But he was weak, and at times the snow overcame him. It fell on him, and he lay buried and lifeless. Yet every time, he struggled alive before it was too late, and fell upon the snow with the energy of fever. Exhausted, he would not give in. He crept indoors and made coffee and bacon. Long since he had cooked so much. Then he went at the snow once more. He must conquer the snow, this new, white brute force which had accumulated against him.
He worked in the awful, dead wind, pushing the snow aside, pressing it with his shovel. It was cold, freezing hard in the wind, even when the sun came out for a while, and showed him his white, lifeless surroundings, the black sea rolling sullen, flecked with dull spume, away to the horizons. Yet the sun had power on his face. It was March.
He reached the boat. He pushed the snow away, then sat down under the lee of the boat, looking at the sea, which nearly swirled to his feet, in the high tide. Curiously natural the pebbles looked, in a world gone all uncanny. The sun shone no more. Snow was falling in hard crumbs, that vanished as if by miracle as they touched the hard blackness of the sea. Hoarse waves rang in the shingle, rushing up at the snow. The wet rocks were brutally black. And all the time the myriad swooping crumbs of snow, demonish, touched the dark sea and disappeared.
During the night there was a great storm. It seemed to him he could hear the vast mass of the snow striking all the world with a ceaseless thud; and over it all, the wind roared in strange hollow volleys, in between which came a jump of blindfold lightning, then the low roll of thunder heavier than the wind. When at last the dawn faintly discoloured the dark, the storm had more or less subsided, but a steady wind drove on. The snow was up to the top of his door.
Sullenly, he worked to dig himself out. And he managed, through sheer persistency, to get out. He was in the tail of a great drift, many feet high. When he got through, the frozen snow was not more than two feet deep. But his island was gone. Its shape was all changed, great heaping white hills rose where no hills had been, inaccessible, and they fumed like volcanoes, but with snow powder. He was sickened and overcome.
His boat was in another, smaller drift. But he had not the strength to clear it. He looked at it helplessly. The shovel slipped from his hands, and he sank in the snow, to forget. In the snow itself, the sea resounded.
Something brought him to. He crept to his house. He was almost without feeling. Yet he managed to warm himself, just that part of him which leaned in snow-sleep over the coal fire. Then again, he made hot milk. After which, carefully, he built up the fire.
The wind dropped. Was it night again? In the silence, it seemed he could hear the panther-like dropping of infinite snow. Thunder rumbled nearer, crackled quick after the bleared reddened lightning. He lay in bed in a kind of stupor. The elements! The elements! His mind repeated the word dumbly. You can’t win against the elements.
How long it went on, he never knew. Once, like a wraith, he got out, and climbed to the top of a white hill on his unrecognisable island. The sun was hot. “It is summer,” he said to himself, “and the time of leaves.” He looked stupidly over the whiteness of his foreign island, over the waste of the lifeless sea. He pretended to imagine he saw the wink of a sail. Because he knew too well there would never again be a sail on that stark sea.
As he looked, the sky mysteriously darkened and chilled. From far off came the mutter of the unsatisfied thunder, and he knew it was the signal of the snow rolling over the sea. He turned, and felt its breath on him.
Things
They were true idealists, from New England. But that is some time ago: before the war. Several years before the war, they met and married; he, a tall, keen-eyed young man from Connecticut, she, a smallish, demure, Puritan-looking young woman from Massachusetts. They both had a little money. Not much, however. Even added together, it didn’t make three thousand dollars a year. Still—they were free. Free!
Ah!—freedom! To be free to live one’s own life! To be twenty-five and twenty-seven, a pair of true idealists with a mutual love of beauty, and an inclination towards “Indian thought”—meaning, alas, Mrs Besant—and an income of little under three thousand dollars a year! But what is money! All one wishes to do, is to live a full and beautiful life. In Europe, of course, right at the fountain-head of tradition. It might possibly be done in America: in New England, for example. But at a forfeiture of a certain amount of “beauty.” True beauty takes a long time to mature. The baroque is only half beautiful; only half-matured. No, the real silver bloom, the real golden sweet bouquet of beauty has its roots in the Renaissance, not in any later, or shallower period.
Therefore the two idealists, who were married in New Haven, sailed at once to Paris: Paris of the old days. They had a studio apartment on the Boulevard Montparnasse, and they became real Parisians, in the old, delightful sense, not in the modern, vulgar. It was the shimmer of the pure impressionists, Monet and his followers, the world seen in terms of pure light, light broken and unbroken. How lovely! How lovely the nights, the river, the mornings in the old streets and by the flower stalls and the book-stalls, the afternoons up on Montmartre or in the Tuileries, the evenings on the boulevards!
They both painted, but not desperately. Art had not taken them by the throat, and they did not take art by the throat. They painted: that’s all. They knew people—nice people, if possible, though one had to take them mixed. And they were happy.
Yet it seems as if human beings must set their claws in something. To be “free,” to be “living a full and beautiful life,” you must, alas, be attached to something. A “full and beautiful life” means a tight attachment to something—at least, it is so for all idealists—or else a certain boredom supervenes, there is a certain waving of loose ends upon the air, like the waving, yearning tendrils of the vine that spread and rotate seeking something to clutch, something up which to climb, up towards the necessary sun. Finding nothing, the vine can only trail half-fulfilled, upon the ground. Such is freedom!—a clutching of the right pole. And human beings are all vines. But especially the idealist. He is a vine, and he needs to clutch and climb. And he despises the man who is a mere potato, or turnip, or lump of wood.
Our idealists were frightfully happy, but they were all the time reaching out for something to cotton on to. At first, Paris was enough. They explored Paris thoroughly. And they learned French till they almost felt like French people, they could speak quite glibly.
Still, you know, you never talk French with your soul. It can’t be done. And though it’s very thrilling, at first, talking in French to clever Frenchmen—they seem so much cleverer than oneself—still, in the long run, it is not satisfying. The endlessly clever materialism of the French leaves you cold, in the end, gives a sense of barrenness and incompatibility with true New England depth. So our two idealists felt.
They turned away from France—but ever so gently. France had disappointed them. “We’ve loved it, and we’ve got a great deal out of it. But after a while, after a considerable while, several years, in fact, Paris leaves one feeling disappointed. It hasn’t quite got what one wants.”
“But this isn’t France.”
“No, perhaps not. France is quite different from Paris. And France is lovely—quite lovely. But to us, though we love it, it doesn’t say a great deal.”
So, when the war came, the idealists moved to Italy. And they loved Italy. They found it beautiful, and more poignant than France. It seemed much nearer to the New England conception of beauty: something pure, and full of sympathy, without the materialism and the cynicism of the French. The two idealists seemed to breathe their own true air in Italy.
And in Italy, much more than in Paris, they felt they could thrill to the teachings of the Buddha. They entered the swelling stream of modern Buddhistic emotion, and they read the books, and they practised meditation, and they deliberately set themselves to eliminate from their own souls greed, pain, and sorrow. They did not realise—yet—that Buddha’s very eagerness to free himself from pain and sorrow is in itself a sor
t of greed. No, they dreamed of a perfect world, from which all greed, and nearly all pain, and a great deal of sorrow, were eliminated.
But America entered the war, so the two idealists had to help. They did hospital work. And though their experience made them realise more than ever that greed, pain, and sorrow should be eliminated from the world, nevertheless, the Buddhism, or the theosophy, didn’t emerge very triumphant from the long crisis. Somehow, somewhere, in some part of themselves, they felt that greed, pain and sorrow would never be eliminated, because most people don’t care about eliminating them, and never will care. Our idealists were far too western to think of abandoning all the world to damnation, while they saved their two selves. They were far too unselfish to sit tight under a bho tree and reach Nirvana, in a mere couple.
It was more than that, though. They simply hadn’t enough Sitzfleisch to squat under a bho-tree and get to Nirvana by contemplating anything, least of all their own navel.
If the whole wide world was not going to be saved, they, personally, were not so very keen on being saved just by themselves. No, it would be so lonesome. They were New Englanders, so it must be all or nothing. Greed, pain and sorrow must either be eliminated from all the world, or else, what was the use of eliminating them from oneself! No use at all! One was just a victim.
And so, although they still loved “Indian thought,” and felt very tender about it: well, to go back to our metaphor, the pole up which the green and anxious vines had clambered so far now proved dry-rotten. It snapped and the vines came slowly subsiding to earth again. There was no crack and crash. The vines held themselves up by their own foliage, for a while. But they subsided. The bean-stalk of “Indian thought” had given way, before Jack and Jill had climbed off the tip of it to a further world.
They subsided with a slow rustle back to earth again. But they made no outcry. They were again “disappointed.” But they never admitted it. “Indian thought” had let them down. But they never complained. Even to one another, they never said a word. But they were disappointed, faintly but deeply disillusioned, and they both knew it. But the knowledge was tacit.
And they still had so much in their lives. They still had Italy—dear Italy. And they still had freedom, the priceless treasure. And they still had so much “beauty.” About the fulness of their lives they were not quite so sure. They had one little boy, whom they loved as parents love their children, but whom they wisely refrained from fastening upon, to build their lives on him. No no, they must live their own lives! They still had strength of mind to know that.
But they were now no longer so very young. Twenty-five and twenty-seven had become thirty-five and thirty-seven. And though they had had a very wonderful time in Europe, and though they still loved Italy—dear Italy!—yet: they were disappointed. They had got a lot out of it: oh, a very great deal indeed! Still, it hadn’t given them quite, not quite what they had expected. Europe was lovely, but it was dead. Living in Europe, you were living on the past. And Europeans, with all their superficial charm, were not really charming. They were materialistic, they had no real soul. They just did not understand the inner urge of the spirit, because the inner urge was dead in them, they were all survivals. There, that was the truth about Europeans: they were survivals, with no more getting ahead in them.
It was another bean-pole, another vine-support crumbled under the green life of the vine. And very bitter it was, this time. For up the old tree-trunk of Europe the green vine had been clambering silently for more than ten years, ten hugely important years, the years of real living. The two idealists had lived in Europe, lived on Europe and on European life and European things, as vines in an everlasting vineyard.
They had made their home here: a home such as you could never make in America. Their watchword had been “beauty.” They had rented, the last four years, the second floor of an old Palazzo on the Arno, and here they had all their “things.” And they derived profound, profound satisfaction from their apartment: the lofty, silent, ancient rooms with windows on the river, with glistening, dark-red floors, and the beautiful furniture that the idealists had “picked up.”
Yes, unknown to themselves, the lives of the idealists had been running with a fierce swiftness horizontally, all the time. They had become tense, fierce hunters of “things” for their home. While their Soul was climbing up to the sun of old European culture or old Indian thought, their passions were running horizontally, clutching at “things.” Of course they did not buy the things for the things’ sakes, but for the sake of “beauty.” They looked upon their home as a place entirely furnished by loveliness, not by “things” at all. Valerie had some very lovely curtains at the windows of the long salotta, looking on the river: curtains of queer ancient material that looked like finely knitted silk, most beautifully faded down from vermilion and orange and gold and black, down to a sheer soft glow. Valerie hardly ever came in to the salotta without mentally falling on her knees before the curtains.—“Chartres!” she said. “To me they are Chartres!” And Melville never turned and looked at his sixteenth-century Venetian book-case, with its two or three dozen of choice books, without feeling his marrow stir in his bones. The holy of holies!
The child silently, almost sinisterly avoided any rude contact with these ancient monuments of furniture, as if they had been nests of sleeping cobras, or that “thing” most perilous to the touch, the Ark of the Covenant. His childish awe was silent, and cold, but final.
Still, a couple of New England idealists cannot live merely on the bygone glory of their furniture. At least, our couple could not. They got used to the marvellous Bologna cupboard, they got used to the wonderful Venetian book-case, and the books, and the Siena curtains and bronzes, and the lovely sofas and side-tables and chairs they had “picked up” in Paris. Oh, they had been picking things up since the first day they landed in Europe. And they were still at it. It is the last interest Europe can offer to an outsider: or to an insider either.
When people came, and were thrilled by the Melville interior, then Valerie and Erasmus felt they had not lived in vain: that they still were living. But in the long mornings, when Erasmus was desultorily working at Renaissance Florentine literature, and Valerie was attending to the apartment: and in the long hours after lunch; and in the long, usually very cold and oppressive evenings in the ancient palazzo: then the halo died from around the furniture, and the things became things, lumps of matter that just stood there or hung there, ad infinitum, and said nothing; and Valerie and Erasmus almost hated them. The glow of beauty, like every other glow, dies down unless it is fed. The idealists still dearly loved their things. But they had got them. And the sad fact is, things that glow vividly while you’re getting them, go almost quite cold after a year or two. Unless, of course, people envy you them very much, and the museums are pining for them. And the Melvilles’ “things,” though very good, were not quite as good as that.
So, the glow gradually went out of everything, out of Europe, out of Italy, “the Italians are dears,” even out of that marvellous apartment on the Arno. “Why if I had this apartment, I’d never, never even want to go out of doors! It’s too lovely and perfect.”—That was something, of course, to hear that.
And yet Valerie and Erasmus went out of doors: they even went out to get away from its ancient, cold-floored, stone-heavy silence and dead dignity. “We’re living on the past, you know, Dick!” said Valerie to her husband. She called him Dick.
They were grimly hanging on. They did not like to give in. They did not like to own up that they were through. For twelve years, now, they had been “free” people, living a “full and beautiful life.” And America for twelve years had been their anathema, the Sodom and Gomorrah of industrial materialism.
It wasn’t easy to own that you were “through.” They hated to admit that they wanted to go back. But at last, reluctantly, they decided to go, “for the boy’s sake.”—“We can’t bear to leave Europe. But Peter is an American, so had better look at America while
he’s young.”—The Melvilles had an entirely English accent and manner; almost; a little Italian and French here and there.
They left Europe behind, but they took as much of it along with them as possible. Several van-loads, as a matter of fact. All those adorable and irreplaceable “things.” And all arrived in New York, idealists, child, and the huge bulk of Europe they had lugged along.
Valerie had dreamed of a pleasant apartment, perhaps on Riverside drive, where it was not so expensive as east of Fifth Avenue, and where all their wonderful things would look marvellous. She and Erasmus house-hunted. But alas! their income was quite under three thousand dollars a year. They found—well, everybody knows what they found. Two small rooms and a kitchenette, and don’t let us unpack a thing.
The chunk of Europe which they had bitten off went into a warehouse, at fifty dollars a month. And they sat in two small rooms and a kitchenette, and wondered why they’d done it.
Erasmus, of course, ought to get a job. This was what was written on the wall, and what they both pretended not to see. But it had been the strange, vague threat that the Statue of Liberty had always held over them. “Thou shalt get a job!” Erasmus had the tickets, as they say. A scholastic career was still possible for him. He had taken his exams brilliantly at Yale, and had kept up his “researches,” all the time he had been in Europe.
But both he and Valerie shuddered. A scholastic career! The scholastic world! The American scholastic world!—Shudder upon shudder! Give up their freedom, their full and beautiful life? Never! Never! Erasmus would be forty next birthday.
The “things” remained in warehouse. Valerie went to look at them. It cost her a dollar an hour, and horrid pangs. The “things,” poor things, looked a bit shabby and wretched, in that warehouse.
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