The Making of Americans, Being a History of a Family's Progress

by Stein, Gertrude

  And then when we are all through with the pleasant summer and its gorgeous washing, then comes the dreadful question of the winter washing. It's easy enough to wash often when the sun is hot and they are sticky and perspiring and the water in a natural kind of a way is always flowing, but when it comes to be nasty cold as it always is in winter, then it is not any more a pleasure, it is a harsh duty then and hard to follow.

  Yes it certainly is all very funny, and so we come back to talk some more about George Dehning, George who in this washing is always strong to do all his duty.

  George Dehning was a fair athletic chap, cheery as his father and full of excellent intentions, and though these were almost all lost in their way to their fulfillment, remember, George was only fourteen just then, that time with a boy when he never can have much sense in him, for it nearly always is then with boys that the meekest of them are reckless dare-devil heedless unreflecting fellows, and so reader do not make too much for him of any present weakness in him.

  Yes, George Dehning was not at all foreign in his washing but for him, too, the old world was not altogether lost behind him. Sometimes the boy had a way with him, and it would show clear in spite of the fair cheery sporty nature he had in him, a way of looking sleepy and reflecting, and his lids would never be really ever very open, and he would be always only half showing his clear grey eyes that, very often, were bright alive and laughing.

  Later such a way of looking could be of great service to him. It would not matter if he never really could have wisdom in him, this look could help him always in his dealings with all men and be of much service too to him with women. He will listen then, and with his veiled eyes it will be as if he were full with thinking, and with himself always well hidden, and so he will be wise; or for a woman, it will be as if he were always in a dream of them. Wisdom and dreaming, both good things when shown at the right time by a young grown man, who wants to be succeeding, always, in every kind of living.

  And so for the moment we leave the sporty cheery well washed George Dehning with his background and his future of wisdom and of dreaming, both now pretty well hidden away in the depths of him.

  And then there was the littlest one whose name had been all given without regard to the old world behind them. They called her Hortense for that was both elegant and new then. The father let the mother do as she liked with the naming, he laughed and a little he did not like it in him and then a little he was proud of his Miss Jenny and her way of doing.

  And so the littlest was Hortense Dehning. She too had the stamp of the fair prosperous woman who had set her seal so firmly on her children, but little Hortense had perhaps a little more in her of that sweet good woman who had born many children and then had died away and left them for that was all she knew then to do for them.

  The little Hortense Dehning was not of much importance yet in the family living. Hortense was ten now and full of adoration for her big sister and yet most of all for her brother. She was not very strong and she could not run after him in his playing, but sometimes he would sit and talk to her about himself and his resolutions and the elaborated purposes that he was always losing. George was always very moral and too he was very hopeful. He always began his to-morrow with himself full of a firm resolution to do all things every minute and to do them all very complicatedly. George felt always he must bring up this little sister for he George was the only one who knew the right ways for her.

  And so he preached a great deal to her, and little Hortense was very devout and adored her instructor. There was always a dependent loyal up-gazing sweetness in her.

  Being the baby of the family she was much petted by her father and always she was overawed by her brother, who was very careful to be noble to her. She was not just then very much with her mother for she was not at this time very important to her. The mother was so busy with her Julia, to find an important and good husband for her. And so little Hortense was left much to her brother and to the governess they had for her.

  For us now as well as for the mother the important matter in the history of the Dehning family is the marrying of Julia. I have said that a strong family likeness bound all the three children firmly to their mother. That fair good-looking prosperous woman had stamped her image on each one of her children, but with only the eldest Julia was the stamp deep, deeper than for the fair good-looking exterior.

  All the family had always looked up to Julia. They delighted in her daring and in a kind of heroical sweetness there was in her. They respected in her, her educated ways and her knowing always what was the right way she and all of them should be doing. It was not for nothing she was a crude domineering virgin. And she was strong in the success she knew always that she had inside her, and the family always admired and followed after.

  Her father loved her energy and vigor, he loved her happiness and the ardent honest feeling in her. He was always very ready to yield to her, he liked to hear her when she explained to him in her quick decisive manner the new faith she had so strongly in her, the new illusions and the theories and new movements that the spirit of her generation had taught to her. And he laughed at her new fangled notions and her educated literary business and all her modern kinds of improvements as he called them, and he abused them and too the way she had of believing that she knew more than her mother, but always it amused the father to have his bright quick daughter explain all these new ways to him. Mr. Dehning knew well the value of what he had learned by living, but his was a nature generous in its feeling and he was always ready to listen to his children when they could fairly demonstrate their ideas to him.

  But Herman Dehning's pride and pleasure in his Julia was all exceeded by the loud voiced satisfaction of the mother to whom this brilliant daughter always seemed as the product of the mother's own exertions. In her it was the vanity and exultation of creation as well as of possession and she never fairly learned how completely it was the girl who governed all the family life and how very much of this young life was hidden from her knowledge.

  Mr. Dehning had never concerned himself very much with the management of the family's way of living and the social life of his wife and children. These things were all always arranged by Mrs. Dehning and he was well content to let her do it though he often grumbled at the foolishness and the expense and at his children always having everything they ever wanted and so being sure to be always good for nothing.

  But always he was very proud of his wife and of his children, though, a little, he always felt it was not right, their new fangled ways of doing, and yet, truly, he was very proud of them always, and indeed they were a group to gratify the pride that he had in him, they were so vigorous prosperous and good-looking, and honest, and always respectful to him, and surely they had good hope of later winning for themselves all the happiness and success he could wish them.

  Julia Dehning at eighteen had lived through much of the experience that can prepare a girl for womanhood and marriage.

  I have said, there were a number of young men and boys connected with the Dehning family, uncles and cousins, generous decent considerate fellows, frank and honest in their friendships, and simple in the fashion of the elder Dehning. With this kindred Julia had always lived as with the members of one family. These men did not supply for her the training and experience that helps to clear the way for an impetuous woman through a world of passions, they only made a sane and moral back-ground on which she in her later life could learn to lean.

  With any member of this kindred there would be, in a young and ardent mind, no thought of love or marriage; nor were the sober business men, young, old, or middle-aged, who came a great deal to the house, attractive to her temper, for Julia was ambitious for passion and position and she needed, too, a strain of romance. No such kind of a man had really come to her and Julia was all ripe for real experience, for even with her well guarded life she had found the sickened sense that comes with learning that some men do wrong. Passionate tempers have greatly this advantage of the unpass
ionate variety; you can never guard them with such care but that they find themselves full up with real experience and with the after-taste of disillusion, but vitally as they are always hit they always rise and plunge once more, while their poorly passionate fellows who receive a vital blow never rise to faith again.

  Julia as a little girl had had the usual experiences of governess guarded children. She was first the confidant, then the advisor, and last the arranger of the love affairs of her established guardians. Then at her finishing school she became acquainted with that dubious character, the adventuress, the type to be found always in all kinds of places, a character eternally attractive in its mystery and daring, and always able to attach unto itself the most intelligent and honest of its comrades and introduce them to queer vices.

  And so Julia Dehning, like all other young girls, learnt many kinds of lessons, and she saw many of the kinds of ways that lead to wisdom, and always her life was healthy vigorous and active. She learnt very well all the things young girls of her class were taught then and she learnt too, in all kinds of ways, all the things girls always can learn, somehow, to be wise in. And so Julia was well prepared now to be a woman. She had singing and piano-playing and sport and all regular school learning, she had good looks, honesty, and brilliant courage, and in her young way a certain kind of wisdom.

  Always Julia was a passionate young woman and she had too a heroical kind of sweetness in her way of winning. She was a passionate young woman in the sense that always she was all alive and always all the emotions she had in her being were as intense and present to her feeling as a sensation like a pain is to others who are less alive in their living. And all this time too, Julia Dehning was busily arranging and directing the life and aspirations of her family, for she was strong always in her good right to lead them.

  And so Julia Dehning when she was seventeen came out upon the world, and she was filled full with courage and experience and wisdom, and she was well ready now with this energy and wisdom to cope with and conquer all the world and all men and women.

  There is nothing more joyous than being healthful young and energetic, and loving movement sunshine and clean air. Combine all this with owning of a horse and courage enough to ride him wildly, and God is good to overflowing to his children. It is pleasant too to have occasionally a sympathetic comrade on such rides. Jameson was a pleasant man of thirty five or thereabouts, a good free rider and an easy talker. Julia knew him first at home and met him usually while riding to the station to meet her father and the city train. They would then either gallop home together or go about riding through the glowing meadows of low oaks, racing cheerily along the country roads, and dipping here and there into a pleasant wood that broke the open country into shadow. They met too, occasionally, in riding parties that went in search of new country to discover and explore. It was all very pleasant and unaggressive, but Julia began to notice that Mrs. Jameson frowned on her in anger now, whenever they all met together. Then too Jameson grew gradually less comradely, more intimate, and gross. Julia understood at last and did not ride with him again.

  Such incidents as these are common in the lives of all young women and only are important in those intenser natures that, by their understanding, make each incident into a situation. Such natures suck a full experience from every act, and live so much in what, to others, means so little, for is it not all common and to be expected.

  In Julia Dehning all experience had gone to make her wise now in a desire for a master in the art of life, and it came to pass that in Alfred Hersland brought by a cousin to visit at the house she found a man who embodied her ideal in a way to make her heart beat with surprise.

  To a bourgeois mind that has within it a little of the fervor for diversity, there can be nothing more attractive than a strain of singularity that yet keeps well within the limits of conventional respectability a singularity that is, so to speak, well dressed and well set up. This is the nearest approach the middle class young woman can ever hope to make to the indifference and distinction of the really noble. When singularity goes further and so gets to be always stronger, there comes to be in it too much real danger for any middle class young woman to follow it farther. Then comes the danger of being mixed by it so that no one just seeing you can know it, and they will take you for the lowest, those who are simply poor or because they have no other way to do it. Surely no young person with any kind of middle class tradition will ever do so, will ever put themselves in the way of such danger, of getting so that no one can tell by just looking that they are not like them who by their nature are always in an ordinary undistinguished degradation. No! such kind of a danger can never have to a young one of any middle class tradition any kind of an attraction.

  Now singularity that is neither crazy, sporty, faddish, or a fashion, or low class with distinction, such a singularity, I say, we have not made enough of yet so that any other one can really know it, it is as yet an unknown product with us. It takes time to make queer people, and to have others who can know it, time and a certainty of place and means. Custom, passion, and a feel for mother earth are needed to breed vital singularity in any man, and alas, how poor we are in all these three.

  Brother Singulars, we are misplaced in a generation that knows not Joseph. We flee before the disapproval of our cousins, the courageous condescension of our friends who gallantly sometimes agree to walk the streets with us, from all them who never any way can understand why such ways and not the others are so dear to us, we fly to the kindly comfort of an older world accustomed to take all manner of strange forms into its bosom and we leave our noble order to be known under such forms as Alfred Hersland, a poor thing, and even hardly then our own.

  The Herslands were a Western family. David Hersland, the father, had gone out to a Western state to make his money. His wife had been born and brought up in the town of Bridgepoint. Later Mr. Hersland had sent his son Alfred back there to go to college and then to stay on and to study to become a lawyer. Now it was some years later and Alfred Hersland had come again to Bridgepoint, to settle down there to practice law there, and to make for himself his own money.

  The Hersland family had not had their money any longer than the others of this community, but they had taken to culture and to ideas quicker.

  Alfred Hersland was well put together to impress a courageous crude young woman, who had an ambition for both passion and position and who needed too to have a strain of romance with them.

  Hersland was tall and well dressed and sufficiently good-looking, and he carried himself always with a certain easy dignity and grace. His blond hair, which he wore parted in the middle, a way of doing which at that time showed both courage and conviction, covered a well shaped head. His features were strongly marked, regular and attractive, his expression was pleasing, his talk was always interesting, and his manners were dignified and friendly. His eyes and voice meant knowledge, feeling, and a pleasant mystery.

  Julia Dehning threw herself eagerly into this new acquaintance. She no longer wanted that men should bring with them the feel of out of doors, for out of doors with men now was soiled to her sense by the grossness of the Jamesons. Alfred Hersland brought with him the world of art and things, a world to her but vaguely known. He knew that some things made by men are things of beauty, and he spoke this knowledge with interest and conviction.

  The time passed quickly by with all this joy of fresh experience and new faith.

  Not many months from this first meeting, Julia gave her answer. “Yes, I do care for you,” she said, “and you and I will live our lives together, always learning things and doing things, good things they will be for us whatever other people may think or say.”

  It had been a wonderful time for Julia Dehning these few months of knowing Hersland. She had had, always, stirring within her, a longing for the knowledge of made things, of works of art, of all the wonders that make, she knew, a world, for certain other people. (Twenty years ago, you know, it was still the dark ages in America
and lectures on art did not grow on every tongue that had tasted the salt air of the mid-Atlantic. It was a feat then to know about hill towns in Italy, one might have heard of Titian and of Rembrandt but Giorgone and Botticelli were still sacred to the few, one did not then yet have to seek, to find for oneself new painters and new places.) It was a very real desire, this longing for the wisdom of all culture, this that had been always strong in Julia. Of course, mostly, such longing in Julia, took the form of moral idealism, the only form of culture the spare American imagination takes natural refuge in.

  Julia Dehning, like all of her kind of people, needed everything, for anything could feed her. It was not strong meat that Hersland offered to her, but her palate was eager, this had the flavour of the dishes she longed to have eaten and to have inside her. To her young crude virgin desire the food he offered to her was plenty real enough to deeply content her.

  Of the family about her, it was only Julia who found him worthy to be so important to her. The cousins and the uncles, the men who could make for her the sane and moral background that would give a wholesome middle class condition always to her, they did not like it much that Hersland was now so important for her. They said nothing to her, but they did not like to have him always about with her. He was not their kind and every minute they could know it, and they did not need him, either out in the world in business or at home where they were happy in the rich and solid family comfort they always had had with the Dehnings; and these men could not find Hersland's knowledge worth much for them, and they did not have it in them that it had a meaning for them that he Hersland had in him, knowledge and a certain kind of feeling that they never could have inside them. What could a pleasant mystery in a man mean to them except only that any man with any sense in him would not ever trust anything real to him.