The Making of Americans, Being a History of a Family's Progress (6 page)

     For a girl like Julia Dehning, all men, excepting those of an outside unknown world, these one read about in books and never really could believe in, for it is a strange feeling one has in one's later living, when one finds the story-books really have truth in them, for one loved the story-books earlier, one loved to read them but one never really believed there was truth in them, and later when one by living has gained a new illusion and a kind of wisdom, and one reads again in them, there it is, the things we have learned since to believe in, there it is and we know then that the man or the woman who wrote them had just the same kind of wisdom in them we have been spending our lives winning, and this shows to any one wise in learning that no young people can learn wisdom from the talking of the older ones around them. If they cannot believe the things they read in the story-books where it is all made lifelike, real and interesting for them, how should they ever learn things from older people's talking. Its foolish to expect such things of them. No let them read the story-books we write for them, they don't learn much, to be sure, but more than they can from their fathers', mothers', aunts' and uncles' talking. Yes from their fathers' and their mothers' living they can get some wisdom, yes supply them with a tradition by your lives, you grown men and women, and for the rest let them come to us for their teaching.
     But now to come back to Julia Dehning. As I was saying, to a girl like Julia Dehning, all men, excepting those of an outside unknown world, those one reads about in books and never really can believe in, or men like Jameson to whom one never could belong and whom one always knows, now after having once begun with one's living, for what they are whenever one met with them, I say for a girl like Julia Dehning, with the family with which she had all her life been living, to her all men that could be counted as men by her and could be thought of as belonging ever to her, they must be, all, good strong gentle creatures, honest and honorable and honoring. For her to doubt this of all men, of decent men, of men whom she could ever know well or belong to, to doubt this would be for her to recreate the world and make one all from her own head. Surely, of course, she knew it, there were the men one could read of in the books and hear of in the scandal of the daily news, but never could such things be true of men of her own world. For her to think it in herself as real any such a thing would be for her to imagine a vain thing, to recreate the world and make a new one all out of her own head.
     No, this was a thought that could not come to her to really think, and so for her the warnings of her father carried no real truth. Of course Alfred Hersland was a good and honest man. All decent men, all men who belonged to her own kind and to whom she could by any chance belong, were good and straight. They had this as they had all simple rights in a sane and simple world. Hersland had besides that he was brilliant, that he knew that there were things of beauty in the world, and that he was in his bearing and appearance a distinguished man. And then over and above all this, he was so freely passionate in his fervent love.
     And so the marriage was really to be made. Mrs. Dehning now all reconciled and eager, began the trousseau and the preparation of the house that the young couple were to have as a wedding portion from the elder Dehnings.
     In dresses, hats and shoes and gloves and underwear, and jewel ornaments, Julia was very ready to follow her mother in her choice and to agree with her in all variety and richness of trimming in material, but in the furnishing of her own house it must be as she wished, taught as she now had been that there were things of beauty in the world and that decoration should be strange and like old fashions, not be in the new. To have the older things themselves had not yet come to her to know, nor just how old was the best time that they should be. It was queer in its results this mingling of old taste and new desire.
     The mother was all disgusted, half-impressed; she sneered at these new notions to her daughter and bragged of it to all of her acquaintance. She followed Julia about now from store to store, struggling to put in a little her own way, but always she was beaten back and overborne by the eagerness of knowing and the hardness of unconsidering disregard with which her daughter met her words.
     The wedding day drew quickly near with all this sharp endeavor of making her new home just what it should be for the life which was to come. Julia thought more of her ideals these days than of her man. Hersland had always, a little, meant more to her as an ideal than as a creature to be known and loved. She had made him, to herself, as she was now making her new house, an unharmonious unreality, a bringing complicated natural tastes to the simplicities of fitness and of decoration of a self-digested older world.
     I say again, this was all twenty years ago before the passion for the simple line and toned green burlap on the wall and wooden panelling all classic and severe. But the moral force was making then, as now, in art, all for the simple line, though then it had not come to be, as now alas it is, that natural sense for gilding and all kinds of paint and complicated decoration in design all must be suppressed and thrust away, and so take from us the last small hope that something real might spring from crudity and luxury in ornament. In those days there was still some freedom left to love elaboration in good workmanship and ornate rococoness and complication in design. And all the houses of one's friends and new school rooms and settlements in slums and dining halls and city clubs, had not yet taken on this modern sad resemblance to a college woman's college room.
     Julia Dehning's new house was in arrangement a small edition of her mother's. In ways to wash, to help out all the special doctors in their work, in sponges, brushes, running water everywhere, in hygienic ways to air things and keep ones self and everything all clean, this house that Julia was to make fit for her new life which was to come, in this it was very like the old one she had lived in, but always here there were more plunges, douches, showers, ways to get cold water, luxury in freezing, in hardening, than her mother's house had ever afforded to them. In her mother's house there were many ways to get clean but they mostly suggested warm water and a certain comfort, here in the new house was a sterner feeling, it must be a cold world, that one could keep one's soul high and clean in.
     All through this new house there were no solid warm substantial riches. There were no silks in curtains, no blue brocade here, no glass chandeliers to make prisms and give tinklings. Here the parlor was covered with modern sombre tapestry, the ceiling all in tone the chairs as near to good colonial as modern imitation can effect, and all about dark aesthetic ornaments from China and Japan. Paintings there were none, only carbon photographs framed close, in dull and wooden frames.
     The dining room was without brilliancy, for there can be no brilliance in a real aesthetic aspiration. The chairs were made after some old french fashion, not very certain what, and covered with dull tapestry, copied without life from old designs, the room was all a discreet green with simple oaken wood-work underneath. The living rooms were a prevailing red, that certain shade of red like that certain shade of green, dull, without hope, the shade that so completely bodies forth the ethically aesthetic aspiration of the spare American emotion. Everywhere were carbon photographs upon the walls sadly framed in painted wooden frames. Free couches, open book-cases, and fire places with really burning logs, finished out each room.
     These were triumphant days for Julia. Every day she led her family a new flight and they followed after agape with wonderdisapproval and with pride. The mother almost lost all sense of her creation of this original and brilliant daughter, she was almost ready to admit the obedience and defeat she now had in her. Sometimes she still had a little resistance to her but mostly she was swelling inside and to all around her with her admiration and her pride in this new wonderful kind of a daughter.
     The father had always been convinced and proud even when he had disapproved the opinions of his daughter. He now took a solid satisfaction in the completeness of accomplishment she now had in her. To her father, to know well what one wanted, and to win it, by patient steady fighting for it, was the best act a man or woman could accomplish, and well had his daughter done it. She had won it, she knew very well what she wanted and she had it. He still shook his head at her new fangled notions, her literary effects, the artistic kind of new improvement, as he called it, that she put into her new house to make it perfect. He did not understand it and he always said it, but he was very proud to see her do it, and he bragged to everybody and made them listen to it, of his daughter and the wonderful new kind of a house she had, and the bright way she knew how to do it.
     The little Hortense had always worshipped this wonderful big sister, and the boy George admired too, and followed after.
     Altogether these last weeks were brilliant days for Julia.
     But always, a little, through all this pride in domination and in the admiration of her family, there was there, somewhere, in the background, to her sense, a vague uncertain kind of feeling as to her understanding and her right. Mostly she had a firm strong feeling in her, but always, a little, there was there, a kind of a doubting somewhere in her. She never in these days did any very real thinking about Hersland as a man to be to her as a husband to control her. But, somehow, a little, he was there in her as an unknown power that might attack her, though she knew very well she had in her a wisdom and experience of life that she could feel strong now always inside her.
     A few weeks before the day they were to be married and to begin their new free life together, this vague distrust in Julia became a little sharper. Alfy was talking to her one night about the good life they were to have soon together, about their prospects and his hopes for the future. “I've some good schemes Julia in my head,” he said to her, “and I mean to do big things, and with a safe man like your father to back me through now I think I can.” Julia somehow was startled though this kind of saying in him was not new to her. “Why what do you mean Alfy?” “Why,” he went on, “I want to do some things that have big money and big risks in them and a man as well known as your father for wealth and reliability for a father-in-law will do all that I need. Of course you know Julia,” be added very simply enough for her, “you must not talk to him about such things now. You are my wife, my own darling, and you and I will live our lives together always loving and believing in the same good thing.”
     He said it simply enough to her and he was safe. Julia would not speak of such things now to her father. No torment of doubt, no certainty of misery could bring her to ask questions of her father, now, about the new life she had before her. Hersland was safe, though very simply now, he often made for her that sharp uncertain feeling more dreadful and more clear before her. He was not different in his ways or in his talk to her from the way he always had been with her, but somehow now it had come to her, to see, as dying men are said to see, clearly and freely things as they are and not as she had wished them to be for her.
     And then she would remember suddenly what she had really thought he was, and she felt, she knew that all that former thought was truer better judgment than this sudden sight, and so she dulled her momentary clearing mind and hugged her old illusions to her breast.
     “Alfy didn't mean it like that,” she said over to herself, “he couldn't mean it like that. He only meant that papa would help him along in his career and of course papa will. Oh I know he didn't really mean it like that, he couldn't mean it like that. Anyhow I will ask him what he really meant.”
     And she asked him and he freely made her understand just what it was he meant. It sounded better then, a little better as he told it to her more at length, but it left her a foreboding sense that perhaps the world had meanings in it that could be hard for her to understand and judge.
     But now she had to think that it was all, as it had a little sounded, good and best. She had to think it so else how could she marry him, and how could she not marry him. She had to marry him, and so she had to think it so, and she would think it so, and did.
     In a few days more the actual marrying was done and their lives together always doing things and learning things was at last begun.
      
      
     Bear it in your mind my reader, but truly I never feel it that there ever can be for me any such a creature, no it is this scribbled and dirty and lined paper that is really to be to me always my receiver—but anyhow reader, bear it in your mind—will there be for me ever any such a creature—what I have said always before to you, that this that I write down a little each day here on my scraps of paper for you is not just an ordinary kind of novel with a plot and conversations to amuse you, but a record of a decent family progress respectably lived by us and our fathers and our mothers, and our grand-fathers, and grandmothers, and this is by me carefully a little each day to be written down here; and so my reader arm yourself in every kind of a way to be patient, and to be eager, for you must always have it now before you to hear much more of these many kinds of decent ordinary people, of old, grown, grand-fathers and grand-mothers, of growing old fathers and growing old mothers, of ourselves who are always to be young grown men and women for us, and then there are still to be others and we must wait and see the younger fathers and young mothers bear them for us, these younger fathers and young mothers who always are ourselves inside us, who are to be always young grown men and women to us. And so listen while I tell you all about us, and wait while I hasten slowly forwards, and love, please, this history of this decent family's progress.
     Yes it is a misfortune we have inside us, some few of us, I cannot deny it to you, all you others, it is true the simple interest I take in my family's progress. I have it, this interest in ordinary middle class existence, in simple firm ordinary middle class traditions, in sordid material unaspiring visions, in a repeating, common, decent enough kind of living, with no fine kind of fancy ways inside us, no excitements to surprise us, no new ways of being bad or good to win us.