate, "Richard," she whispered, "I love you. Listen to me. I'll never love anybody else. I'm so lonely." It was like making love to a little dappled angel. Could she have said these things, she wondered, if she had been in Richard's all too human presence? ”

“ Roads with no particular beginning or end had been the shifting foundations of life in the West—had been and still were. They gave a wretched monotony to one's thought about it, and one could not speak of its inhabitants without repeating the word. That night Alwyn thought of this common fact with wonder, with sickness of heart, with rather selfish pity for the pioneers—race of religious, childish, energetic tramps that they were because he himself had gone astray on a road that he did not know. ”

“ But he knew what she knew and tried to forget: that each picture was a tomb where a dead heart (or merely the youth and freshness of a heart which was now old) lay buried-buried with its affections, its apathy, its fury. He knew that on each insignificant grave there stood (though he could only guess what it was) a secret like hers, wild and perfect as a wild flower, nodding in its everlasting leaves, or dangling from a broken stem. ”

“ And when she glanced back at her husband, Alwyn realized that he was not only her enemy, but her priest.
She rarely spoke of religion, and had no reminiscences of its coming and going in men's hearts. Evidently it had nothing to do with love, of which she spoke with pride and regret, as Alwyn's other grandmother spoke of the old days—their glory, their poverty, their bravado. "My son," she would say, "there were broken hearts and romances. But young women in my day covered their nakedness, every one was modest and genteel. ”

“ Rose did not know what to do with herself, so she took Timothy away.
"Don't send me back," Nancy cried. "I'm all right. Don't shut me up again. I'm not crazy. I'll be good and work. I'll do what you tell me. But don't send me back."
Far off under the trees her child could be heard crying, cries muffled in Rose's apron. Henry knelt and prayed. When he stood up his mouth was as firm as if he had not been praying abjectly, but had merely risen from his chair at a family council.
"My mind is made up," he said. "Stop crying. You shan't go back. I'll write Jesse. You ought never to have married. ”

“ Scarcely remembering the weeks at sea, he felt as if he had fallen out of Cuba through a trapdoor into a cellar containing millions of people.
He went into a pub to get warm, wondered what his father would say if he came through the swinging door and found him there drinking whisky, and was amused as if it were an idle fancy, as if in reality he had no father. When he went out again, his sense of direction told him that he was going away from the lodging house in Wapping; but he thought of Marbury as if he were a man he had known years ago, as if, that night, he had not a friend in the world. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Virtue did lead to happiness. . . . In her mother's life, childlike purity had led only to an old woman's despair (for she was already growing old) ; but that life was exceptional and not for her to try to understand. Such an extremity of sadness was a wild thing, dangerous even to see. It was as if God had permitted a heathen disaster to take place, perhaps merely to show His mystery, perhaps to teach His angels a lesson; there was nothing in it for human beings, at least for Marianne, to learn. ”

“ Marianne said.
She dried her eyes, and opened the door of her mother's part of the house. Her mother, who through the thin walls had heard her crying, was waiting in the center of the room under the hanging lamp. "What's happened?" She opened her large arms like those of a man. "Don't you cry," she said. "The one you want isn't always the best husband." She was ready to tell her own story.
"But I don't want him, mother," Flora whispered, moving toward her bedroom door. ”

“ But the best of life is over when satisfactions begin to age one as disappointments have done. Joy proved its reality by leaving scars on his face, smaller but deeper than those of sorrow. He began to look haggard and sad even when he smiled.
Rose and Henry were anxious. "Leander is by nature a bachelor," they said, "and ought not to have a son on his hands—it is too much for him." ”

“ There Alwyn and his little sister waited on a stone pile, and stared over the fence, over the shrubs and the monuments, at the nearly soundless funeral. The tall stranger and the great blue-gray box had come a thousand miles from a place called Oklahoma City; and Alwyn breathed heavily as the coffin, covered with bouquets, disappeared in the new grave, because the heroine of an old story had come back to the place where her travels had begun. ”