This Side of Innocence

by Caldwell, Taylor;

  The girl sat down with all her old and unhurried grace, which was so regal, so quietly elegant. She unwrapped the package, examined the contents. She lifted radiant eyes to his. “Oh, Philip! How kind of you!”

  His voice was trembling treacherously, though he tried to steady it. “Not half so kind as you, Mary. It was the kindest thing to visit my aunt and my father yesterday. They wanted me to tell you how much they enjoyed your coming. I believe they quite love you.”

  A bright color ran over her face, and the small bruises quickened. But she did not look away from him. She said simply: “I love them too. I wanted to know them, because of you, Philip.”

  Philip remembered Dorothea’s telling him affectionately of “that dear child’s determination to marry him in three or four years.” They had laughed together; Philip had never heard such a gentle laugh from Dorothea before.

  He said: “They want you to come again soon, Mary.”

  Mary bent her head over the books. A long length of her fair hair fell over her cheek. “I want to, Philip,” she said, in a low tone. “But I think it best not to.”

  There was a little silence. Then Philip murmured: “Your father forbade it?”

  Mary nodded, her head still bent.

  Philip sighed. The burning in his heart was wilder. Jerome!

  Philip spoke in what he hoped was a reasonable voice: “Well, then. I am sorry. He probably knows best.”

  Mary lifted her head; her eyes were fearless and direct, but they seemed older to him than he had ever remembered them.

  “I ought to have asked him first. You see, Philip, there were things I didn’t know.”

  Good God! thought Philip. He had a great aversion for situations which involved embarrassment and the invasion of another’s privacy.

  “I didn’t know my mother had been married to your father,” Mary went on, without hesitation. “I didn’t know that she had divorced him, and then had married Papa. If I had given it even just one thought—Papa’s not wanting me to go down there—I might have realized that he must have good reason to forbid me. I seem to have grown up since yesterday.”

  To Philip, that young and steady voice became unbearably pathetic. He said, as if defending her against the cruelty of disillusion: “My dear child!”

  “Mama told me,” she went on, as if she had not heard him. “She was very upset. It was very thoughtless of me.”

  Philip drummed his fingers silently on the arm of his chair.

  He heard Mary sigh. “How hard it must have been for all of you to leave Hilltop,” she said.

  “Yes,” he answered, speaking fully from his knowledge that Mary was now no longer a child. “It was very hard. There were so many memories. Mary, my dear, I loved your mother, too. She was the first mother I had ever had. She gave me my watch.” He drew it from his pocket and showed it to her. She nodded.

  She said, with a faint wonder on her face: “It’s very strange how you don’t think of your parents ever having had a life of their own before you were born. And very stupid too. Did Mama seem beautiful to you, Philip, and kind?”

  “Yes. Oh, yes, Mary.” He found it a little hard to see her clearly.

  She stared at a wall with dreaming eyes. “You know, Philip, I sometimes thought that Mama was a little tiresome, at times. She was just ‘Mother’ to me, and I was always vexing her. But now I seem to know her better. She looked sad when she talked of your father. Philip, do you suppose she ever liked him, really?”

  Philip’s conflict of emotions confused him. “Mary, I don’t know. I really don’t know. Perhaps she did. She must have, or she wouldn’t have married him in the first place. Well. It can’t be helped. It happened a long time ago, long before you were born. Some things are best forgotten. It does no good to dig them up after they’re buried.”

  Mary’s hands were clasped on the books. For the first time Philip saw them consciously, and he was moved by their delicate whiteness, their transparency. The lamplight shone on the girl’s clear profile; her thick pale lashes threw a sharp shadow on her cheek. He thought: It is such a lovely, valorous face, so exquisite, so fine. And so proud, so nobly pure. That small firm chin had dignity, too; the shape of the brow was aristocratic, imperial, in its white and sloping contours. Something too poignant moved in Philip.

  “But,” she said thoughtfully, “you come here, Philip. Papa likes you. He wants you to come.”

  “We always liked each other, your father and I,” he said. “There was no quarrel between us.” He halted. He knew what the girl was thinking: There is no quarrel, either, between me and your father. He saw Mary smile; that smile saddened him, it was so ironical, robbed of youth. Then she turned to him, with her lucid and open look.

  “There are some things I don’t know yet, aren’t there, Philip?”

  He was extremely embarrassed and alarmed. “I am sure your mother told you all there was to know, Mary. I—I would say it is a matter of incompatible temperaments, between your father and mine. I understand they were enemies all their lives. They never understood each other. It was not just your mother—” He stopped. He was always averse to discussing others in their absence. It smacked of disloyalty.

  Mary was regarding him seriously. “I think I understand. But your father was not bitter about mine. Papa told me those scars had come from Uncle Alfred. Perhaps if there had been no scars, Papa might have forgotten too. They always remind him. He must have been terribly humiliated. Poor Papa.”

  Philip stood up hastily. “Your father is a very proud man, Mary.” Then he paused. How penetrating of the child! He studied her earnestly, and again that odd poignancy moved him.

  “Yes, very proud, Philip. I know that now. You see how wrong I was. I know there is something more that I haven’t been told. Can you tell me?”

  Philip was full of consternation. With more severity than he actually felt, he said: “Mary, my dear. Don’t you think it is a little impertinent of us to discuss your father like this? Do you think he would like it?”

  “Of course he would not. You are right, Philip.” She put aside the books. Her expression was so tranquil that it appeared impassive.

  “You will try to forget all this, Mary? It does not make any difference between you and me?”

  She stood up. Her head was considerably higher than his. Her eyes were candid again, and very blue.

  “How could it, Philip?” She gave him her hand. It was cool in his, and yielding.

  “You will tell Aunt Dorothea and Uncle Alfred that I send them my love, and that I’ll come to see them again some day, but not just yet?” she said.

  “Yes, darling, I will.” The poor, poor child. But she was no longer a child.

  He went down the stairs slowly. He arranged his dark features into a smile before going into the library. He saw Jerome, and again that harsh burning pierced him. But he saw Amalie also, and her anxious pallor.

  He said cheerfully: “The child is very pleased with the books. She wants to play the Brahms for you the first thing tomorrow, Jerome.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  “Work, or business, or even the professions,” Jerome said, “have become not merely the source of the wherewithal with which to enjoy life but reasons for existence in themselves.”

  This seemed to him to be a most terrible spiritual error. He blamed the Puritans for it, the Puritans who were masochists and hated joy and life. He had listened to Philip’s account of his last years at Harvard. Scholasticism, classicism, no longer had for their aim the broadening of the human concept of the universe, the increase of delight as consciousness is increased, but were a preparation for making money. Philip had friends in Boston and Philadelphia. It disgusted Jerome when Philip cynically informed him that conversations about the arts and philosophy, and conjecture as to man’s place in nature and in government, were ridiculed as the occupations of silly professors and schoolteachers, and those unacquainted with reality. Now it was “business.” In defense, many Bostonians and Philadelphians had hi
nted that whatever had nothing to do with the capacity to make money was not “democratic,” not “American.” A wave of anti-Europeanism had arisen. Many had become alarmed at this. But Philip explained that it was not anti-Europeanism per se, but a guilty revolt against tradition, aristocracy, the arts and philosophy, which “Europeanism” represented to the lusty boars that ranged through American banking houses and industry. It was “hatred of class,” explained the boars, who were rapidly establishing an “aristocracy” of their own which had its basis in cash balances only. “Classes,” in Europe, had been based on family, tradition, learning, intellectual accomplishment. But American “classes” were even more rigid: how many thousand pairs of shoes or tons of pig iron or ready-made suits or locomotives or rails or silver or coal had a certain man sold during the past year?

  To Philip and Jerome, this seemed a far uglier thing than the old class distinctions of Europe, and even of the earlier America. “It is comparatively easy to make money,” Philip said. “The veriest peasant or pleb or rascal can do it. So, if we are not careful, the new leaders of America, the new statesmen and politicians, will inevitably come from those who have no tradition of pride and dignity and honor. We shall have mountebanks representing millions of lightless and cunning fools, without learning, without a sense of universal responsibility, and without exaltation. I foresee a time when America will have profound weight in the world. If that weight is not accompanied by thoughtfulness, intellectual perception and decent altruism, then the world will be in a sorry state indeed.”

  He recalled to Jerome Plato’s hint for a perfect society: that a certain class of noble and learned men, of tradition and intellect, be maintained from which to draw all statesmen, all lawmakers. “They need not come from the ‘old’ families,” said Philip, “for the ‘old’ families in America are almost always the descendants of mere robbers and pirates and thieves in the slaughterhouse or mining or railroad businesses. We should have monitors in all our public schools, constantly on the alert for those children, those boys, those young men, no matter what their background or their family, who display intuitive delicacy, integrity and intellect. These should be winnowed out from the mass, who will always be concerned, in our terribly out-of-joint society, with the making of money and with work for its own sake. Free scholarship to the best universities should be given these young men. Later, we should have for them governmental schools of political science, with the emphasis on history and human relationships.

  “From these graduates, and from them only, should come the Senators and Congressmen, the civil servants, the Mayors and the Judges, the officers of the armed forces, and even the Presidents of the United States. This is true democracy: the free choosing of the best. Only in a true democracy can the best, regardless of background or birth, be elevated to positions of authority.

  “In these governmental schools there would be no emphasis on money. Service to the nation, to humanity, would be stressed. That would be their vocation, the ideal to which they would be dedicated.”

  “A Brahmin class!” said Jerome, with a laugh. “Think of its dangerous potentialities!”

  “There is no danger,” said Philip seriously. “An inherited aristocracy is your real ‘Brahmin’ class. The class I suggest would be drawn from all ranks of society, from the children of laborers and masons to the children of Boston and Philadelphia society, from the children of the plantation owners of the South to the children in the tenant cottages. They would be elected to governmental positions; they would not inherit them. There would be no ‘House of Lords’ idea in America.”

  “Your idea smacks of the monastery,” said Jerome, but his ridicule, as usual when with Philip, was really only a mask for his real interest and approval.

  “The monastery idea is not a bad one,” replied Philip. “A body of dedicated men, freed of the stultifying necessity of making money, free to work for the general good and the advancement of knowledge. I have always agreed with the premise of the Roman Church: that to do his best work, a man must be liberated from personal anxieties, not weighed down by the compulsion to provide for a family.

  “The graduates of my hypothetical schools would be sufficiently remunerated, so that their families would not suffer. It is not the desire for money which is the root of all evil, personal and national, but the desperate necessity for it.”.

  He smiled. “Under this plan of mine, the venal lawyer, the greedy businessman, the intellectual failure and the incompetent could not resort to politics, nor be elected to positions of profound trust and gravity. As my graduates would be imbued with their mission, they could not easily be bought by subversive lobbies. As they would, in the first place, be good men, they could not be tempted by scoundrels.”

  “I have a feeling this is going to cost me money,” said Jerome reflectively.

  “It is.” Philip laughed. “We can begin right here in the schools of Riversend. We must have talks with the teachers. Find out the best boys, not those of keen and avaricious and merely acquisitive minds. But those who are thoughtful and intrinsically decent, as well as good scholars. Provide scholarships for these boys. Tell them, from the very beginning, in their grades and forms, to what they must dedicate themselves.”

  He stood up and walked slowly but eagerly up and down Jerome’s office. “America! I feel prophetic. This nation shall be great and heroic. It shall stand like a Colossus over the ruck of dark and malignant history. It shall, it must, know that the destiny and the dreams of all men repose in it, as a child in the mother’s womb. Who can withstand America, if she lives in the sun of nobility and generosity, if all men within her borders can truly say: ‘I am free’?”

  He continued to walk up and down. He said musingly: “I feel mystical. America is not merely an experiment, conducted by men, in liberty and vision and hope. It is an experiment, conducted by God, to discover whether man has come of age, whether he is mature enough to order his own destiny, whether he has acquired sufficient greatness of heart to succor other men. Here is the hope of the ages. Here is the dream of the prophets. Here is the thought of Plato and Socrates, of Jesus and Buddha. It was to all men, and not to Moses alone, that God said: ‘Lift up thine eyes westward, and northward, and southward, and eastward, and behold it with thine eyes.’ And surely, surely, He said this of America. Surely, this is the Promised Land.”

  Jerome had seldom seen him so moved. Philip turned to him suddenly, eyes flashing, hands clenched. “We must keep America safe from the mountebanks, the liars, the exploiters, the haters, the fools. Here is the dream. We dare not let it turn into a nightmare, where only money and property are sacred, and man’s soul is buried under the stones of materialism and lust. Something else must be taught in the schools besides preparation for making money. Something spiritual, something subjective and noble must be injected into the minds of children. Something not chauvinistic and narrow.

  “We have mouthed for over a hundred years that all men are equal in the sight of God and before the law. But we have never made the children believe it. Unless we do, we are lost. That is the evidence of history. So long as one man in America is without, hope, so long is the whole nation without hope. If one man lack a vision, we shall all lack it. That is the task for the future: to give all men hope, to assure them that they do not live by bread alone.”

  “It all comes down to the never-ending fight against the ‘gray men,’” said Jerome.

  “Yes. The fight against those who love only their own bellies and their own bank accounts. The fight against those who see in possessions the only reason for living. Religion, thus far, has failed to conquer the ‘gray men,’ or even to fight them. It must begin, this fight. It cannot begin soon enough.”

  Philip paused. He looked at Jerome queerly. “You are quite wrong, you know,” he said. “My father isn’t a ‘gray man.’ He only needed money. Someone should have told him, in his early days, that a man does not need to demonstrate his competence and justify his existence by the making of
money. He knows that now. Yes, you are wrong.”

  Jerome stood up abruptly. “Let us have luncheon together,” he said.

  Philip sighed. They went out.

  Jerome did not speak again of what they had been discussing, but Philip knew that he was thinking, and he was satisfied.

  Jerome began to speak of Mary. Amalie and the girl were returning to America after a few months in Europe. They had attended the Jubilee of Queen Victoria; friends of Jerome’s in England had been instrumental in presenting both Amalie and Mary at Court. “I want the girl to get a feeling of stability, of the firm integration of history,” said Jerome. “She is seventeen now and she has a mind. When she returns, she wishes to go to Cornell University. I hardly thought I’d live to see the day of coeducation in America!”

  “Mary has a great soul,” said Philip. His face was moved. He looked away from Jerome. “I only hope she will marry as great and as good a man as she is a woman.”

  “Oh, I have plans for her,” said Jerome, with smug satisfaction. His expression was bright with pride and love. “But there’s my boy, too. He’s to go to Groton very soon. My God, how time flies. Banal, that remark, isn’t it? Will’s twelve now, and has the makings of a rousing businessman. But Amalie’s been careful of him. He goes to Sunday school, and his mother teaches him constantly that he has a duty to others above his duty to himself. Whether he is taking the lesson to heart or not, only time will tell. He has a good bank account of his own,” added Jerome wryly.

  After the meal Philip went back to his father’s Bank. Alfred, as usual, appeared happy to see his son. Philip sat down. “I’ve talked with Jerome about what we discussed last night, Father,” he said. “I think he will endow a few scholarships. With yours, and mine, the thing ought to be impressive.”