# The Grandmothers/Chapter 11

ALWYN'S father always loved to hunt. When he could afford it and the farm work was not too pressing, he went north in the autumn during the deer season. Then his brother Jim, the minister, came from Chicago with a little armory of guns and cases of expensive fishing tackle; and the two went off together, to forget, in a tent under the hemlocks, that one had sacrificed his future to the other, that one was happy and the other unhappy (though they might not have agreed which was which), and that an abyss of prosperity and college education lay between them.
After they came back, the farmhouse smelled of hides, and for months little meat was eaten but venison, which made Alwyn sick. His uncle Jim's handsome face glowed with the conventional poetry of recaptured boyhood, with delight in the photographs which he tinted artistically with transparent water colors, with pride in the analogies which had been suggested to him in the north and which would serve him in many private conversations if not in sermons.
Alwyn's father, on the other hand, talked by the hour of exaggerated dangers and mystifying sensations of danger where there was none; of men who lost their compasses and strayed in circles and were found half dead; of timber wolves baying up and down the darkness; of stags marching slowly into clearings to keep a rendezvous with him; and he spoke very shyly of killing things, as if to kill were a love gesture. Then there was upon his face a shining expression of tenderness without pity and violence without fault, which was the equivalent of beauty—though he was what is called a homely man, with his very long nose, his low forehead, his delicate, outstanding ears, and small eyes.
When he was first married fox hunts were still held in the county—cutters and teams of young horses racing around the snowy fields and marshes, and waiting here and there for the hounds to bring the fox across the road. Now most of the hunters he knew went to the woods merely to get drunk together away from their wives. And the immigrants who were steadily buying up the land were not sportsmen; they hunted out of season, only for food, and exterminated the game fish with nets. One year he held the office of game warden, was menaced and even stoned by loafers along the mill races in little saloon towns, and arrested many lawbreakers. It was good sport, but very lonely; indeed, all the sport which was left in that part of the world was lonely.
So he took his little son with him along woodland paths where partridges walked, moving their fine throats and crowned heads, uttering a sort of girlish, insane cry. Or before dawn they drove many miles—the boy wrapped up in strong-smelling blankets, the horse's hoofs ringing under the mist—to small, hidden lakes not yet emptied of bass and pickerel. Alwyn held his breath as in wet boats they ventured out from the piers as if on a pane of glass, and shuddered automatically when a gun was fired or a bleeding bird or animal was found in the bushes. But the company of the timorous, overwatchful boy did not satisfy his father, then (as he grew up and his character crystallized) embarrassed, and finally displeased him. Alwyn was disappointed when he ceased to be taken along; for the heartbreaking landscapes, the blue herons like dwarf angels, the stateliness of other birds and animals just before they were disfigured by their own blood, his father's silent, primitive enjoyment, even his own distaste and fright, had enchanted him.
During the winter months his father earned money as a taxidermist, having taken lessons from a man who had spent a vacation at Hope's Corner when he was a boy, and later having studied it from a book. He was remarkably skillful, and many sportsmen brought him their dead trophies to mount, so they might hang permanently in the lodges of secret societies, in dining rooms and dens. Alwyn invariably felt sick when he went into the room at one end of the house which was his workshop. Bodies of birds and small animals bleeding slowly on newspapers, while his father imitated them with wire, tow, string, and wet clay; the pelts drying on wooden forms and the bird skins turned inside out, and dusted with cornmeal and arsenic; scraping-knives in the skulls of deer; the odor of stale meat and green bone; the rank odor of water birds' flesh, almost black with oil. . . .
There one winter he built a life-sized stallion on a frame of slats and heavy wire, modeling every tendon and vein from photographs of a dead race horse. It was so large that an opening had to be cut in the wall to take it out. He said, "I often wonder if what they call sculpture isn't a lot like my work." With the light of the desire to be proud of himself in his eyes, he reminded one more sharply than most mature men are able to do, of the waste, wreckage, or abandonment of gifts amid which youth is turned into maturity.
When at last the birds balanced on curious crotches which he sought in the woods, he put in black-headed pins, bound their feathers into place with thread, and painted their beaks, eye sockets, and feet; and when the raccoons, squirrels, foxes, or lynxes stood on var nished pedestals which a cabinet maker prepared for him, he caressed and bent their limbs, to give them back, falsely, what he and his like had taken away—life, its grace and its agitated peace. He worked as patiently as if he were bringing them to birth or at least bringing about a resurrection (though he was only making their death resemble life a little); and he tried to make Alwyn see the charm of what he was doing.
He tried in vain; the boy stared at him unhappily. There are things which require not sensibility but the lack of it to be felt, and he was still too imaginative to understand them. Not until he grew to manhood was he to be able to bear the thought of his father's intimacy with so much agony and death.
Even then he was to remember with dismay a large snow owl caught in a trap and brought uninjured to his father, who poured chloroform on a handkerchief and placed it in between the bars of the cage. The immense bird's plumage, oyster-white and sand-white, was like velvet embroidered with a sort of alphabet. It snapped its brutal beak and stretched its wings as if they were lame with fatigue. It grew drowsy, straightened its sagging neck with a royal movement, and nodded again. At last Alwyn's father dared to reach inside and cover its nostrils with the cloth; and in the shadow of his large brown hand the milky eyelids fell finally. For months thereafter Alwyn woke panic-stricken in the middle of the night, having felt that hand passing gently over his own face.
His father loved the lives of animals as well as their death; and in his movements and the tone of his voice there was a charm to which, like strong slaves, they responded humbly. Old sows let him handle their litters, and he could make nervous ewes who will not usually give suck even to one of twin lambs if, having fallen unnoticed in a corner of the fold, it does not smell like the other—accept the lambs he offered them as their own. When the neighbors' heifers were brought to the barn door, his great bulls walked forth mildly as if to play their parts in a ceremony which he had arranged.
The farmers within a radius of fifteen or twenty miles paid him to break vicious colts. He could tell which ones had been abused; he petted these and fed them apples and turnips; he whipped others who had no fear. Then he would hitch one of them to a low, light cart from which he could fall without risk, and attach to its legs a complicated set of ropes. It would begin to kick; he would bring it to its knees, or even throw it deftly on the ground, muttering phrases which seemed to be hypnotic; for its ears would shiver, its wild, bloodshot eyes roll, and convulsive sighs go in and out of its nostrils. He would repeat these exercises with infinite patience, with obvious delight; and at last one bad young horse would be broken and ready for work, and another would take its place.
For minor animal diseases and in cases of emergency, he was often called upon to serve his neighbors as a veterinary surgeon. He could puncture the bellies of horses and cattle swollen by colic, and knew how to make delirious stallions take bitter drenches from a bottle. With his sleeves rolled up over his heavy upper arms, he would go into the dark stable to deliver a young heifer's calf by force. Alwyn wanted to follow him on these occasions; but his father recognizing his excessive sensibility by the fact that he felt as modest or even ashamed in his presence as in a woman's, he was never allowed to watch either birth or breeding. On the other hand, he was allowed to hold the legs of young boars and bull calves while his father castrated them, working so deftly that they did not even scream before the last stroke.
Alwyn's father himself believed that this was his principal talent. "If I could have gone away to a veterinary college—" he said again and again; the sentence never had an end. "It was fate," he would add, "and my father had no patience with me." Fate personified by a small, dyspeptic man (Alwyn's grandfather) who had never forgiven anything, never seemed to remember anything, and who had never changed his mind. . . . Alwyn's father would go on talking about it in a muffled and dreamy tone of voice, but never blamed his brother. "Jim had his chance; it was right that he should. But there was only one chance in our family. . . ." Then, seeking his wife's eyes and gazing around at his mysterious children, he would conclude, "Jim has had good luck—but I guess I wouldn't change places with him."
Three or four times every year Alwyn's uncle, the Rev. James A. Tower, came lonesomely, complacently, back to his birthplace; and at first Alwyn could not decide whether even he was satisfied with his lot. He seemed to return from another world, with his suits of English material, his thick ties made of scarcely worn bali dresses, his golf hose, cameras, and watch fobs, his strong sentiment for nature, his loneliness. and optimism; and at first glance seemed to resemble his poor relatives only by accident, without actual kinship. . . .
His mother, half forgetting that he was her son, never bullied him or forced him to take her into his confidence, and, in spite of his cultivated imagination, never tried to explain to him her conception of life as a great county fair, or her cult of the new moon. His little nieces adored him because he looked happy and could afford to be generous. Because he still loved hunting, fishing, and country food, his brother defended him from the accusation of having changed. His sister-in-law, Marianne, was genuinely fond of him, but, for reasons which were obscure at first, did not approve of the life he led.
The minister brooded lovingly upon their lives, the labor, the poverty, the narrowness of outlook, which were still established where he had been born, comparing these things with the conditions of his later life and calling the contrast progress. There he still saw himself as young and marked by good fortune for the future, as in a certain mirror of all those in the world, and in it alone, one catches a glimpse of a face one can be proud of. There he would have denied the least of his disappointments, and there he counted his blessings, thinking that he saw life in proportion.
One afternoon Alwyn sat beside his uncle on a hilltop. Spread out below them lay the farm: the poor house with its wooden coronet around the chimney, the desperately weeded crops, the faded washing floating between the trees, the dung heaps steaming with ammonia, the pigpens and rusty farm machinery. The elder of its two eldest sons (Alwyn born in the house, his uncle in what was now the woodshed) gazed down upon it and shook his head. "I am a fortunate man," Alwyn heard him whisper to himself.
Three years after the marriage of Alwyn's parents he had been ordained, and thereafter had occupied the pulpit of a fashionable church outside Chicago. He had preached a cheerful, modern faith, and had been remarkably successful with young people. His resonant voice, his fine presence, his warm but discreet social relations, had made the deacons of his church proud, those of other churches envious. Bishops and devout philanthropists having begun to speak of him, his ambition had been excited anew by the ministry as a career, and he had forgotten music and the hopes he had once founded on it.
But meanwhile he had also forgotten Irene Geiger, and had married a wealthy girl named Caroline Fielding. Her mother and her two sisters did not relinquish their claims upon her, especially when one of them was ill; and she herself had always suffered from periodical nervous pain. So the large house in Chicago and a sick room, otherwise their nuptial chamber, in which she would crouch alone day after day and night after night, began at once to divide her time exactly between them. The young minister might as well have been a bachelor. At last it seemed wise for him to retire from the active ministry for the present, in order to live in Chicago with his delicate wife, who was also so conscientious a sister and daughter.
His family scarcely saw her for years. At last the summer came when she felt strong enough to be taken to the farm. There, in spite of her sober elegance, she looked like a young actress in the common daylight: her beauty already hardened by anxiety and authority, her youth hampered by a quantity of parasols, smoked glasses, gloves, flowered hats, and dark blue veils to protect her skin from the dust. With a certain timid arrogance she seemed to welcome her new relatives on the threshold of their own home.
She brought a quantity of missionary magazines containing pictures of laughing, muscular savages; and the country people might have felt that they had not place in her world, being neither prominent representatives of Christian wealth and culture like those among whom it was her privilege to live, nor heathens to whom it might have been her privilege to have been sent. Alwyn and even his father wanted to talk to her about their ambitions, but she listened with disapproval to any expression of discontent. Her mother-in-law wanted to tell her about the old days, but she believed that the important history of the West was that of the development of churches, seminaries, and wealthy families in Chicago. Everyone waited on her while she stayed. She took pains not to reveal by too much gratitude how uncomfortable she was in the farmhouse, and ignored its poverty, feeling that they were duty bound to be satisfied with their station in life, as she was with hers, and not wanting to remind them of the difference between the two.
She never remodeled her rich, draped, braided frocks no matter how the fashions of inferior women changed; and later, when Alwyn visited her home, he saw the kinship between them and its upholstery, its alcoves of taffeta and plush, and the rigid brocade with which its windows were symmetrically draped to keep out the light.
That house was a veritable museum of Middle Western luxuries. In the bathrooms the mahogany closets, wash-bowls, and tubs were lined with flowered porcelain; and the faucets were the heads of a number of dogs—dead family pets, copied from the life—out of whose bronze mouths the water trickled. Rug lay upon rug; brass lamps stood beside music boxes, under decrepit chandeliers. A tall, stringless harp was wrapped up like a mummy in the music room, and there was a bust of Music with Chicago soot on its nose. The ceilings had been decorated by an Italian professor with a mass of birds, curlicues, butterflies, and flower beds upside down. Tiers of paintings and steel engravings portrayed snow scenes, kittens playing with balls of yarn, missionary dispensaries in foreign lands, and bouquets the color of moss and dried blood. From a life-sized portrait in oils of the father of the family, the late merchant prince Cromwell Fielding, one hard, idealistic eye, over the wavy beard which fell to the middle of his chest, appeared to govern the ranks of tasseled armchairs and sofas. In the dining room great services of French china waited to be used; but in these degenerate days there were not many people worthy of an invitation: a few doctors of divinity, a few heroic missionaries upon furlough, a family of cousins in the East, one of whom had been first lady of the land, a poor cousin who had lost his money by foolish investments and worked in a clothing store. . . .
There, surrounded by her mother, her sisters, and these infrequent guests, the retired minister studied, and in general failed to understand, his wife's extraordinary character. In it, as in the house itself, an elaborate worldliness served as a setting for puritan austerities; and her vanity merely emphasized her virtue. Her opinions, varying in expression no more than if they had been memorized speeches, her delicately self-conscious observance of the proprieties, her chaste beauty, her air of playing a noble role before a chosen public, inspired him with the awe of a child ushered for the first time into a theater and told that the great actress is a member of his family.
Alwyn Tower, another country boy, equally sensitive to the theater and whatever resembled it—though without the bias of his uncle's early ambitions and romance—was equally impressed by his aunt's character; but he felt an obscure fear of it as well.
Having no children of their own, they extended their hospitality to Alwyn and thought that they were ready to make all the necessary sacrifices for his future. His aunt's sisters watched over him excitably; her mother was suspicious, but found no dignified way of expressing her displeasure at his presence; his aunt loved him sternly, his uncle with a childless man's embarrassment. Then from the streets of the great city, criminally alive, draped with dirt and gas, full of bleached and bitten faces, scented with slaughter houses, he came and went over the threshold of the ugly palace (one of those in which progress and millionaire civilization had been born) and watched the events which took place inside it.
They were like the episodes of a long symbolic play at which part of the audience may laugh, while the rest shudders at the secret meaning. On Friday afternoon the ladies went with their own carriage and coachman to the symphony concert, occupying the same seats as long as they lived. A pet dog sometimes ate one of the new kid gloves which were laid on each of their beds every Friday before lunch. On one occasion it caught one of the canaries during its bath; one of the sisters fainted away, and an old sewing woman sprinkled her face with lavender water, dropped the bottle, and bandaged the bird with cotton batting and thread. Finally this dog escaped from the house, was run over, died, and was buried beside seven others; and the old mother, pitifully frightened, denounced automobiles. Every Sunday morning she sought an excuse not to go to church, usually found it, and usually obliged one of her daughters to stay at home, lest she be lonely. She was but superficially devout; the church was a great mansion like her own, and she would have undertaken the menial tasks of God's house, as of her own, only if there had been no one to do them for her. Fortunately her daughters felt their sacred obligation to make her happy, by comparison with which even divine service was a sort of self-indulgence.
Caroline Tower genuinely loved her husband, and love often produced a vague tumult in her emotions; but logically conservative in spite of it, she dealt with her duties in the order of time—her mother came before her husband. She wanted him to be a clergyman: God's house and work came before everything in the world—except her mother's house, which was a sacred establishment as well, a sort of sumptuous private chapel to the glory of motherhood, which is the source of the glory of God.
So her husband was ignored whenever his desires conflicted with the rulings of her conscience as a daughter. He still hoped vaguely to bring about a change in their way of life, to rouse in her heart, even by accident, a passion which would set aside her other obligations, or to profit by some interference of Providence, as for example the death, in God's good time, of his mother-in-law, to whom he was devoted, nevertheless. Meanwhile he believed that his family on the farm must be satisfied with him, now that he was not merely working for God's kingdom of virtue, prosperity, and enlightenment, but was a part of it himself; and though scarcely a minister of the gospel and almost a bachelor, he was content with the exceptional dignity of his deprivations, in a world of poorly dressed, impious, uneducated men.
Then suddenly Caroline died. Dying was just like one of her headaches; therefore she did not realize what was happening until it was too late to do more than think of her soul and its metamorphosis. She gazed at her mother, her sisters, and the opulent room, as if in truth she were leaving them behind forever. and were willing to do so; but gazed at her husband with the still sharper anguish of a mere separation. Then her face assumed the first look of humility which he or even her sisters had seen upon it; it became the childish face of one maddened by regret—regret for everything believed, everything done, everything left undone. And before the end she whispered, “In my Father's house are many mansions, many . . ."
The family sorrow produced such a pandemonium in the house that the horror and momentary despair of James Tower, in fact not quite a member of the family, were scarcely observed. He hid in corners of the drawing-rooms and the long, dim corridors when he was not needed; he went up to Hope's Corner and tried to hide among the flocks, trees, and furrows of his boyhood—hiding from the storm of sorrow and waiting for it to pass, determined to go then and take up his ministry where he had put it down.
For a time sorrow added a certain sensuality to the abstract, liberal doctrines which he had been taught in the seminary and sent forth to teach; and he felt his vocation more strongly than at any other period in his life, either before or after. He would idealize his bereavement and make it public; it would be a consolation to others. He would direct their eyes upward to the ideal place where—trailing restlessly up and down, cloud folded about her distinguished head like one of her veils—she intimidated him by her dead perfection, by the distance between them, scarcely greater now than it had always been, and by the gaze upon which her eyes had finally closed. Every day for almost a year he told himself that presently he would look for a vacant parish in which to begin the great work which everyone had expected of him even she, though she had previously had other things for him to do.
He had been her humble servant from the first. On her deathbed she had rewarded him with a look which meant, he believed, that no one would ever love him as she had loved him then, and that she regretted leaving nothing and no one but himself. This gave him a sort of pride for which his good fortune in other respects had not prepared him; looking back upon that moment, making the most of that pride, he was to be even less impatient than before with abnegation, home life, and servility. And as the sheer pain of his loss came to an end, her presence in the vague paradise of his memory grew less and less sufficient. He began to remember her qualities as if he were in danger of forgetting them, and therefore drew nearer to her mother and sisters, in whom, even during her lifetime, her character had been reflected, shadowy aspect by aspect.
The younger of the surviving Misses Fielding, Anne, was physically the image of her dead sister; but her beauty had somehow vanished, though she was still a young woman. Her strength of character, mournful and reserved—as it were a throbbing of the atmosphere wherever she was—resembled Caroline's as much as one note of a great bell resembles the next.
Miss Ada Fielding was uncannily successful with flowers, birds, and animals, charmed little children, cheered and influenced missionaries, invalids, and servants. But there her power ended; for the rest of the world (in ignorance and compassion, in fear and trembling) she could only pray. She and Caroline. had saintliness in common.
For the ghostly presence of his wife's loveliness, Jim was dependent upon her mother, in whom—less ephemeral than the old woman's youth and the young woman's very life—much of it had survived. Mrs. Cromwell Fielding was a delicate personage in watered silk, satin, and kid, feathers and chains, baroque pearls and enamel. Like beauty itself, she feared nothing but death, and would not permit a funeral or a will to be mentioned in her presence. She loved her possessions, especially those that she could see and touch, as a naturalist loves his dead butterflies, an alchemist the fiquids in which immortality may be in solution; and spent her time in self-sacrificing labor among them—seeming to her son-in-law the personification of beauty, which picks up and puts down, loses and finds, counts, multiplies, and mixes, the base materials without which it is never seen.
Naturally these three women were opposed to his leaving them to occupy a pulpit. For Ada he was a surviving part of her dead sister's life, and she wept at the mere thought of his being taken away as well, by God. Anne suggested briefly that it was mere human vanity which made him impatient to resume the vocation, for which, furthermore, others were better fitted than he. Mrs. Fielding maintained that charity and idealism began at home, which therefore was the proper place to exercise them and serve God; it ought to be service enough for him to serve her; and when she spoke of it, her flashing old eyes, like those of a young temptress, made him look the other way.
There was also wealth. It was an aspect of Caroline's character—not merely something she had possessed—because she had always possessed it and because she had never forgotten it for a moment without ever having to give it a moment's thought. In Jim's imagination it adorned her departed spirit as a saint's image in a reliquary is adorned. It hung heavily; it sparkled; it doubled and faded—bewildering to a poor farmer's son—in every room of the house where, like a ghost, she seemed to stay because it was. So if he had had to leave its sacred precincts, he would have lost her a second time; her ghost would have died, in the great deathbed of his memory.
There was also a theological dilemma. By temperament and training he was inclined to a very liberal interpretation of Protestantism. Only the most arbitrary orthodoxy was suited to the strong souls of his relatives by marriage. But if he applied that orthodoxy to their lives as frankly and earnestly as in other quarters he was accustomed, indeed was expected, to apply the laws of a looser belief, he would be obliged to condemn them altogether. In his heart he could not blame them; but he did not know how, theologically, to justify them. How, for example, would he go about it to preach a funeral oration for one of them? At one moment, thinking of their doctrines and listening to their criticism of others, he would accuse them, in spite of himself, of hypocrisy, vanity, selfishness, materialism; a moment later, he would be idealizing them with all the force of his imagination. At last, to his great relief, the gentleness of his nature triumphed thoroughly over his unkind judgments.
So for this family's sake he abandoned his ordained ambitions, as for his own he had abandoned others. Having a talent for obedience, naturally endowed with the patience and politeness which family life requires, he then bent all his efforts to being a perfect son-in- law and a widower.
When he first arrived in Hope's Corner for one of his visits to his brother's family, his face would be as handsome as ever; but the contented smile would give way slowly to a look of pleading. He was afraid that one of those on the farm would accuse him of having given up the ministry for mere love of luxury and idleness; he was afraid of discovering by accident what they thought. . . . Knowing that his nephew Alwyn had as little taste as he for the life of poor farmers, he would talk to him by the hour about his melancholy as a widower, about his problems which were insoluble. though already solved; and would be depressed by the boy's avid, noncommittal interest, unable to judge from it what account of his avowals would be given Ralph and Marianne. Then he would go back gladly to Chicago, to his family by marriage, his family by death, among whom at any rate he was not blamed, if not highly appreciated.
In the rich house he passed the rest of his life. quietly. He sometimes thought of himself as a commoner with secret liberal views in the villa of an old queen, having been married to one of the ladies-in-waiting. Still in awe of its sluggish and sumptuous power, and wistfully eager to be admired by the younger generation, such as Alwyn, he thought of dedicating it to worthy, modern causes; but he was not certain what they were, and had no authority in any case. For example, he would rouse his nephew's interest in the large library: red leather editions, as large as dictionaries, of the Victorian poets and Shakespeare, uncut sets of George Eliot, Dr. van Dyke, and John Burroughs, and bound volumes of the best monthly magazines; but Mrs. Fielding would hide the keys of the bookcases lest a volume be "mislaid."
As time passed he rarely spoke of anything but the Fieldings, rationalizing their prejudices, uneasily explaining and defending them, defending without explaining himself. . . . Alwyn saw him give up every least ambition save to go on being a good man and a gentleman, and saw a series of senseless duties invented by the ladies to discipline him, as Alwyn himself, the other farmer boy in the house, was being disciplined.
The most serious family problem during Mrs. Fielding's later life was that of servants. The overfurnished mansion and its mistress both needed the attention of maids, seamstresses, coachmen, and janitors. As she grew older, she could not endure the presence of those whom her daughters could find to employ. Spying upon the face of a new cook, her fine, three-cornered eyes would discover a sort of modern insolence; the man who came to wax the floors would anger her by a radical smile. Present-day help had no respect for her, at least no reverence; worst of all, they regarded her requirements as the whims of an old lady who would soon be out of the way. It was as if she saw death making use of their eyes to intimidate her; and she, having death's eyes, glared back at them, at their youth and strength which would not last even as long as hers had. Miss Anne and Miss Ada spent hours in interviewing applicants, whom she discharged in the twinkling of an eye; and finally, with great satisfaction, she reduced the members of her family to the duties of domestics.
One day a janitor, after helping himself to raspberry cordial, addressed her by the name of his former employer. Her son-in-law took his place, temporarily; but he gave satisfaction, and no other janitor was ever hired. He fed the hens, beat carpets, mowed the lawn, kept the flower beds clean and gaudy, stoked the furnaces, carried out ashes, and shoveled snow from the walks, saying that only a farmer's son could do these things so well.
He did not seem to grow old. Organic weaknesses made their presence known by the vague melancholy of indigestion and the irritability of fatigue, but they did not insist; they were merely waiting until there should be need of them to complete his discipline. He thought, when he thought of it at all, that life with a firm, exquisite hand like that of a loving helpmate (his own) had put him in his place. He was not happy, but he was content; and when he visited the old farm, he looked back indulgently upon his ambitions: love, music, and the ministry—unwise wishes of a selfish boy.
He would have been less at ease in the farmhouse if he had remembered more clearly the morality and religion of his parents, or if he had understood his sister-in-law Marianne's even sterner beliefs which now ruled where he had been a boy, and there prepared her children to condemn him—though she expected them to be too courteous ever to show it. The religious atmosphere in which Alwyn grew up was inherited in large part from his grandmother Duff, though fundamentally her piety had been no more than a public attitude, assumed out of loneliness and defiance. The few people she admired were Christians, and it could never have been said that she was not as worthy of the name as they. But without any respect for the father of her children, her sorrows had grown too bitter to come under the jurisdiction of God the Father, a God of resignation and forgiveness. The steadfast refusal to surrender to either of them had given her spirit, as she had grown old, an infidel grandeur, a fortitude more stoic than Christian. Young or old, all that she had had by way of a personal religion had been a sort of poetry; its arbitrarily fixed rules happened to be Christian doctrine, but it was not at all the poetry of God—rather that of worldly dignity, disappointment, and vanity of the spirit, that of conducting herself properly and proudly.
Under the influence of this unhappy poetry, Marianne Tower's strong, happy beliefs had been formulated: the same pattern of belief, but with peace in place of resentment, confidence instead of desperation, white where black had been—her mother's disillusionment reversed. The very principles on which America was founded were the result; and like certain of the Pilgrims, she represented them with the competence and heedless ardor of a woman under an enchantment.
There was also about her religion, as there had been about her mother's irreligion, a royal assurance and a slight suggestion of vainglory. She would have been willing to spread it by force, particularly in view of its importance to the nation as a whole, meanwhile. coercing the doubtful with contempt and the lukewarm with enthusiasm, for lack of other sorts of authority. Like a state religion, it could not have existed without hypocrisy—plaster to hold the edifice together, many hypocrites around the few men and women of pure rock; a tribute to its power when faith—the tribute to its charm—was not forthcoming. But she did not complain of hypocrisy, preferring that people should pretend to be better than they are (which pretension is a sort of humility) than that they should acknowledge their failings and cease to be ashamed of them; and remembering that the only one of her father's lies which her mother had never challenged was his prayer when they had knelt together on the kitchen or sitting-room floor.
Like Catholicism, her religion required adherence and obedience before faith—mere willingness to believe and reform before the unerring comprehension of God in detail. She thought that faith was a private, indeed a selfish experience which took place after a sort of sickness of curiosity about God, in a lonely bedroom, for example, with sighs and stammered prayers and many vague tears. She could imagine very well how it happened, that intellectual prodigy, there in secret. But secrecy was dangerous; in it temptations as well as God invested themselves with magic and dazzled the excited soul, the soul as vague as tears, and in it dangerous sensibilities came out as stars do in the darkness—which she had learned, indeed, to her sorrow.
So she did not overrate this or any other mystic experience, and was comparatively indifferent to the puzzles of what to believe and their theological answers. Giving herself to God meant merely being responsible for her life, her virtue, her usefulness to others and to the world as a whole—individually responsible to Him, not to the schoolmasters of faith, pastors or priests. Therefore she had to consider and believe only those doctrines which could help her to recognize her duties and overcome the discouragement which was almost the only temptation she ever encountered. It was sacrilegious to worry about the rest; only a bad scholar would turn to the back of the book to hunt for answers, or to play with problems which he could not yet profitably solve. Kept busy by divine forces—conjugal passion, poverty, good health and illness, motherhood—engaged not in fathoming God's opinions but in the illustration of those she knew instinctively, she did not find much time to gaze in the direction of His face, or to wonder what human face it resembled.
Thus, though Protestantism is a branch of Christianity founded upon faith, Marianne Tower, like most American Protestants in this respect, was entirely concerned with works: with severities, kindnesses, abstinences, successes, which all the world could see; with prayers and testimonies which all the world. could hear and understand; with sin instead of heresy, reform instead of repentance; with serving more than with loving God.
Her love of God was principally a sort of grateful admiration, and admiration for reasons which would have entitled other gods to a share in it. Doubting as little as poets and children do, she believed every miracle of virtue she heard about, no matter by what religious principles, with what sort of divine guidance, it had come to pass. Therefore she would have honored any god who, to her knowledge, was arrayed in the esteem of entire races, upon whom as on a corner stone families were founded, and by whom public morals were regulated. But her knowledge was limited by church magazines and tracts which libeled the religions of the countries to which missionaries were sent (the executives and propagandists of American Christianity having realized, perhaps, that it harbored the germs of polytheism); and she knew no other god but God, in whose veins there was Jewish blood—God of clean and respectable living, innocent thought, and industry.
One day when Alwyn had come back from school, full of what he had learned about heathen religions from other sources of information than hers, and was sitting on top of the flour barrel in the pantry where she was at work, he said that he did not believe in missionaries going to foreign lands to lead races away from their own deities and undermine the culture and customs which suited them.
She asked, "Tell me, Alwyn, are you beginning to lose your faith? Don't you believe in God?" In the beginning she had hoped that he would become a minister.
"I do, mother," he said, with a vague sense of being courageous. "But I don't want Him to—I don't know, I'm not sure that He isn't the same as the others."
Gazing into his eyes, she did not need to be told that he spoke of another god than God. She shed tears, wiped them away, and threw back her head. "Well, my son," she said, "we shall see if your God can do for you what mine has done for me."
Touched and troubled, Alwyn asked himself if in reality he had a god of his own, what help he needed, what help she had received; and in his confusion, he preferred to think of her beliefs. . . .
Her religion—perhaps, Alwyn thought, American Christianity as a whole—was a religion of ideal prose; all the beauty it had was the elegance of a perfect law, a Napoleonic code. It deified Jesus, but deified Him as a social leader and teacher martyred for His virtue, a compassionate attorney at the right hand of God the judge, and a fulfillment of the half-political prophecies of the Old Testament—whose jurisprudence of hygiene, family relations, patriotism, and commerce, its morality resembled.
Even Alwyn's mother was confused, in teaching her children, about the meaning of Christ's strange parables. Perhaps He had not been a success as a teacher, not having laid down one precept which did not require interpretation before it could serve as a basis for conduct, or given one example whose significance could not be mistaken. But His ravishing voice was still more persuasive, not only to children but to herself, than the voices of those indecent, vindictive, but comprehensible men of genius, the Jews who had come before Him. So when she closed the Bible and continued in her own words, it was to repeat the Old Testament moral lesson (subtly modified by more civilized feeling, by changing customs, by a pure woman's refinement, and by her nearly superstitious respect for education), but as if it had originated upon His lips.
In spite of its complex origins, her morality was not at all ambiguous. She believed that money was the result of ability, and was in itself an ability or talent (the money which in Christ's parable the master had given his servants to multiply had actually been called talents). It was power for good; to waste even the smallest piece of it meant wasting potential charity, educational opportunities, and at its source, the dignity by which God's kingdom on earth ought to be supported, made known, even advertised. More of it than could be spent painstakingly, painfully, she regarded with suspicion. An ardent desire for success proved the sincerity of one's efforts, whatever they were—but Christ had failed; therefore, once any sort of success had been achieved, she regarded it suspiciously as well, and judged it by its fruits, which ought to be very nearly those of failure: humility, self-denial, pity for others.
She believed the human body to be sacred. Therefore all those things which disagree with it, or change its reactions and way of functioning—deforming shoes and clothes, alcohol, excess of other sorts of food and drink, idleness—were sacrilegious. Good health was the body's virtue; and it also was a talent of the capital lent by the Master.
According to her, love, often as automatic in its influence as a drug, often wasteful of time, health, and money, existed only to bring men and women together in marriage. Trees and plants, because they had no responsible souls, had the right to put forth more flowers than fruit; but for men and women even one kiss given in vain laid waste the heart and blighted the fruit of the fruit-bearing kiss of marriage. Marriage existed to people the continent with witnesses for the Lord, who gave it—no, who lent it.
When she spoke of the continent of America to her children, it was as another talent, like the ability to sing or speak fluently, to tame animals or govern men or children. Alwyn saw it then in his imagination, a fantastic bird's-eye view: lying by a miracle between the disastrous North and the sickening tropics; a vast mass of wood, fur, grains, metals, flesh, fish, fruit, electricity, and inspiration; flooded with milk and syrup; smelling of unemployed fertility; stained with rivers and refuse and the blood of the early settlers; rising into the sky in the West in young, red, weather-beaten wrinkles and wounds (and when the first missionaries saw the Rockies they named them the Blood of Christ Mountains). . . . A talent that a whole race had, just as an individual might have a talent for mathematics; and whatever the others were, it would always be the principal talent of Americans, as long as it lasted. Lent, not given; to be guarded and risked and multiplied and used to the glory of God, the owner.
Alwyn, thinking of what he had learned about history and its classifications, said to himself that his mother, though only a poor farmer's wife, might be called an aristocrat. The lowest classes serving the whole of society (that is, the state) out of hunger and servility—but these did not count in America, where almost no one was hungry. The upper classes also serving it, to amuse themselves and to gain their ends of vanity and glory, usually bound up with the destiny of the state; prodigal enough to give away their sons, therefore making soldiers, priests, men of letters, orators, figureheads of them. The middle classes serving only themselves, bringing up sons in the interest of the family fortunes, seducing the sons of others if they had none of their own—the Fieldings were people of that sort. He thought of his uncle Jim among them, as timid as the last heir of a branch of deposed royalty—ashamed of its poverty and fanaticism, himself without either heirs or pretensions—in their grudgingly hospitable, merchant prince's palace.
Then Alwyn thought (and it may have been the vanity he had inherited from his grandmother Duff which suggested it to him) that perhaps America's only aristocracy existed—not among millionaires, trying to earn money and get the most out of money as if they were still poor—but in poor homes in the country, in the strong, ignorant imaginations of such women as his mother and grandmothers, who had a sense of responsibility to God before the nation, to the nation (though they had little to gain by its glory, little to lose by its ignominy) before the family, and to the family only before themselves; aristocratic because of a vague sense of having had actually aristocratic grandparents, many times removed, and because their religion happened to be public rather than private, putting good behavior above the joys and pains of faith, judging private virtue by the public good. . . . Thus Alwyn began to make his peace with the tormenting sense of having come down in the world, which was his birthright as a Tower.
It was true in any case that his grandmother Tower had been proud to give to the world her most gifted son, Jim, all that she could afford to give, and that his mother wanted to give all her children. The latter would say, "I sometimes think that I am like a stalk bearing a great many flowers, almost more than it can bear; when they get ready to open, perhaps it will break I shall be willing. All your father and I will need in our old age will be a place to lie down to rest forever. I am giving my life for you children in order that you may give your lives to others. . . . " She spoke as if she herself and her children had royal obligations to some sort of kingdom, and did so not merely out of maternal vanity, but because of her religion.
Perhaps, properly speaking, it was not a religion at all, but the jurisprudence of a moral commonwealth. She had no need for anything else after her marriage. Intimate emotions which seemed to her sacred, took the place of specifically religious exercises. Thanks to the former, she was not spiritually impoverished or chilled by a faith which was all ethics (as those whose lives were more placid, more prosperous, and less rich, might have been); so she was the perfect Protestant.
Alwyn's uncle, the minister, felt this. During one of his visits Alwyn heard him say to his father: "Ralph, your wife is a saint on earth. We have been peculiarly blessed. Caroline was, too, while she lived." Hearing his dead aunt called a saint as well, Alwyn was jealous for his mother.
It was in regard to him that her judgment upon spiritual matters showed itself as most evidently superior to that of her mother-in-law, who had no patience with hair-splitting, resented disapproval of Jim, and pronounced him perfect, though his way of life did pass her understanding. Alwyn's mother was the more thoughtful of the two, and her beliefs had crystallized while teaching them to her children; whereas in the hard early days his grandmother had had little time to think, and had been able to teach her children only by means of the old belt without a buckle behind the kitchen door. Their differences of opinion were more important than profound, being merely those between taking for granted and knowing logically one and the same thing, between roughness and refinement in its expression, between one generation and that which followed it. They were particularly important to Alwyn, because it was his mother's reasonable version of the faith of his fathers—more suitable to his nature because he was above all his mother's son—which determined in large part the beliefs for which eventually he was to desert that faith altogether.
He enjoyed even her injustice toward his uncle Jim, for example, because at a time in his life when all that was inarticulate seemed merely stupid, and when opinions had more charm than they were ever to have again, a certain intolerance proved how faultless her opinions were. So he soon found himself obliged to agree with her about the minister, whom, because he was courteous, handsome, wealthy, and well educated, he instinctively preferred to his other relatives.
In fact, she blamed her brother-in-law less than she pitied him, blaming him only to point a moral for the children whom she was going to send out in the world as he had been sent. For their sake she insisted on the fact that he had wasted his opportunities, and exchanged the family birthright of anxiety, ambition, and loneliness, for the comfortable approval of a family that was not even his own. If music was his true calling, the sort of divine persuasion for which he was better fitted than for argument and prayer, he should not have given in to his father's and brother's disapproval. Having undertaken to be a preacher, he should not have ceased for the sake of domestic convenience. Coming from a poor family as its gift to the world and having retired from the ministry, he should have found something better to do than to indulge a rich family's vanity and serve its petty needs.
In general she preferred the appearance of perfection and unity in the least distinguished lives to noble qualities—such as the self-control and self-sacrifice, devotion to the dead, and generosity, which Jim displayed—haphazardly thrown together in a life which seemed to have developed along the line of least resistance; and had no doubt that her husband, without great intelligence or any pretensions, was the greater man of the two. Furthermore, it was a Christian's duty to give, not merely a good example, but one which could not be misinterpreted, which did not require explanations to be made by those who loved him, allowances by those who did not. Simple integrity was a duty as well as a source of happiness.
Alwyn himself, as scrupulous at least as his mother, did not want any religious faith compromised by devious individual behavior, and did not want to consent to one himself which he was likely to have to compromise. Immoderate like other Americans, other adolescents, he already believed in extreme positions. and deliberate apostasy—not in accidental reaction, nor in vague decadence of the old toward the new. He was quite ready to reject, for himself, his family's beliefs, but not on the basis of any less perfect embodiment than his mother's life; it would indeed have been unfair to judge his uncle's ideals by his representation of them.
Then the problem of formulating a set of beliefs which would be in harmony with as many of his instincts as were ineradicable (as his mother's beliefs seemed to be with all her instincts) troubled him and gave him pleasure; and during his adolescence, many religions seemed to burst vaguely into bloom at once in his imagination.
He had learned that God was one and uniform; he felt that He was legion. "Thou shalt have no other gods before me. . . ." He believed that he had seen the others already, under ordinary circumstances, very slightly disguised by the lives of ordinary men and women such as his relatives—thorough and shameless, as deaf to interruption, as busy as death. . . . They came to his attention also by way of pictures and books: the splendor of devout savages as he had heard about it, the bitter-sweet nobility of extinct races, the Greeks, for example, as it had been written about. "Thou shalt have no other gods. . . ." And he fancied himself in love with them all.
He had learned that God, who created man, was the lesson man was to learn long after by his painful experiments, mistakes, misery, and contentment; the body of knowledge of what for most people in or dinary walks of life is likely to result from this or that course of action; God handed down from father to son, mother to son; God the law. Alwyn felt that He was also the breaking of the law. At any rate he had already formed a vague resolution to break it; could he break it as well as his mother had kept it?
Naturally timid, he realized that even to be an outlaw, a more or less effective exception, would require more strength than, by himself, he would have. "We shall see, my son, if your God can help you. . . ." And if his God were gods? Would not his life, if he committed himself to them all, be a sort of Tower of Babel in which the divine workmen would merely dispute among themselves in all their tongues, and accomplish nothing? Each had power; had they any power in common? Could they, together, do—what one of them could do what, for his mother, one of them had done?
For her religion had indeed brought about a miracle of energy and peace; it was also true that marriage had made her religion what it was then. As mere doctrine it had been a birthright and a dowry; her husband, who had no talent for thought, had added nothing to it. But the evenly passionate years had changed its bearing upon experience, and as a method of living, it had been a sort of marriage settlement.
She not only believed, but felt, as by a physical instinct, that the curtain of death would not go down upon her drama of love; a drama of two characters with their children and their children's children—by virtue of heredity and immortality the cast would never be changed. And when she compared it—its dignity of citizenship, its perfect and tender monotony, the brightness somehow continually shed upon its humble scene with her girlhood, the latter seemed to have been a melodrama of insubstantial puppets, agitated. by a hand which had trembled for many reasons, and for no reason at all.
The motives of that melodrama had been dread of the future (and now that she was a mother, each moment was very naturally the child of the one before); servile dependence upon others, her angry parents, for example (and now the entire world outside the four walls of her home might have been destroyed without leaving her in despair); loneliness (and she had given birth to children enough to begin a new race, companions for her on earth and in heaven); and the obscure need of emotions, caresses, pride, pain (and now, day for day, she was scarcely equal to the feast of feeling which was her daily bread). . . . So contented was she that, in retrospect, she regarded the thoughts of her girlhood as other women regard the dolls whose mothers they have pretended to be.
And marriage had swept away, with the mist of sadness, her springtime mysticism, which had been an imaginary communication (as it were by messages, signals, and amorous glances) with what was beyond understanding. Now, in the person of her husband, what was beyond understanding lived in her simple house; she slept within reach of its strong, however tired arms. Mystery was in God the equivalent of passion; from time to time it had taken (and would take) possession of her. But she would no more have thought of trying to rouse or control it—even by curiosity, speculation, or yearning—than if it had been a man's passion; she did not even ask of the moody lover whom she had married the right to say yes or no. Thus all that was enigmatic in religion—the bitter effort to fathom God's apparent indifference, to accept the evil which He permitted, the amorous effort to have the truth naked of its disguises, to reach the point where mortal desire leaves off and serene, immortal satiety begins—gradually wrapped itself in the same pure shame and darkness which hid away her marriage bed. Those riddles were for the sorrowful the disappointed and disabled and victimized; as such at least she, when merely the Duffs' daughter and Paul Fairchild's fiancée, had been faced with them.
Paul Fairchild might never have existed; Ralph's great hand, at its first touch, had obliterated the traces of him in her mind. Until she came to tell that story as a lesson to her grown children, she did not try to explain even to herself the evil role he had played in her youth; then, disdainfully overlooking his failings, she concluded that her own subservience had been at fault. Nor did her father, the diabolic, pitiful old man to whom she was as devoted as she could be, trouble her otherwise than practically. Thus it happened that out of her theory of life, as out of a picture (warm white on white against white) the devil, like a black shadow, had faded.
This was love's negative work. Positively, it gave her strength and kept her young. (Indeed, it kept them both, and their love-making, young; for twenty years the farmhouse was electric with it; and even the youngest of their children grew up in the fragrant, restless atmosphere of a new marriage, as if in the heart of the lightning which cools a midsummer night in Wisconsin.) Repeatedly with child, a number of illnesses obviously in abeyance, thin and no taller than her children when they were adolescents, able to afford hired help only when actually ill—no one understood her vitality. On certain days, without warning, it would be exhausted; then, her face for the moment the color of old age, her voice dreamy, her quickened breathing scarcely to be divided into words, she would find herself unable to work, and would creep away to rest. Perhaps lying with her eyes closed all afternoon in the empty bed, she would draw strength there from her companion, who would be far off in the woods or fields among his little wild beasts and great domestic animals.
Ralph, a child even in manhood, and a child of nature, drew strength from those animals, from the land, from heat and cold, from physical experiences—but drew his spiritual strength from her. If obliged to think of any complex problem, he suffered from pains in his forehead; she thought for him. He was timid and conservative; all his abilities would have been handicapped by a deaf pessimism, but for her thoughtful speech which charmed him into action—that of being a good father, farmer, and citizen—charmed him like a sort of cheerful music. His passions were entangled in and blinded by melancholy; at the end of a few months of an unhappy marriage, one or the other—desire or discouragement—would have left him no better than a heavy, broken-hearted animal. A Christian as it was, without her help he would have been unable to conceive God except as a father's tyranny, or as violent pleasure, or death. The light, steady wave of her character breaking constantly upon his temperament had worn away its roughness, given it brightness and another sort of distinction than its own: that of the wrath and force of instincts mixed with intellectual gentleness, that of animality the heart of which has been touched and not broken.
Incompatibility of the sort which puts an end to fugitive affections was the basis of their permanent and essentially religious devotion to each other. Each, like a portion of a circle, found in the other what was needed to balance and perfect himself. Trait for trait, each was strong where the other was weak; each was the opposite of the other an opposite as symmetrical as that between man and woman physically. The good-tempered years, as they passed, brought about an interweaving not only of their interests and affections, but their characteristics. Death, to take one of them, would have had to leave a part of that one behind, or mutilate the other to carry off its momentary share of the two, inextricably married.
This process, this mystery, constituted at last the family's one enduring mysticism. Schooled by the discipline which in Marianne's hands Christianity had become, her children were to inherit, as if it were a religion, a theory of love, which would probably be interpreted by them in terms of various religions, various kinds of good and bad behavior, and which, changing its form but keeping its vitality—as in transmigration a vast, vague soul, typically American—would probably be heard of for some time to come.
During one of Alwyn's summer holidays he went with his parents to a Methodist camp meeting on the other side of the county. He and his mother drove a single horse, his father following in a carriage with the little girls; and they stopped for the noonday meal. with a family of friends. There was a newborn baby in the house, and his mother shed tears as she held it in her arms.
When they were alone again, moving swiftly through the dust between the cloudy fields of timothy and waves of turning grain, he asked, "Why did you cry?"
"Because I want another baby." At that time she knew that for accidental physical reasons she would not be a mother again. "I shall be glad when I am a grandmother, with your little ones at my knees. Before very long, you know. . . ."
It was the first time she had noticed that he was almost a grown man, and he knew that he should be proud, but was embarrassed. "The people I pity most on earth," she added, "are your uncle Jim and old Mrs. Fielding and her daughters. I don't see how a woman can be religious without children."
They reached their destination. The annual revival took place in a grove, along the edge of a deep ravine where, it was said, there had been rattlesnakes. On the camp grounds there were dormitories for men and for women, hidden from each other by a thicket; the auditorium, a sort of vast wooden tent; a dingy hall in which meals were served; and a number of cottages rented by particularly devout and prosperous families. There were quoits played with horseshoes by the old men, and exercises of physical prowess for the young in sweaty shirt sleeves and cloth caps too small for their heads. Between meetings the speakers, among whom were several bishops, balanced in rocking chairs beside their wives on the various porches. Certain rough but quite unexceptionable young couples played in the mossy gorge, the male faces red with the summer and with excitement, the girls disheveled and gay. A number of dry, gentle women tried to occupy everyone with Bible classes and games. This was one of the fountainheads of western Protestantism, and epitomized its mean amenities, its lack of mystery, its vast, somewhat emasculate, but primitive power.
Alwyn sat on a bench between his parents during the afternoon service. His uncle, the minister, had been expected to join them there; he had not come, presumably for family reasons. The hymns were miserable; he had heard one of the tunes in Chicago in a cheap theater.
Then a little man limped forward on the platform draped with flags. He was the founder and director of a school for lumberjacks in the north woods near Lake Superior, where Alwyn's father had gone to hunt. In the simplest words he talked of his students, great brutes of all races, few of whom could read or write; how they worked by night in the basement of the little building making cement blocks, both to pay their individual expenses and to support the school; how their hard hearts were touched by love of the Lord; how, for lack of room, equipment, and funds, many had to be turned away. Then, tears shining on his sharp, lonely, cripple's face, he recited: "The desert shall rejoice, and blossom as a rose. . . . Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart; for in the wilderness shall streams break out. . . . And an highway shall be there, and it shall be called the way of holiness—wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein. No lion shall be there, nor any ravenous beast. Sorrow and sighing shall flee away."
Alwyn had never seen nor heard so moving a man. He compared him with the family minister, his uncle Jim; but almost in shame, he wished that he were beside the latter in the great, odious city mansion, rather than where he was; and suddenly thought of him not only with a certain lack of respect but with profound gratitude—he scarcely knew why. . . .
There followed a testimony meeting. Most of the statements of faith were made by women and by men of the clergy, men poorly paid to do so, speaking for others or for others' sake; most of them had evidently been made before, the very old, intoxicating, weak words falling into place as one expected, with a sound of satisfaction. Suddenly Alwyn's father stood up beside him.
Alwyn trembled; he never knew what his emotion was ignoble embarrassment, or terror of something present and invisible which was scarcely his friend, or the shock of intimacy with him who had, that which had, begotten him.
He saw his father gaze at his mother, as if she were all that the universe contained. His mother had forgotten herself and his father; she was quite pale, and made somehow homely by her humility. Alwyn saw her gaze back at his father, and realized that she believed that with eyes accustomed to fields, horizons, and deep woods, more farsighted than her—she was looking at God.
His father's voice shook. He said, "I know that my Redeemer liveth," and sat down.