Glenway Wescott

“ Spread out below them lay the farm: the poor house with its wooden coronet around the chimney, the desperately weeded crops, the faded washing floating between the trees, the dung heaps steaming with ammonia, the pigpens and rusty farm machinery. The elder of its two eldest sons (Alwyn born in the house, his uncle in what was now the woodshed) gazed down upon it and shook his head. "I am a fortunate man," Alwyn heard him whisper to himself.
Three years after the marriage of Alwyn's parents he had been ordained, and thereafter had occupied the pulpit of a fashionable church outside Chicago. ”

“ 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. ”

“ His uncle Jim's handsome face glowed with the conventional poetry of recaptured boyhood, with delight in the photographs which he tinted artistically with transparent water colors, with pride in the analogies which had been suggested to him in the north and which would serve him in many private conversations if not in sermons.
Alwyn's father, on the other hand, talked by the hour of exaggerated dangers and mystifying sensations of danger where there was none; of men who lost their compasses and strayed in circles and were found half dead; of timber wolves baying up and down the darkness ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Caroline Tower genuinely loved her husband, and love often produced a vague tumult in her emotions; but logically conservative in spite of it, she dealt with her duties in the order of time—her mother came before her husband. She wanted him to be a clergyman: God's house and work came before everything in the world—except her mother's house, which was a sacred establishment as well, a sort of sumptuous private chapel to the glory of motherhood, which is the source of the glory of God. ”

“ She never remodeled her rich, draped, braided frocks no matter how the fashions of inferior women changed; and later, when Alwyn visited her home, he saw the kinship between them and its upholstery, its alcoves of taffeta and plush, and the rigid brocade with which its windows were symmetrically draped to keep out the light. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 or dinary 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Like beauty itself, she feared nothing but death, and would not permit a funeral or a will to be mentioned in her presence. She loved her possessions, especially those that she could see and touch, as a naturalist loves his dead butterflies, an alchemist the fiquids in which immortality may be in solution ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ She brought a quantity of missionary magazines containing pictures of laughing, muscular savages; and the country people might have felt that they had not place in her world, being neither prominent representatives of Christian wealth and culture like those among whom it was her privilege to live, nor heathens to whom it might have been her privilege to have been sent. Alwyn and even his father wanted to talk to her about their ambitions, but she listened with disapproval to any expression of discontent. ”

“ Then there was upon his face a shining expression of tenderness without pity and violence without fault, which was the equivalent of beauty—though he was what is called a homely man, with his very long nose, his low forehead, his delicate, outstanding ears, and small eyes. ”

“ 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 ”

“ With the light of the desire to be proud of himself in his eyes, he reminded one more sharply than most mature men are able to do, of the waste, wreckage, or abandonment of gifts amid which youth is turned into maturity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”