Hansl dresses very sharply, in Hong Kong suits and shirts. A slender man, he carries himself like a concert violinist and has a manner that, as a manner, is fully convincing. For his sister"s sake ("She had a wonderful life with you, she said to the last"), he was, or intended to be, my protector. I was a poor old guy, bereaved, incompetent, accidentally prosperous, foolishly trusting, thoroughly swindled. "Your brother f.u.c.ked you but good. He and his wife."
"She was a party to it?"
"Try giving it a little thought. Has she answered any of your letters?"
"No."
Not a single one, Miss Rose.
"Let me tell you how I reconstruct it, Harry," said Hansl. "Philip wanted to impress his wife. He was scared of her. Out of terror, he wanted to make her rich. She told him she was all the family he needed. To prove that he believed her, he had to sacrifice his old flesh and blood to the new flesh and blood. Like, "I give you the life of your dreams, all you have to do is cut your brother"s throat." He did his part, he piled up dough, dough, and more dough-I don"t suppose he liked you anyway-and he put all the loot in her name. So that when he died, which was never_ going to happen..."
Cleverness is Hansl"s instrument; he plays it madly, bowing it with elegance as if he were laying out the structure of a sonata, phrase by phrase, for his backward brother-in-law. What did I need with his fiddling? Isn"t there anybody, dear G.o.d, on my_ side? My brother picked me up by the trustful affections as one would lift up a rabbit by the ears. Hansl, now in charge of the case, a.n.a.lyzed the betrayal for me, down to the finest fibers of its brotherly bonds, and this demonstrated that he was completely on my side-right? He examined the books of the partnership, which I had never bothered to do, pointing out Philip"s misdeeds. "You see? He was leasing land from his wife, the nominal owner, for use by the wrecking company, and every year that pig paid himself a rent of ninety-eight thousand dollars. There went your profits. More deals of the same kind all over these balance sheets. While you were planning summers in Corsica."
"I wasn"t cut out for business. I see that."
"Your dear brother was a full-time con artist. He might have started a service called Dial-a-Fraud. But then you also provoke people. When Klaussen handed over your files to me, he told me what offensive, wicked things you said. He then decided he couldn"t represent you anymore."
"But he didn"t return the unused part of the fat retainer I gave him."
""/ be looking out for you now. Gerdas gone, and that leaves me to see that things don"t get worse-the one adult of us three. My clients who are the greatest readers are always in the biggest trouble. What they call culture, if you ask me, causes mostly confusion and stunts their development. I wonder if you"ll ever understand why you let your brother do you in the way he did."
Philip"s bad world borrowed me for purposes of its own. I had, however, approached him in the expectation of benefits, Miss Rose. I wasn"t blameless. And if he and his people-accountants, managers, his wife-forced me to feel what they felt, colonized me with their realities, even with their daily moods, saw to it that I should suffer everything they had to suffer, it was after all my_ idea. I tried to make use of them._ I never again saw my brother"s wife, his children, nor the park they lived in, nor the pit bulldogs.
"That woman is a legal genius," said Hansl.
Hansl said to me, "You"d better transfer what"s left, your trust account, to my bank, where I can look after it. I"m on good terms with the officers over there. The guys are efficient, and no monkey business. You"ll be taken care of."
I had been taken care of before, Miss Rose. Walish was dead right about "the life of feeling" and the people who lead it. Feelings are dreamlike, and dreaming is usually done in bed. Evidently I was forever looking for a safe place to lie down. Hansl offered to make secure arrangements for me so that I wouldn"t have to wear myself out with finance and litigation, which were too stressful and labyrinthine and disruptive; so I accepted his proposal and we met with an officer of his bank. Actually the bank looked like a fine old inst.i.tution, with Oriental rugs, heavy carved furniture, nineteenth-century paintings, and dozens of square acres of financial atmosphere above us. Hansl and the vice president who was going to take care of me began with small talk about the commodity market, the capers over at City Hall, the prospects for the Chicago Bears, intimacies with a couple of girls in a Rush Street bar. I saw that Hansl badly needed the points he was getting for bringing in my account. He wasn"t doing well. Though n.o.body was supposed to say so, I was soon aware of it. Many forms were put before me, which I signed. Then two final cards were laid down just as my signing momentum seemed irreversible. But I applied the brake. I asked the vice president what these were for and he said, "If you"re busy, or out of town, these will give Mr. Genauer the right to trade for you-buy or sell stocks for your account."
I slipped the cards into my pocket, saying that I"d take them home with me and mail them in. We pa.s.sed to the next item of business.
Hansl made a scene in the street, pulling me away from the great gates of the bank and down a narrow Loop alley. Behind the kitchen of a hamburger joint he let me have it. He said, "You humiliated me."
I said, "We didn"t discuss a power of attorney beforehand. You took me by surprise, completely. Why did you spring it on me like that?"
"You"re accusing me of trying to pull a fast one? If you weren"t Gerdas husband I"d tell you to beat it. You undermined me with a business a.s.sociate. You weren"t like this with your own brother, and I"m closer to you by affection than he was by blood, you nitwit. I wouldn"t have traded your securities without notifying you."
He was tearful with rage.
"For G.o.d"s sake, let"s move away from this kitchen ventilator," I said. "I"m disgusted with these fumes."
He shouted, "You"re out of it! Out!"
"And you"re in_ it."
"Where the h.e.l.l else is there to be?"
Miss Rose, you have understood us, I am sure of it. We were talking about the vortex. A nicer word for it is the French one, le tourbillon,_ or whirlwind. I was not out of it, it was only my project to get_ out. It"s been a case of disorientation, my dear. I know that there"s a right state for each of us. And as long as I"m not in the right state, the state of vision I was meant or destined to be in, I must a.s.sume responsibility for the unhappiness others suffer because of my disorientation. Until this ends there can only be errors. To put it another way, my dreams of orientation or true vision taunt me by suggesting that the world in which I-together with others-live my life is a fabrication, an amus.e.m.e.nt park that, however, does not amuse. It resembles, if you are following, my brother"s private park, which was supposed to prove by external signs that he made his way into the very center of the real. Philip had prepared the setting, paid for by embezzlement, but he had nothing to set in it. He was forced to flee, pursued by bounty hunters who s.n.a.t.c.hed him in Chapultepec, and so forth. At his weight, at that alt.i.tude, in the smog of Mexico City, to jog was suicidal.
Now Hansl explained himself, for when I said to him, "Those securities can"t be traded anyway. Don"t you see? The plaintiffs have legally taken a list of all my holdings," he was ready for me. "Bonds, mostly," he said. "That"s just where I can outfox them. They copied that list two weeks ago, and now it"s in their lawyers" file and they won"t check it for months to come. They think they"ve got you, but here"s what we do: we sell those old bonds off and buy new ones to replace them. We change all the numbers. All it costs you is brokerage fees. Then, when the time comes, they find out that what they"ve got sewed up is bonds you no longer own. How are they going to trace the new numbers? And by then I"ll have you out of the country."
Here the skin of my head became intolerably tight, which meant even deeper error, greater horror antic.i.p.ated. And, at the same time, temptation. People had kicked the h.e.l.l out of me with, as yet, no reprisals. My thought was: It"s time / made a bold move. We were in the narrow alley between two huge downtown inst.i.tutions (the hamburger joint was crammed in tight). An armored Brink"s truck could hardly have squeezed between the close colossal black walls.
"You mean I subst.i.tute new bonds for the old, and I can sell from abroad if I want to?"
Seeing that I was beginning to appreciate the exquisite sweetness of his scheme, Hansl gave a terrific smile and said, "And you will. That"s the dough you"ll live on."
"That"s a dizzy idea," I said.
"Maybe it is, but do you want to spend the rest of your life battling in the courts? Why not leave the country and live abroad quietly on what"s left of your a.s.sets? Pick a place where the dollar is strong and spend the rest of your life in musical studies or what you G.o.dd.a.m.n well please. Gerda, G.o.d bless her, is gone. What"s to keep you?"
"n.o.body but my old mother."
"Ninety-four years old? And a vegetable? You can put your textbook copyright in her name and the income will take care of her. So our next step is to check out some international law. There"s a sensational chick in my office. She was on the Yale Law Journal._ They don"t come any smarter. She"ll find you a country. I"ll have her do a report on Canada. What about British Columbia, where old Canadians retire?"
"Whom do I know there? Whom will I talk to? And what if the creditors keep after me?"
"You haven"t got so much dough left. There isn"t all that much in it for them. They"ll forget you."
I told Hansl I"d consider his proposal. I had to go and visit Mother in the nursing home.
The home was decorated with the intention of making everything seem normal. Her room was much like any hospital room, with plastic ferns and fireproof drapes. The chairs, resembling wrought-iron garden furniture, were also synthetic and light. I had trouble with the ferns. I disliked having to touch them to see if they were real. It was a reflection on my relation to reality that I couldn t tell at a glance. But then Mother didn"t know me, either, which was a more complex matter than the ferns.
I preferred to come at mealtimes, for she had to be fed. To feed her was infinitely meaningful for me. I took over from the orderly. I had long given up telling her, "This is Harry." Nor did I expect to establish rapport by feeding her.
I used to feel that I had inherited something of her rich crazy nature and love of life, but it now was useless to think such thoughts. The tray was brought and the orderly tied her bib. She willingly swallowed the cream of carrot soup. When I encouraged her, she nodded. Recognition, nil. Two faces from ancient Kiev, similar b.u.mps on the forehead. Dressed in her hospital gown, she wore a thread of lipstick on her mouth. The chapped skin of her cheeks gave her color also. By no means silent, she spoke of her family, but I was not mentioned.
"How many children have you got?" I said.
"Three: two daughters and a son, my son Philip."
All three were dead. Maybe she was already in communication with them. There was little enough of reality remaining in this life; perhaps they had made connections in another. In the census of the living, I wasn"t counted.
"My son Philip is a clever businessman."
"Oh, I know."
She stared, but did not ask how I knew. My nod seemed to tell her that I was a fellow with plenty of contacts, and that was enough for her.
"Philip is very rich," she said.
"Is he?"
"A millionaire, and a wonderful son. He always used to give me money. I put it into Postal Savings. Have you got children?"
"No, I haven"t."
"My daughters come to see me. But best of all is my son. He pays all my bills."
"Do you have friends in this place?"
"n.o.body. And I don"t like it. I hurt all the time, especially my hips and legs. I have so much misery that there are days when I think I should jump from the window."
"But you won"t do that, will you?"
"Well, I think: What would Philip and the girls do with a mother a cripple?"
I let the spoon slip into the soup and uttered a high laugh. It was so abrupt and piercing that it roused her to examine me.
Our kitchen on Independence Boulevard had once been filled with such c.o.c.katoo cries, mostly feminine. In the old days the Shawmut women would sit in the kitchen while giant meals were cooked, tubs of stuffed cabbage, slabs of brisket. Pineapple cakes glazed with brown sugar came out of the oven. There were no low voices there. In that cage of birds you couldn"t make yourself heard if you didn"t shriek, too, and I had learned as a kid to shriek with the rest, like one of those operatic woman-birds. That was what Mother now heard from me, the sound of one of her daughters. But I had no bouffant hairdo, I was bald and wore a mustache, and there was no eyeliner on my lids. While she stared at me I dried her face with the napkin and continued to feed her.
"Don"t jump, Mother, you"ll hurt yourself."
But everyone here called her Mother; there was nothing personal about it.
She asked me to switch on the TV set so that she could watch Dallas._ I said it wasn"t time yet, and I entertained her by singing s.n.a.t.c.hes of the Sta-bat Mater._ I sang, "Eja mater, fonsamo-o-ris. "_ Pergolesi"s sacred chamber music (different from his formal ma.s.ses for the Neapolitan church) was not to her taste. Of course I loved my mother, and she had once loved me. I well remember having my hair washed with a bulky bar of castile soap and how pained she was when I cried from the soap in my eyes. When she dressed me in a pongee suit (short pants of Chinese silk) to send me off to a surprise party, she kissed me ecstatically. These were events that might have occurred just before the time of the Boxer Rebellion or in the back streets of Siena six centuries ago. Bathing, combing, dressing, kissing-these now are remote antiquities. There was, as I grew older, no way to sustain them.
When I was in college (they sent me to study electrical engineering but I broke away into music) I used to enjoy saying, when students joked about their families, that because I was born just before the Sabbath, my mother was too busy in the kitchen to spare the time and my aunt had to give birth to me.
I kissed the old girl-she felt lighter to me than wickerwork. But I wondered what I had done to earn this oblivion, and why fat-a.s.sed Philip the evildoer should have been her favorite, the true son. Well, he didn"t lie to her about Dallas,_ or try for his own sake to resuscitate her emotions, to appeal to her maternal memory with Christian music (fourteenth-century Latin of J. da Todi). My mother, two-thirds of her erased, and my brother-who knew where his wife had buried him?-had both been true to the present American world and its liveliest material interests. Philip therefore spoke to her understanding. I did not. By waving my long arms, conducting Mozart"s Great Ma.s.s_ or Handel"s Solomon,_ I wafted myself away into the sublime. So for many years I had not made sense, had talked strangely to my mother. What had she to remember me by? Haifa century ago I had refused to enter into her_ kitchen performance. She had belonged to the universal regiment of Stanislavski mothers. During the twenties and thirties those women were going strong in thousands of kitchens across the civilized world from Salonika to San Diego. They had warned their daughters that the men they married would be rapists to whom they must submit in duty. And when I told her that I was going to marry Gerda, Mother opened her purse and gave me three dollars, saying, "If you need it so bad, go to a wh.o.r.ehouse." Nothing but histrionics, of course.
"Realizing how we suffer," as Ginsberg wrote in "Kaddish," I was wickedly tormented. I had come to make a decision about Ma, and it was possible that J was fiddling with the deck, stacking the cards, telling myself, Miss Rose, "It was always me that took care of this freaked-in-the-brain, afflicted, calamitous, s hrill old mother, not Philip. Philip was too busy building himself up into an imperial American." Yes, that was how I put it, Miss Rose, and I went even further. The consummation of Philip"s upbuilding was to torpedo me. He got me under the waterline, a direct hit, and my fortunes exploded, a sacrifice to Tracy and his children. And now I"m supposed to be towed away for salvage.
I"ll tell you the truth, Miss Rose, I was maddened by injustice. I think you"d have to agree not only that I"d been had but that I was singularly foolish, a burlesque figure. I could have modeled Simple Simon for the nursery-rhyme wallpaper of the little girl"s room in Texas.
As I was brutally offensive to you without provocation, these disclosures, the record of my present state, may gratify you. Almost any elderly person, chosen at random, can provide such gratification to those he has offended. One has only to see the list of true facts, the painful inventory. Let me add, however, that while I, too, have reason to feel vengeful, I haven"t experienced a Dionysian intoxication of vengefulness. In fact I have had feelings of increased calm and of enhanced strength-my emotional development has been steady, not fitful.
The Texas partnership, what was left of it, was being administered by my brother"s lawyer, who answered all my inquiries with computer printouts. There were capital gains, only on paper, but I was obliged to pay taxes on them, too. The $300,000 remaining would be used up in litigation, if I stayed put, and so I decided to follow Hansl"s plan even if it led to the _Gtterdmmerung__ of my remaining a.s.sets. All the better for your innocence and peace of mind if you don"t understand these explanations. Time to hit back, said Hansl. His crafty looks were a study. That a man who was able to look so crafty shouldn"t really_ be a genius of intrigue was the most unlikely thing in the world. His smiling wrinkles of deep cunning gave me confidence in Hansl. The bonds that the plaintiffs (creditors) had recorded were secretly traded for new ones. My tracks were covered, and I took off for Canada, a foreign country in which my own language, or something approaching it, is spoken. There I was to conclude my life in peace, and at an advantageous rate of exchange. I have developed a certain sympathy with Canada. It"s no easy thing to share a border with the U.S.A. Canada"s chief entertainment-it has no choice-is to watch (from a gorgeous setting) what happens in our country. The disaster is that there is no other show. Night after night they sit in darkness and watch us on the lighted screen.
"Now that you"ve made your arrangements, I can tell you," said Hansl, "how proud I am that you"re hitting back. To go on taking punishment from those p.r.i.c.ks would be a disgrace."
Busy Hansl really was crackers, and even before I took off for Vancouver I began to see that. I told myself that his private quirks didn"t extend to his professional life. But before I fled, he came up with half a dozen unsettling ideas of what I had to do for him. He was a little bitter because, he said, 1 hadn"t let him make use of my cultural prestige. I was puzzled and asked for an example. He said that for one thing I had never offered to put him up for membership in the University Club .1 had had him to lunch there and it turned out that he was deeply impressed by the Ivy League cla.s.s, the dignity of the bar, the leather seats, and the big windows of the dining room, decorated with the seals of the great universities in stained gla.s.s. He had graduated from De Paul, in Chicago. He had expected me to ask whether he"d like to join, but I had been too selfish or too sn.o.bbish to do that. Since he was now saving me, the least I could do was to use my influence with the membership committee. I saw his point and nominated him willingly, even with relish.
He next asked me to help him with one of his ladies. "They"re Kenwood people, an old mail-order-house fortune. The family is musical and artistic. Babette is an attractive widow. The first guy had the Big C, and to tell the truth I"m a little nervous of getting in behind him, but I can fight that. I don"t think I"ll catch it, too. Now, Babette is impressed by you, she"s heard you conduct and read some of your music criticism, watched you on Channel Eleven. Educated in Switzerland, knows languages, and this is a case where I can use your cultural clout. What I suggest is that you take us to Les Nomades-private dining without crockery noise. I gave her the best Italian food in town at the Roman Rooftop, but they not only bang the dishes there, they poisoned her with the sodium glutamate on the veal. So feed us at the Nomades. You can deduct the amount of the tab from my next bill. I always believed that the cla.s.s you impressed people with you picked up from my sister. After all, you were a family of Russian peddlers and your brother was a lousy felon. My sister not only loved you, she taught you some style. Someday it"ll be recognized that if that G.o.dd.a.m.n Roosevelt hadn"t shut the doors on Jewish refugees from Germany this country wouldn"t be in such trouble today. We could have had ten Kissingers, and n.o.body will ever know how much scientific talent went up in smoke at the camps."
Well, at Les Nomades I did it again, Miss Rose. On the eve of my flight I was understandably in a state. Considered as a receptacle, I was tilted to the pouring point. The young widow he had designs on was attractive in ways that you had to come to terms with. It was fascinating to me that anybody with a Hapsburg lip could speak so rapidly, and I would have said that she was a little uncomfortably tall. Gerda, on whom my taste was formed, was a short, delicious woman. However, there was no reason to make comparisons.
When there are musical questions I always try earnestly to answer them. People have told me that I am comically woodenheaded in this respect, a straight man. Babette had studied music, her people were patrons of the Lyric Opera, but after she had asked for my opinion on the production of Monteverdi"s Coro-_ nation ofPoppaea,_ she took over, answering all her own questions. Maybe her recent loss had made her nervously talkative. I am always glad to let somebody else carry the conversation, but this Babette, in spite of her big underlip, was too much for me. A relentless talker, she repeated for half an hour what she had heard from influential relatives about the politics surrounding cable-TV franchises in Chicago. She followed this up with a long conversation on films. I seldom go to the movies. My wife had no taste for them. Hansl, too, was lost in all this discussion about directors, actors, new developments in the treatment of the relations between the s.e.xes, the progress of social and political ideas in the evolution of the medium. I had nothing at all to say. I thought about death, and also about the best topics for reflection appropriate to my age, the on the whole agreeable openness of things toward the end of the line, the outskirts of the City of Life. I didn"t too much mind Babette"s chatter, I admired her taste in clothing, the curved white and plum stripes of her enchanting blouse from Bergdorfs. She was well set up. Conceivably her shoulders were too heavy, proportional to the Hapsburg lip. It wouldn"t matter to Hansl; he was thinking about Brains wedded to Money.
I hoped I wouldn"t have a stroke in Canada. There would be no one to look after me, neither a discreet, gentle Gerda nor a gabby Babette.
I wasn"t aware of the approach of one of my seizures, but when we were at the half-open door of the checkroom and Hansl was telling the attendant that the lady"s coat was a three-quarter-length sable wrap, Babette said, "I realize now that I monopolized the conversation, I talked and talked all evening. I"m so sorry...."
"That"s all right," I told her. "You didn"t say a thing."
You, Miss Rose, are in the best position to judge the effects of such a remark.
Hansl next day said to me, "You just can"t be trusted, Harry, you"re a born betrayer. I was feeling sorry for you, having to sell your car and furniture and books, and about your brother who shafted you, and your old mother, and my poor sister pa.s.sing, but you have no grat.i.tude or consideration in you. You insult everybody"
"I didn"t realize that I was going to hurt the lady"s feelings."
"I could have married the woman. I had it wrapped up. But I was an idiot. I had to bring you_ into it. And now, let me tell you, you"ve made one more enemy"
"Who, Babette?"
Hansl did not choose to answer. He preferred to lay a heavy, ambiguous silence on me. His eyes, narrowing and dilating with his discovery of my wicked habit, sent daft waves toward me. The message of those waves was that the foundations of his goodwill had been wiped out. In all the world, I had had only Hansl to turn to. Everybody else was estranged. And now I couldn"t count on him, either. It was not a happy development for me, Miss Rose. I can"t say that it didn"t bother me, although I could no longer believe in my brother-in-law"s dependability. By the standards of stability at the strong core of American business society, Hansl himself was a freak. Quite apart from his disjunctive habits of mind, he was disqualified by the violinist"s figure he cut, the n.o.ble hands and the manicured filbert fingernails, his eyes, which were like the eyes you glimpse in the heated purple corners of the small-mammal house that reproduces the gloom of nocturnal tropics. Would any Aramco official have become his client? Hansl had no reasonable plans but only crafty fantasies, restless schemes. They puffed out like a lizard"s throat and then collapsed like bubble gum.
As for insults, I never intentionally insulted anyone. I sometimes think that I don"t have to say a word for people to be insulted by me, that my existence itself insults them. I come to this conclusion unwillingly, for G.o.d knows that I consider myself a man of normal social instincts and am not conscious of any will to offend. In various ways I have been trying to say this to you, using words like seizure, rapture, demonic possession, frenzy, Fatum,_ divine madness, or even solar storm-on a microcosmic scale. The better people are, the less they take offense at this gift, or curse, and I have a hunch that you will judge me less harshly than Walish. He, however, is right in one respect. You did nothing to offend me. You were the meekest, the only one of those I wounded whom I had no reason whatsoever to wound. That"s what grieves me most of all. But there is still more. The writing of this letter has been the occasion of important discoveries about myself, so I am even more greatly in your debt, for I see that you have returned me good for the evil I did you. I opened my mouth to make a coa.r.s.e joke at your expense and thirty-five years later the result is a communion.
But to return to what I literally am: a basically unimportant old party, ailing, cut off from all friendships, scheduled for extradition, and with a future of which the dimmest view is justified (shall I have an extra bed put in my mothers room and plead illness and incompetency?).
Wandering about Vancouver this winter, I have considered whether to edit an anthology of sharp sayings. Make my fate pay off. But I am too demoralized to do it. I can"t pull myself together. Instead, fragments of things read or remembered come to me persistently while I go back and forth between my house and the supermarket. I shop to entertain myself, but Canadian supermarkets unsettle me. They aren"t organized the way ours are. They carry fewer brands. Items like lettuce and bananas are priced out of sight while luxuries like frozen salmon are comparatively cheap. But how would I cope with a big frozen salmon? couldn"t fit it into my oven, and how, with arthritic hands, could I saw it into chunks?
Persistent fragments, inspired epigrams, or spontaneous expressions of ill will come and go. Clemenceau saying about Poincar that he was a hydrocphalie in patent-leather boots. Or Churchill answering a question about the queen of Tonga as she pa.s.ses in a barouche during the coronation of Elizabeth II: "Is that small gentleman in the admiral"s uniform the queen"s consort?"
"I believe he is her lunch."
Disraeli on his deathbed, informed that Queen Victoria has come to see him and is in the anteroom, says to his manservant, "Her Majesty only wants me to carry a message to dear Albert."
Such items might be delicious if they were not so persistent and accompanied by a despairing sense that I am no longer in control.
"You look pale and exhausted, Professor X."
"I"ve been exchanging ideas with Professor Y, and I feel absolutely drained."
Worse than this is the nervous word game I am unable to stop playing.
"She is the woman who put the "dish" into "fiendish." "
"He is the man who put the "rat" into "rational." "
"The "fruit" in "fruitless." "
"The "con" in "icon." "
Recreations of a crumbling mind, Miss Rose. Symptoms perhaps of high blood pressure, or minor tokens of private resistance to the giant public hand of the law (that hand will be withdrawn only when I am dead).
No wonder, therefore, that I spend so much time with old Mrs. Gracewell. In her ticktock Meissen parlor with its uncomfortable chairs I am at home. Forty years a widow and holding curious views, she is happy in my company. Few visitors want to hear about the Divine Spirit, but I am seriously prepared to ponder the mysterious and intriguing descriptions she gives. The Divine Spirit, she tells me, has withdrawn in our time from the outer, visible world. You can see what it once wrought, you are surrounded by its created forms. But although natural processes continue, Divinity has absented itself. The wrought work is brightly divine but Divinity is not now active within it. The world"s grandeur is fading. And this is our human setting, devoid of G.o.d, she says with great earnestness. But in this deserted beauty man himself still lives as a G.o.d-pervaded being. It will be up to him-to us-to bring back the light that has gone from these molded likenesses, if we are not prevented by the forces of darkness. Intellect, worshipped by all, brings us as far as natural science, and this science, although very great, is incomplete. Redemption from mere_ nature is the work of feeling and of the awakened eye of the Spirit. The body, she says, is subject to the forces of gravity. But the soul is ruled by levity, pure.
I listen to this and have no mischievous impulses. I shall miss the old girl. After much monkey business, dear Miss Rose, I am ready to listen to words of ultimate seriousness. There isn"t much time left. The federal marshal, any day now, will be setting out from Seattle.
SOMETHING TO REMEMBER ME BY.