But no — This is an evasion, an attempt to rationalize a mere feeling, ex post facto. The truth is, I am confused, and scarcely for the moment know what I do think or feel. Unhappy? Oh, yes! as the Negro spiritual says. What else could be expected? Yet I blame no one but myself for my unhappiness, and I hope I am too intelligent to suppose that my unhappiness is of any importance. Confused. My imagination darts in fifty directions, checked in each. I desire you — I hate you — I want to talk intimately with you — I want to say something horribly injurious to you … At one moment, it is of the purely trivial that I should like to talk to you. I should like to tell you of the amusing affair of old Smith (who was with me when I met you) and Mrs. Faubion, who sits opposite us at table; of how, last night, having made himself mildly tipsy with Guinness, he attempted to get into Mrs. Faubion’s room, just as she and her roommate (an incredible young woman!) were going to bed; how he put his foot inside her stateroom door (and such funny shoes he wears! horned like the rhino!) and tried to engage her in banter, meanwhile displaying, as if guilelessly, a purse full of gold sovereigns! At dinner, last night, he had told me of this project, and I had tried to dissuade him from it. No use. He was convinced that Mrs. Faubion was “that sort” … And this morning at breakfast, when Mrs. Faubion and I were alone, it all came out, the whole wretched story. “What was the matter with Mr. Smith last night?” “Matter? Was something the matter?” “Yes! He came to our room, and got his foot inside the door, and wouldn’t go away — all the time trying to show some gold money he had in a pocketbook! We had to shut the door in his face!.. Actually!.. And then he tried to come back again! I had to threaten to ring for the steward …” She looked at me, while she said this, with an air of profound wonder and mystification, perhaps just faintly tinged with suspicion. It puzzled her. What could have been the matter with the old man? And was I involved?… I suggested, of course, that he was just a little tipsy, and urged her to pay no attention to it. She remained, however, puzzled, and a little unconvinced … And Smith! When I walked round the deck with him later in the morning, did he say anything to me about this tragic — for him, I assure you, tragic — adventure? Not a word. Not a single word. But he was unhappy, and quiet — I could see the misery in him turning and turning round that dreadful and brief little disaster; while he revolved in his mouth one of the “expensive” cigars which his employer had given him as a parting present … Well, a horrible little episode, you will say, and why should I want to describe it to you? Again, because I am sure it will touch in you certain obscure chords which it touched in me, and set us to vibrating in subconscious harmony. Pity? Horror? Wonder? A sense of the disordered splendor and unexpectedness and tragedy of life? All these things, Cynthia; but chiefly the desire that we might again, as last year at the Bach concert, listen together.
And of course my childhood recollection is even better than that; for, narrated by me to you, it constitutes the playing upon us both of a chord unimaginably rich in stimuli. Consider some of these. The fact that I tell you this story — (as a “story” it is nothing — merely, say, the description of the sailing of a whaleship from New Bedford) — puts you in the position of the mother, and me in the position of the child; but it also makes our relation that of father and daughter. Again, it makes us both children—brother and sister, perhaps. Or, once more, it takes the color of a dual conspiracy, the delicious conspiracy of two adults to become children. Sentimental? No doubt. But the device, if anything so entirely spontaneous can be called a device, is universal. Baby talk! My baby doll! Icky fing!.. Revolting when we detect others in this singular regression, but just the same the instinct is powerful in all of us, and given the right circumstances will betray itself without the least compunction … Very well, then — the right circumstances have arisen chez moi, and I must report to you this tiny episode taken from my childhood. Like the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra la, it seems to have no connection; but, tangential though its pertinence may be, its pertinence is none the less profound.
When my mother and father died, the children were distributed, for temporary shelter, among various relatives; and it was my good fortune to be sent for a winter to the house of my father’s cousin, Stanley Bragg, in New Bedford, who had come forward with an offer to look after “one male child.” Of course, I was at first bewildered by the abrupt change, the removal from tropics to New England, the separation from my brother and sister; but on the other hand I had always been fond of Cousin Stanley; and his house, which I had several times visited, had always seemed to me quite the most beautiful and romantic in the world. It stood well back from County Street, concealed by elms and huge horse chestnuts, on a high grassy terrace. On the lower lawn (and this had, to begin with, particularly fascinated me!) stood a life-sized figure of a stag, cast in dark metal. It looked very lifelike, especially when it had been wetted (as frequently in summer) by the garden sprinkler. The garden, behind the house, was divided formally into squares by high box hedges which were full of spiderwebs and superb spiders — the latter I used to tempt out of their deep funnels of silk by twitching a strand of web with a twig: and I had the feeling that they used positively to growl at me. Here there was an old-fashioned chain well, like a little latticed house, overgrown with honeysuckle, which worked with a crank; and which kept up a gentle clinking while from the revolving cups on the chain it gushed forth the most delicious water. There were also fruit trees, flower beds, a wilderness of nasturtiums round the pump, and at the end of all, before you got to the barn, grape arbors all across the back wall — so thickly grown that on a not too rainy day you could crawl in under the vines and eat grapes in shelter. In the stable, of which John was the benevolent king, were the two horses which Cousin Stanley kept; a solemn black closed coach; a light buggy, for country driving; and, in the cellar, a pig. On one wall, where the whips and harnesses were hung, was nailed a wood carving of a large heart-shaped leaf.