UNA AND ROBIN

1930

Part One

In Carmel, in the house on the Point close to Una
and Robin, we settled down into a most peaceful life. It always
makes me feel wide and deep and still when I leave this high place
and go down to the sea. We were close to the beach and the big
waves boomed in beside us night and day; and the lovely salt smells
mingled with the coastal smells of eucalyptus and bay.

What a contrast of family life Una and Robin made for
most family lives. I wondered if Robin's words explained it, when
he said:

"... Oh, fortunate earth; you must find someone

To make you bitter music; how else will you take bonds
of the future, against the wolf in men's hearts?"

One day Una came over to see me:

"This morning I woke up with such a dreary thought,
Una," I said. "I lay there in my bed and looked out at the sea,
and everything seemed to be so active, so going-on-of-its-own accord!
The water was so blue and happy-looking; everything moved and
twinkled in the sunshine; those sand-birds twinkled up and down
on their little roller skates, like you twinkle around, Una;

*From "Ascent to the Sierras" in *Cawdor*.

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and the gulls swooped in the white-haired, wind-blown spray--everything so gay and full of happening. And I knew that unless I _did_ something about it, nothing would happen to me. I could just lie there. Unless I managed it, no breakfast would come in to me: absolutely _nothing_ would happen that I hadn't made to happen, and anything I wanted, I'd have to go and _get_."

"I know it! It's an awful thought, really!"

"And it's always been so and always will!"

"I know it! It's just like that in my house. I have to make everything move. But Robin doesn't care if nothing happens to him. He doesn't want anything to happen. He hates to have anything happen. I can't go away a day and leave him unless the boys are there. He just sinks down into nothing."

"Goes below the surface, I suppose, without resistance."

"I suppose so. Lies on the bed and looks out of the window."

"But Una, he loves to hear you tell about happenings . . ."

"Oh, yes; he likes to hear about things. I always tell him every single thing I hear. That's where he gets all those stories. They sink into him and come out years later! He gestates as slowly as an elephant!"

Una's graven image smiled his slow, beautiful smile. His long, sea-colored eyes drooped at the outer corners--the only droop in his face.

"Una likes to make things happen," he said, in his low, kind voice.

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"Yes, I guess I do," she admitted, twinkling her creamy face and flashing deep blue eyes around her. "It's lucky, isn't it?"

"I should say so," I exclaimed. "I hate to, but I hate it worse if they don't: I mean if everything in and all around me is static, immobile, inactive!"

"Oh, I like to cope with things. I love all my house-work, all the washing and things. Robin's pretty good about helping--I mean he likes to wipe dishes: that's easy, and we have good times together doing the dishes . . ."

"But that tower--all those huge rocks, Robin! How did you ever roll them all up--alone--and build them together, one on top of another--if you don't like doing things?"

"Oh, Una wanted it," he answered. His voice always has a light, low tone of surface in it--something slightly humorous and unserious, yet always, always kind. His eyes, though, are deeper than the sea and clearly profound. If one meets his eyes for more than a glance, there is something actinic in their effect upon one. Something painfully alive and raw comes out of his eyes, like an unknown ray that burns the mists one covers oneself with. Mercifully, he quickly slides them from one's own, and this is a relief.

His eyes must carry both radiant and awful messages to his brain all the time; and one has the feeling that he sees All, whatever that is. Like God's eyes in the Bible. Knowing that much, knowing all around everything, seeing whole, so to speak, leaves him uncritical; and without judging anyone, he neither likes nor dislikes them much.

" . . . I that am stationed, and cold at heart, incapable of burning,

4.

My blood like standing sea-water lapped in a stone pool,
my desire to the rock, how can I speak of you?

Mine will go down to the deep rock."*

His living seems to go a long way, from the top level that we
most of us live on, straight on down to Profundis --also up into the
mysterious regions above us. Una palpably keeps him on the surface.
Though her he moves, he eats, exercises, shaves, procreates, and
smiles his kind, beautiful smile upon almost everyone. Through her he
lives and moves and has his being on her earth. Through the twins, who
are the projection of herself and him and inseparable from either of
them in their own minds, Robin also lives.

At some early moment (or was it gradually?) Una took over
the responsibility of his earthly life, he gladly giving it into her
hands. Unless she lives, he doesn't live: that is, on this, her earth.
In the deepest sense, Una, then, has saved him. I don't mean in the
obvious way, although she did that, too, when she took him and checked
the drinking and plotted a life for him, making him keep to a pattern.
I mean she has absolved him from human suffering, from the ambi-valent
destiny of those who live their own lives. She has lifted him beyond
pleasure and pain: he is safe.

He doesn't participate in the accidental fortunes of daily
life; he is unidentified with it save through Una--and it is his strangely
good fortune that just she caught the wild hawk before it beat its
life out against the rocks.

"... (I have granite and cypress,
Both long-lasting,
Planted in the earth; but the granite sea-bowlers are
prey to no hawk's wing, they have taken worse pounding,

*From Cawdor.

5

Like me they remember

Old wars and are quiet; for we think that the future is
one piece with the past, we wonder why tree-tops
And people are so shaken)"*

For no one could be better than Una to be identified with. She has the luck that comes more from a fine common sense and balance, than from the indulgent gods. She is so well organized, that things come right for her; so completely herself, that everything she does is successfully done. Perhaps the gods gave her the genius for living well. Steff says it doesn't matter what one does, so long as one thinks right. Una thinks right, apparently, and all her acts follow, obediently melodious.

That stone house Robin built and the massive square tower
next to it--they are absolutely so hand-made, every rock is known
(" . . . my fingers had the art to make stone love stone, you will
find some remnant . . . ")** personally to Robin, just as every inch
inside them is known intimately to Una: she has dusted and polished
over them so for years.

Think of the power Robin has put into them: if it could
be weighed and measured, the figures would seem super-human! The
great stones moved and edged up from his shore, inch by inch, a few
inches at a time; up the cliff and over the road--and then lifted by
block and tackle, slowly (every hairbreadth measured first) up into
place, until the tower rose massive, to endure forever: longer,
far longer than Una and Robin and Garth and Donnan--as long as those
prototypes, the hawk and the unicorn--God only knows how long!

*From "Granite and Cypress" in Roan Stallion.

**From "Tor House" in Cawdor.

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"Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion

Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall
down,

The square limbed Roman letters

Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;

For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the
brave sun

Die blind, his heart blackening:

Yet stones have stood for a thousand years and pained
Thoughts found

The honey peace in old poems."*

And not content with house and square tower, Una must have a
round tower, too, hard by--so the new rock pile grows larger: Robin
is collecting for that. And it is not subterfuge, either. Una made
him roll the rocks and build for her. She knows it is good for him,
of course, but it isn't only that. What fun would that be? No,
she loves her house, she loves her tower; she wanted them and he made
them for her.

Up in the upper room of the tower, Una sometimes sits at
her little organ and sings old ballads . . . while the fire burns in the
chimney place and the wild storm beats against the undomesticated
rocks of the shore below. Little Una, twinkling and flashing, whole-
souled, secure against the world in her stone tower, sweetly singing
ballads about another older life that is romantic and real like hers--

*From "To the Stone Cutters" in Roan Stallion.

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that treasure must be a payment more than enough for Robin.

I think to see her gold and silver head against the back-
ground of his rocks, animating them, is never stale for Robin. Her
fabulous braids are wound round her head so meekly, making it round,
giving the madonna contour; and her small face is Irish--sweet
and fierce by turns. Indomitable. In that creamy skin, no color
except such blue, deep blue eyes, and sometimes the faintest pink in
her cheeks.

And Una has another little organ in the living room of the
house, too! She snatches moments to play upon it. She does a
whole morning's washing for her three-all those shirts and things--
and hangs them out in the sun; and then sits down and plays a tune.
Not breathlessly or hurriedly: she can change her tempo in a flash
from the bustling, practical rush, into the perfect leisure. Never
mechanical, she is always adjusted. It is an anomaly that generally,
when human beings are adjusted, they are more mechanical than
machines! Automatic. Una never is. She is too conscious for that--
never missing anything. Everything counts with her--has a meaning--
is valuable or hateful. She can cope better than anyone I ever knew
--liking it!

It is morning. Una washes out the clothes and hangs them
on the line in dozens. She steps briskly about, with emphatic, small
steps. Her feet look childish in her low shoes, and her legs look
innocent. She is dressed in a black cotton dress with a round neck
and her arms are bare.

Robin is back upstairs in their bedroom. He is pacing
up and down. He has been the one down first of them all, to put the

8.

coffee on the stove. After breakfast, those great handsome boys
have been steered off to school.

"Now, dear, you'd better get up stairs," Una says. Robin
is always held a little below the surface in the morning, and Una
leaves him to it. He isn't taciturn--he is dazed to the outer
world. His pulse beats slowly, and his eyes seem to see inwards.
He is aware of his three, and would be responsive if they wanted him.
He would always give up poetry for life--his life. He would rather
drive the boys to school than write a poem--thinking life more valu-
able than its reflection; but Una won't have it. "Now go upstairs,
Robin," Una says, briskly.

He carried that pipe; he stops a little, preparing to
miss the place where the upper floor juts over the little stairs.
The proportions of the house are all made for Una; Robin is tall and
made like a hawk. Why can one never get away from that idea of him
being like a hawk? Why--when his face is so sensitively harmonious
and ready to smile, kind, tender and aloof--why does one feel the
broken hawk somewhere in him? Where in him? Robin does not seem
to suffer--being beyond good and evil fortune. But there is often
a stoop in his body. Is it because the house is built for Una,
and he must bend, or because he has bent himself against the heavy
rocks?

Mornings, then, Robin works upstairs. No familiar
house-noises disturb him. Una's rattling and polishing only bind
him more securely in that concentration where he probes. Voices
mingled with Una's do not cut through. We laugh hilariously,

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recounting the gossip, the fun of things. Una adores news. The
last bit.

"I have something I must tell you!"

"Oh, what?" she will exclaim, greedily, her blue eyes
twinkling and flashing. She rubs honey-and-almond cream on her hands,
for she has just dried them. A hundred times a day Una rubs honey-and-
almond cream rapidly on her hands.

"Well, you know . . ."

Robin is pacing slowly up and down above our heads. The
boards in the floor creak and that pipe smoke . . . ? He never budges
from his post above. Oh, yes! The little ancient bantams outside
that belong to the boys, are squawking and making an awful fuss all of
a sudden. Una and I scarcely notice them, but Robin slowly lowers
himself down the little steep staircase. One sees his long foot come
first in its battered leather gaiter, then his great angular hand on
the stair rail, finally his head, bent to miss the ceiling. Haggard,
a kind of pallor over his granite features, the deep-creased right cheek
washed wanly with a smile, he says gently:

"Something seems to be making trouble for the little cocks."

Una jumps up, then, with a look of rage, and flies to the
door--so fast that she is there without moving through the air.

"It's that cat!" she will announce in a little, growling voice.
Robin laughs, softly. He is always amused by Una, always aware.
Why not? For he lives through her. She is his conduit, his battery;
she brings him life. More than that, she is his lightning conductor;
she keeps the destroyer away, absorbing evil for him, making it

10.

harmless.

He always goes back upstairs. All his mornings are there.
That is the time given him to go away from the life of every day,
away from the happy home and Una. Yet not away, for he takes her
with him, somewhere in him, and she brings him back again. She is
his life-line in the deep sea of human suffering.

She goes with him. He does not have to go alone into those
hearts, into the cells of the sorrowful, stupid, and predestined
mortals that he tells about in his poems.

She has collected stories of the coast for him from
farmers and sailors and roadmen and all kinds of people. Just
the stories. She has given him the framework of those lives, in a
way, just as she has given him the framework of his own life. But
that's all. She never intrudes a step into the life of his creative
work. She never talks about what he is doing at any moment, nor
does he tell her. She leaves him alone with it. When a thing is
finished, he brings it to her, but not till it is finished. She must
often wonder what is going on, but she never speaks of her wonder.
She sends him upstairs there into their bedroom--and then leaves him
to it.

Robin is thinner and more gaunt when he comes down at one
o'clock. There is a wan-ness over his cheeks and the deep clefts in the
rocky face are deeper. His eyes are deep as eyes can be, and more
deep than is comfortable. He has been looking into lives. Looking
into individual lives.

Robin knows the destiny of every individual life is
tragic--must be so, leading inevitably to old age, disease and death;

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and that the passage towards old age is tragic when any individual
wish seeks its end. It isn't that Robin holds any brief for collective
living: he has gone a long, long way beyond collectivity. He just
knows something Una knows about love. Something he hasn't written
about yet.

And he knows there is just so much to endure. It is as
though there is a given amount of human--no--living suffering to every
square foot of this earth. Often married people feel this unconscious-
ly. There is some unhappiness in the air--if one of them takes it,
the other goes free. I once knew a man and his wife who had a mys-
terious illness which they shared. When one of them had it, the other
went free. Robin knows about this kind of thing, and does his magin
in the upstairs room. He says:

"This coast crying out for tragedy like all beautiful
places; and like the passionate spirit of humanity

Pain for its bread: God's, many victims, the painful deaths,
the horrible transfigurements: I said in my heart,

'Better invent than suffer: imagine victims

Lest your own flesh be chosen the agonist, or you martyr
some creature to the beauty of the place.'

And I said,

'Burn sacrifices once a year to magic

Horror away from the house, this little house here

You have built over the ocean with your own hands

Besides the standing boulders: for what are we?

The beast that walks upright, with speaking lips

And little hair, to think we should always be fed,

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Sheltered, intact and self-controlled? We sooner more
liable

Than the other animals. Pain and terror, the insanities
of desire, not accidents but essential,
And crowd up from the core.¹

I imagined victims for those wolves, I made them phantoms
to follow,

They have hunted the phantoms and missed the house. It is
not good to forget over what griefs the spirit

Of the beauty of humanity, the petal of a lost flower blown
seaward by the night-wind, floats to its quietness".*

He takes it for them all--for his three--in his powers. It is
not just writing poetry that Robin does up there. He is living it out
--bringing it up and out of himself or beyond himself--concelling their
portion for Una and Donnan and Garth. That is why his things are so
poignant. They are not just written--they are endured.

Experiencing the human tragedy consciously and voluntarily,
and building it into solid blocks of poetry, is an atonement for his
own three; but it is more than that. It is for all--for any of us.
No one can read Robin's poetry and be just the same afterwards. One
could be saved from those sins and sorrows by reading of them as he
writes. Bringing into consciousness and clear understanding, the dis-
tracting terrors and troubles of life, he dissipates them. What a
task for one man!

"Joy is a trick in the air; pleasure is merely contemptible
the dangled

*From "Apology for Bad Dreams."

13.

Carrot the ass follows to market or precipice;

But limitary pain--the rock under the tower and the hewn
coping

That takes thunder at the head of the turret--

Terrible and real. Therefore a mindless dervish carving
himself

With knives will seem to have conquered the world.

"The world's God is treacherous and full of unreason;
a torturer, but also

The only foundation and the only fountain.

Who fights him eats his own flesh and perishes of hunger;
who hides in the grave

To escape him is dead; who enters the Indian

Recession to escape him is dead; who falls in love with the
God is washed clean

Of death desired and of death dreaded.

"He has joy, but joy is a trick in the air; and pleasure,
but pleasure is contemptible;

And peace; and is based on solider than pain.

He has broken boundaries a little and that will estrange
him; he is monstrous, but not

To the measure of the Dog. . . . But I having told you--

However, I suppose that few in the world have energy to
hear effectively--

Have paid my birth-dues; am quits with the people."*

*From "Birth Dyes" in Dear Judas.

14.

At night, Una and Robin climb the little staircase in
silence. All the talk of evening is finished, the house separely
locked and the fire lowered in the fireplace. There is no sound
in their ears now but the big sea booming in its perpetual clamor
against the rocks below the house. Upstairs Una lowers the trap
door that closes the stair-opening and that is Robin's pacing-ground
in the long mornings of work. ("See!" cries Una, "Robin has quite
a long way to pace up and down!") She undresses and then opens the
casement and leans out for a moment, never tiring of that perilous
sea, nor of her silver moon that seems to shine for her alone in her
lone world, making a long path of light across the western water and
causing the path up through the grass below to shine like a path
to heaven. Una salvaged the abalone shells in the Indian kitchen-
midden they came upon when Teddy dug his ground, and she patiently
crushed with a hammer three big wheelbarrows of them and put them, thick
in her narrow trail up from the road to the house. Unbelievably
lovely and shining with the opal tints of mother-of-pearl, Una's
path lies gleaming in the moonlight or dazzling in the sunshine,
with the wild-flowers in the grass bordering it. Even the rain en-
hances the pathway to this happy house.

Robin stands beside his desk and reads over the morning's
work. He does not want to talk any more. He has gone back to his
inner life and he takes up the thread of story and drama and follows
into sleep wherever it will lead him. The last thing he does at
night is to make a contact with his work and hold it through the
dark hours.

In the morning, it is still with him. He is not all there,

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seeming a little dazed, and absent-minded.

He makes the coffee, but doesn't say much to the others. They respect his abstraction and leave him to it. Una gets the boys into the car and takes them to school; and when she comes back, Robin is upstairs at his desk, or, if not, if he lingers below gazing out the window, or leans beside the western gate among the pigeons and chicks, Una says:

"You'd better go upstairs now, dear," and he goes, unresistingly, pipe in hand and his eyes shrouded.

Many, many friends have given these two bits of stone from distant lands for their remembrance. When they themselves were in the old country, they brought back stones from all over the British Isles, and from the Round Towers of Ireland. They have stones from John o'Great's and Land's End, and Una picked up a stone from George Moore's place in Ireland, for he is her favorite of all writers, and she had a stone-cutter in Monterey carve "Moor Hall" on it. There is a stone from Nijni Novgorod in Russia, one from Angkor, one from the Wall of China, another from the Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt. Then there are some little Astec heads that were picked up in the maize fields of Mexico. All these make a mosaic woven into the old stones of California.

And plants! So many friends have given them things to plant on the place! There is a bladder campion from Tintagel in Cornwall and a strange writhen tree from New Zealand, some English thyme, and Una even has a lone asphodel whose infrequent blooming she waits for

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breathlessly, that lives beside a wall in a sad sort of way, doubtless
regretting Greece.

A page from Una's diary at this time, says:

**August 19, 1929.** Drove to Finvoy to see a cromlech. Bought a bog-oak walking stick at Portrush. Such a beautiful afternoon, the wide, high, rolling moor covered with heather and a few pools of bog-water; here and there a thorn tree. When the wind blows through one thorn tree, the sound is like the suffering of a whole forest. One ancient gray stone house alone at the edge of the moor. Robin said: "Wuthering Heights." We walked a mile to the cromlech, a massive one, the top stone ten feet long by eight wide, supported by three upright ones. Above, curlews circled with plaintive calls. Garth scared up some grouse. I found a lucky bunch of white heather. We had brought our tea with us and drank it quietly there by the cromlech, with eyes on the windy clouds and mountains far away: nearer, we could see a smiling valley with little farms of grain and flax. A family arrived as we were leaving. The two girls were twins--and our twins there!--mystical stone and magical twins! Saw two peasants making a sod wall. Met a procession of tall, white geese, very dignified, and clearly having a plan. (Chickens are always at loose ends.) I love the bright blue eyes of white geese. . . . Walking near Bonamargy by Bally Castle, asked an old man some questions. He surprised us by asking whether we were "antiquarians." He told us of Deirdre and of many ancient things, and of Sorley Boy McDonnell buried with eight of his family in the deep vault of the Abbey behind Iron Doors put up by Lord Antrim, his descendant. Donnan copied some inscriptions on tombs. Robin found an old cross in a hedge, on the

17.

way back to Cushendun. The postmistress at Knocknacarry gave us a
brown glass ball found on the shore (used during the war to hold up
the nets to catch submarines.) Met an old woman gathering sticks
to start her fire in the morning. She complained that nice clean turf
(peat* was no longer plentiful and cheap as in her youth. She said,
"It's a fine day just, and what is the date? Sure August is a grand
month with the harvest, and many a laugh I had because I was born
in August when everything is plentiful, the salmon in the sea and
the harvest on the land." So she tottered away, leaning on her stick,
and we heard the dry snapping of little twigs. . . . Tomorrow we'll walk
to Ossian's grave."

And all around this magical spot, how the gossips congesture!
Of course people have always had their eyes on Una and Robin, for
nothing is so fascinating as those who seem to know how to live their
own lives.

It must have started years ago when the crash and break-up
of Una's marriage with Teddy occurred, for that was noisy and pain-
ful and public, because Teddy couldn't help making it so. Teddy
thought she was happily married because he was. He adored her,
but he didn't observe her. He is not contemplative at any time and,
anyway he was almost always away from her, occupied in being a
lawyer--and quite a successful lawyer.

At night he talked to her. His brief and unconcentrated
love-making left Una baffled. She who is passionately interested
in process and in the detail of creation, would possibly have made
Teddy into a famous lawyer, counselling him with her urgent, dynamic
interest in him and his work--had he first satisfied her first need

18.

for satisfaction. People have to get their bodies out of the way before they can accomplish anything. If they don't, the unquiet flesh obstructs every path and chokes all channels: becomes threatening and clamorous and, if defeated too long, brings real disaster.

It is the misfortune of American men that they live so far outside themselves in their ambitions and activities, that they are rarely good lovers. Their minds are apt to wander, and Teddy's mind was always wandering.

Una didn't know what the matter was. There she was in Los Angeles, in a nice street, in a pretty house, comfortable, as comfortable as all the other women around her, well dressed, living a pleasant, if somewhat smug, California life. But there seemed to be no color to it, no flavor. She felt no color or flavor in herself, either; but as though she were a peach in a basket with rows of other peaches, nice to look at, but without any taste.

She was restless and unhappy. She played golf--miles of golf, and she rode in automobile endurance tests; but still her energy outlasted her expenditure of it. She made friends at this time that enriched her soul and that opened up the sensitive, aesthetic side of her; an interest in art became one of the wistful substitutes for love.

Her spirit broadened, overflowing wider fields of earthly interest, because the narrow, insuperable river of light was damned up in her. But these second-choice remedies only developed her, and that was not enough for Una. Education, as an end in life, may be enough for some inhibited women, but not for such as she.

Of course she knew nothing, herself, at this time, of

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the pattern she wove. Only her instinct knew how to find its way
out. It was while she sought for still more education that, ironically,
she found love. She decided to take a college course to see if it
would help. It did. She met Robin there.

She was arrested by the look of the handsome boy who
lingered on the stairways, disoriented and lost in the crowd of
well-directed young people. His face was unlighted and his eyes were
blind, but he had great beauty. Una had to have him, and she knew
this immediately. She went like an arrow to the heart of that hollow
oak, and their long saga commenced.

Robin had written a few things before he met Una, but
it was only after they came together that his great poems came out
of him. It seemed as though each was the sole, inimitable channel for
the other, of all the creatures on earth. Robin, locked in Avernus,
turned out to the world with messages--Una carrying them in her firm
hands; and she, the lover of process and object, of efficiency
and excellence, turned inward to meet Robin. Lovelessness may be
educative and developing to character, but love is living. The
philosophy of Becoming is the hope of those who are not; Being
is the rare experience, and that is what Una and Robin attained to
through each other.

Upon the outer circumference of this reality, was
Teddy: Teddy the lawyer, with suspicions but no certainties. But
he had to know, of course, so three detectives were about and *about*
and *about*, and those lovers never even knew it until Una faced the
piles of papers on Teddy's desk: circumstantial, incontrovertible.

20.

Their interpretation was as may be expected. They saw her "in the toils." They described her in the grasp of "that drunken beast."

Robin did drink. That didn't matter to Una. Nothing did. Instinctively, she knew it didn't matter, once she got him to herself. She who could win in those other endurance tests, would win in this one.

But Teddy couldn't give her up. He thought it was because he couldn't give her up to be harmed by that worthless drunkard that it was his duty to keep her safe. But when Teddy ever faced the hard truth? Just as well for him he doesn't: his calibre is not made to endure it.

Una sorrowfully saw through Teddy and pitied him, so she agreed to go away for a year and see what would happen in that length of time. She went--not knowing whether Robin would wait for her, whether he could wait for her, whether he would disintegrate and fade out before she got back to make him into something solid. For she always looked at things squarely. She knew the danger and didn't shrink from it. She had to be that fair to Teddy--that a year would test them out.

She knew she could handle Robin if she had him near, but she didn't know whether she could at a distance. She still doesn't know that: misdoubts it, in fact. She knows she is the little god in the machine--she likes that. Doesn't she wish she had a great, dangerous, humming aeroplane to drive?

She went to Europe, then, but not to repine. No Una is not that kind. She is too valiant, too robust to brood, too

21.

outward-moving and interested in life to torture herself with the thoughtsof uncertainty, no matter how uncertain the outcome. She and Robin had promised they would not even write each other. So she knew nothing except what she hoped.

I think she set her head back and compressed her pretty mouth and looked fierce with her black-lashed, blue Irish eyes, and said to herself she would get Robán, no matter what happened, so long as he didn't drink himself to death before she got back to him. If another woman got him, as might be, it wouldn't make any difference: she could get him back from anyone. Just so he stayed alive--that was all that mattered.

In the year and a half they had had of each other, Robin had set her on her feet forever. He with no balance of his own, had given her her perfect equilibrium. She could enjoy herself now in Europe--and she proceeded to do so.

She loved it all whole-souledly, primarily because she loved Robin and he had set her free to love the world. She had fun. She went about alone in Italy and France, assimilating it, bringing back vestiges in prints of Botticelli's paintings that would be pinned upon the redwood wall of Tor House and grow faint with the years. Botticelli women who looked like Una: round-headed and wide-eyed with wonder and delight.

But Ireland set its deepest mark on her, making her feel her blood and its race. And the towers of the old country--she adored them. She belonged to them and they to her. She felt like a tower woman. She felt an affinity with the women in wild ballads

22.

who leaned from stone towers over tossing seas . . .

She had promised a year, but after seven months, rumors
came to her that Teddy was forgetting his sorrow with some other
girl, and this seemed to absolve her; so she hurried hom to find
Robin.

When she came, she had the spiritual strength of ten men
and the look of a dove. Teddy asked her if she still wanted a divorce
and she said, "Yes!" with the decisive finality, the little determined,
wilful, upward inflection that is always in her voice, that has
always been in it since Robin had set her free by giving her what
she wanted and made her know herself. She has always known what she
wanted at every moment since then. She is never uncertain. And
whatever she wants is right. Her wishes are set for constructing.
She cannot wish wrong.

It was sad that Teddy had to lose himself so that Robin
and Una should find themselves, but so it was. Teddy has lost his
way in life without Una. Over the way, across the wild grasses,
he lights an unshaded beacon in the window that faces hers. Perhaps
he believes he does it for Una, that she will know he is there if she
ever needs him; for he cannot believe that Robin is anything calculable
and sure, even now. But it is really for himself that he sets the light
there . . . burning towards her at one side from the glad stream of
her own and Robin's quiet, unalterable blaze. His small ray set towards
her, gives him his only feeling of identification with real life--
except Colin, perhaps, these last few years. And it is a fancy of
mine that he somehow figures that Colin is Una's more than Gay's.

23.

Robin had waited for Una, quietly drinking, gently, in a lost
kind of way, with a look of unknowing on his face. She didn't mind
that. They went to live together in the north, Una waiting for the
divorce, and they drank together a good deal, for she liked to drink
herself. She had no plan of life yet--only to love Robin and live
with him and talk and talk, to tell him everything, carry everything
to him, to fill him with the life she saw, filtering it through her
glad and fascinated attention.

She adored the passionate and terrible business of living,
the strangeness, the macabre, wild horror of frustrated love,
now that she enjoyed completion; and nothing was too slight to engage
her vivid interest, so long as it had an edge of keenness, a flavor, or
a bit of zest. She roved over the intricate earth hunting owt her
feed, carrying home to Robin the morsels of story, the devious and
peculiar beauties of humans, their pitiful escapes, or their glad,
victorious arrivals. She filled Robin, who was waiting to be filled.
He tucked away, deep in him, all the fragments that he would never
have gone out to secure himself, not being a hunter like Una.

After a while they went to Carmel and lived in a tiny log
cabin among pine trees, unneighbored, but not, I fear, unnoticed.
People had been talking about them ever since the scandalous front
page paragraphs in newspapers had interpreted in their own way the
happenings of this divinely guided pair. A great inhibition sometimes
leads to great accomplishments, but this time it led to great love,
and the poetry was a by-product of that.

The newspapers did not tell a thing about it at the time.
Since poetry in bulk brings with it its own respectable protection

24.

when it comes along in book after book, the world, so loving and
admiring what it can heft and handle, waited till the shelf began
to fill before its press took up the tale in reverential form--delic-
ately alluding to the secluded couple in the rock-walled house on the
point; the shy, sheltered poet, "America's greatest poet," living in
the happiest security of wedlock; the observed, magnetic, focal
spot of all Carmel--nay, of this whole coast--the emphasis now all
on the volume, the output, the scandalousness submerged beneath the
product that is but a reflection of the passion that made it flame.

In the log cabin, Una did all her housework. Teddy, in a
last letter of farewell, had exhorted her to work! To write or
paint and fulfil the promise she gave out in her personality of being
able to do something. He begged her to be a Great Woman and produce
something beautiful "like the Great Women in the plays and books."
Una and Robin only had a little money. She wanted to spend what
they could on books and music instead of on servants, so she washed
and swept from the beginning, and she has always done so.

And when Tor House was built, and the tower--she kept on
with it. Her work has been wrought in human clay, and she has
fired the shapes in the furnace of her own body. Oh, she has
produced, but not as Teddy foresaw it for her.

It was not long before she began to check the drinking.
Not for any puritanical reason, rather for efficiency of living, so
the alcohol self-distilled in the cells would have its chance to
better stimulate their perceptions and their gladness.

It was not accomplished all at once. One morning, when she

25.

woke up, Robin was not by her side. She was alone in the little house.
Everything was silent, and no sound was to be heard except the rumor
in the pines and the slow roll of the great sea below her. She was in
a terror as she dressed hurriedly and ran out to seek him. Never a
sign of him about, though, and hours went by while she experienced the
terrible arrested and suspended life of a suddenly emptied house.
She couldn't imagine where he could be, who never left her side.
They had grown so bound together, they were like two even halves
joined perfectly. Distraction rose in her. . .

Finally he came. He had risen in the dark and walked to
Monterey and bought a bottle of whiskey and drank it all!

But that was the only time. Her anger and her grief pre-
vented any recurrence of such solitary indulgence; and Robin learned
that he could not hurt her, for when she suffered, he had to feel
her pain for her. When anything troubles Una, it grieves Robin more
than it does her. I do not think she can ever feel as deeply as
Robin feels for her.

Once I lived near them in the house next to Teddy's, and
one morning I looked out the west window and saw Una running wildly
across the open space between our house and his. Her long braids
swung out behind her and her legs were bare below the little black
cotton dress. Her face was terrible. It was like a maenad's--the
mouth open with horror, shaped for a shout, but no sound coming
from it, and her eyes were black and seeing tragedy ahead of her.

She disappeared like an apparition wiped out. I thought of
Robin, of Garth and Donnan. Something awful must have happened.

26

Soon I went over to Tor House, though I scarcely dared, for fear of
what I would find there.

Una was weeping on her knees then in the court-yard, bending
over Porthos, one of the tiny little bronze bantam cocks. He lay
braids trailed in the dusty sand. Robin stood above her, his face
whiter than ashes, frozen with pain, silent, drooping over her. When
I came, he raised his eyes towards me, slowly, with the curious effect
of furtiveness he gives, because his motions are so gradual and
stealthy. Garth and Donnan stood there, too, with bent heads and
uncomfortable faces that were too young and too unaccustomed to suffer-
ing to rightly express it. Una seemed not to see me. The little
cock lay on its side, panting a little, and her hands hovered over it.

"Una's precious!" she sobbed, "Una's little precious!" It
seemed to know her, and it rolled its glazing eye up at her.

"What is it? Robin?" I asked, breathlessly. It seemed to me
I couldn't stand the anguish bunched there in that group.

"The neighbor's dog caught it and ran off down the hill,"
he answered in his light, low-toned voice, devoid of feeling. His
eyes returned to Una: they were dark and aghast at the sight of her.

"He's dying," she sobbed. I waited a moment and then I left
them. I was all outside what was going on, and could do nothing to
help.

I knew how Una had gentled those little things. Someone had
given them to the boys when they were chicks, nine years before; and
they ran in and out of the house like familiars. One, just that one
it had to be, would sit on Una's lap and when she talked to him,
cajoling him, he would put up his little head and crow a long, proud

27.

cock-a-doodle-do in a thin, piping voice that broke like an old man's.

"That's the man!" Una would cry, hugging him, "That's Una's
darling man!"

After a while, I went back to Tor House in my car, to try
and take her away from there for awhile, and she went with me, leaving
Robin and the boys to watch over the cock which they had moved into
the house. He was breathing fainter and fainter, now. Una's eyes
were red, but she wasn't weeping any more. When she came with me, Robin
walked to the car with us and gave her a long, slow, clinging kiss. He
looked twenty years older and one saw how he would be as an old man.

We drove up to the Highlands and never spoke of what had
happened--just went to see some friends and laughed and talked of other
things. And when we went back to the Point, and Robin came out of the
house, Una saw the bird was dead, for his face was full of it and the dread
of telling her.

She said, "Oh, dear!" as though she had dropped an egg and
broken it, for she had been through the worst, already. She doesn't
repine--and, anyway, perhaps Robin had taken the worst of it for her.
He was a little sick from what he had witnessed, and could not eat or
work for a day or two; but the boys buried it with some ceremoniousness,
and got comfort from that, enjoying it.

Well, at first they were alone in the little log house,
except for an adored white bull-dog called Billie. Una practised maternal
love upon Billie and longed for twins. She carried the thought of
twin boys around with her so constantly, that she could hardly believe
it when the little girl was born. She only lived a few hours. Did

28.

she know she had come to the wrong house, and so slipped away?

Down at the edge of the sea upon the Point where the rocky shore projects, Robin and Una walked together and planned their life-long, age-long house; and finally they bought their strip of land and Robin began to slowly roll the rocks up the declivity; so slowly, with what patience and unchanging intention, he fitted the great stones together, making rooms. No slip-shod work in that, nothing soft: a granite hardness in the man Teddy had called but a year or two before, "the vile poetaster"!

Take the lines:

"... and we all applaud our vices."

Mine, coldness and the tenor of a stone tranquility; slow life, the growth of trees and verse,

 content the unagitable and somewhat earthfast nature."

There was in him a slow, deep rhythm, perpetual and unfaltering like the sea, motivated by the round, observing moon. Their life was elemental, and it was as though they were truly aspects of the universal forces, as dependable as they are, and living under the Safe Law that governs them.

Robin made the deep-embrasured windows that would look out to sea. . . . Una thought of the twins growing up in the wide west window-seat, eating at the little table and learning their lessons; and after a while, there they were. That is wonderful, but not so wonderful when one realized the harmony in that woman, so constituted that she longs only for the things that are for her!

In this low-ceilinged living-room, Una pasted the Botticelli

"From "Vices" in Roan Stallion.

29.

prints onto the redwood panels. From the end wall, the round gaze of Venus rising from the sea, covered the room; and someone painted a profile of Robin that Una hung on the side wall near, so it seemed to be watching her. Just as he does in life.

In that room, where so often people come and go, flooding in, inevitably attracted there by the charm of it, the glamor of happiness; where Una's orange wine, perpetually brewing in the kitchen, is continually being sipped by guests who turn little glasses to the light and exclaim over the amber clearness--Robin sits hardly speaking, his pipe held poised in the air by that great bony hand that the rocks have shaped and hardened and never broken. His eyes are always on Una's face--clinging to it. Does she steady him, and hold him to the level of the surface life? Sometimes he has a drowning look in his eyes--but never when they are on Una's face.

In such security there is no need to be careful of love, no studied politeness or conscious good behavior. That would not be real enough to suit such practical lovers. I remember the very first time I was in there for tea, when Steff took Tony and me. Una always makes fresh gingerbread for a tea party, and she cut everyone a slice and slid it on to our plates. That happened to be the day when she turned out the room, polished the floor and swept the rugs until they were fresh and bright--and she adores the look of it after she has livened it up by hard work. We ate and drank and laughed, and Robin glued his eyes on Una's face and fumbled his gingerbread so that a lot of crumbs and powdered sugar fell on the floor in front of him. When Una saw that her rage rose in her and, giving him a look as though

30.

she would kill him, she ran into the kitchen and came back with a dust pan and rapidly brushed up the debris, talking all the time about something, going on with the party, doing two things at once--Robin doing only one: looking sorry.

In the room beside the living room, Robin built the bedroom where the wide window looks out to sea, and the bridal bed stands in it where they have loved together for so long and where he says he will die with the western sun shining in his eyes over the sea.

"I chose the bed downstairs by the sea-window for a good death-bed

When we built the house: it is ready waiting,

Unused unless by some guest in a twelvemonth who hardly suspects

Its latter purpose. . ." *

Upstairs, in the long room, the twins have slept for years; and Robin and Una have slept there, too, at the other end. But the evenings before the fire, the late night coming on them after all their talk, have ended in the "bridal bed" next door, before they mounted the steep, small stair-way.

The books keep coming into that house: people always sending them, Una buying them when she can; books of biography, books particularly about Ireland--that Robin loves as well as she does, maybe because she does--yet they do not swamp the house, for she gives them away to people, to the Library, burns many--especially books of verse!

They ate for years in the living room beside the fire, until Robin later added the beautiful dining room with inner and outer

*From "The Bed By the Window" in Thurso's Landing.

31.

walls of stone and a wide stone fireplace. In the little balcony at
one end of this room, Una's Grandmother's spinning wheel came to rest;
and below, her small spinet stands. Over the fireplace, he carved the
words:

"Carpent poma nepotes." (Let the grandchildren gather
the apples.)

And at the edge of the balcony:

"Time and I against any Two"--and also:

"No noise, no strife, nor swear at all,
But all be decent in the hall."

When this Tor House came into being, what did Teddy do but
arrive on the scene, buy the adjoining land, and raise a stone house,
too. Maybe not realizing it, he must build a bigger and better one
than Robin. But it was not built with love, but by stone masons. It
is taller and broader and quite mechanical looking: it does not live--
is not convincing somehow. It is a house and not a home. Robin's
house fits the ground; the trees he planted, cedars and eucalyptus,
cluster round it, holding it in their embrace; the fat pigeons strut
up and down upon the grey stones of the wall around the court-yard, and
the bantam cocks dart in and out under the low dark branches. Every
inch of the place is known and lived in and adored by the four who are
at home there. No one loves poor Teddy's forlorn house. Wife has
succeeded wife there; pretty girls, one more baffled than the other,
lingering and leaving. No one of them ever feels she has Teddy.
Abandoning law and abandoned by life, Teddy turned to the theatre and
to acting. This substitute, chosen by the ingenious savior of unhappy

32

man that always guides him from within, is all that is left to one bereft of reality and harmony. Unless mortals are lucky enough to find and keep the true way, they must live in symbols of the truth.

Teddy built a beautiful theatre and, wistfully calling it the "Golden Bough", he tried to live in the versions of love and life conjured up by dramatists. He acted in plays whenever he could, at least he directed them, living through his cast in the roles forbidden him in real life.

There is nothing but play-acting left to Teddy and his kind. And it is not Una's fault, either, any more than it is his own. It comes from not knowing, from the pitiful ignorance of life, the untorn veil--the so-called unlucky soul who is victimised by his mistaken judgment. How many people, after all, know how to live? Faster than they can learn, the creeping incurstations of civilization come smothering their delicate instinctive faculties; or, like a blind increasing blanket of fermenting dough, growing over them, wovering consciousness; comforts and gadgets and novelties usurp the rights of natural faculty.

Lost and uncentred, Teddy built the stone house and the Golden Bough Theatre, and in the town he built fairy-tale cottages, fantastic and amusing enough. He ran about like a harried creature, evading the issue. The only true light in his life was the unshaded electric beacon he burned in his living room window towards Una every night. He had said he would be always watching, and he was: watching and waiting. For what? He had not the will to think that through. What if something did happen to sweep Robin away from Una--and it could only be death, and he was too good a soul to wish for that, being a lovable small person in his own way--well, suppose she was left without Robin: could he

33/

suppose she would ever turn back to him, did he wait never so long?
No, he could not suppose it; so presumably he did not conjecture about
it--left it in the air, unresolved. And continued to flit and fill his
life with activities without end.

Una surely helped him all she could. She is fond of him. She
helped the wives who came and went. One girl she settled in Teddy's
upper chamber at a loom, fancying the child could like to sit there
weaving a little atmosphere around herself in quietness, looking up the
hill towards the town where Teddy labored to reproduce the illusion of
love and poetry in the Golden Bough Theatre. The poor girl simply hated
it! She wasn't that kind at all!

The last wife is Gay. She fares better. She is less baffled
than her predecessors, because she has less capacity for wondering, and
more acceptance without question. Particularly since the friendly little
Colin has come, she feels more real with Teddy.

Teddy and his wives ate in the living room like Una. The
living room is, suitably enough, yellow and domed: eggeshaped, and
Teddy inside it, unhatched. Perhaps in another life, he will break the
shell and live. I know Robin hopes Teddy will be born some day. In
the meantime, the yearns over him, somewhat, is fond of him, wants to
do things for him, but doesn't know what. He chides Una when she scolds
Teddy too much, as she has to do sometimes, for his oblivion and
foollessness. He is so scattered and all over the place. Una counsels
him wisely, but he cannot obey her.

When Robin added a dining-room to his house, raising tons
and tons of stone with his own hands, slowly, with deliberation, and
silent, unhastening intensity, Teddy decided to build a dining-room

34.

onto his house. Then masons came, and the sounds of hammering began
across the road, voices of men building broke into the ocean's roll
of surf. What kind of imitation is that, that apes the form and takes
no note of the method and the meaning? The world's kind--Teddy's kind--
the replicas of life with no life in them!

There must even be little Botticelli prints in Teddy's living
room: but not pasted onto the panels--oh, no!--but in little factory-
made frames; handsome, a little better-seeming to Teddy, poor darling!

Most women with the pressure upon them that Una had, and
increasingly has, would look harried and anxious, with frowns on the
forehead and down-turned lips. But not she. I believe that every year
she looks more exultant and thrilled with life. As the long braids
grow more grey with time, her face becomes more and more fulfilled,
brimming with fulfillment until it would seem that every breath she
draws is satisfaction and content to her. The lines that are coming
to mark her features now, are from her frequent laughter: "happiness
lines," Tony called them--about the rarest things in the world in women's
faces, more often seen in men's.

Consider the lilies of the field, and then consider Una and
what she gets through in a day! In the past, like now, all the housework,
and taking care of the twins, nursing them both, washing them, changing
diapers, adoring them and watching over them like a lioness, getting up
a hundred times a night to look at them and see if they were still alive,
still breathing; watching over Robin, edging him away from drink, making
him build houses and towers of stone for her, having to give him his

35.

task every day: requiring poetry, making him work, sending him to his double work morning and afternoon, above to the long, low upper room, and then out upon the seashore.

And gardening: making things grow around the house and tower, making Robin plant hundreds and hundreds of little trees, then getting them watered, keeping them going. And sewing! Making her little black house-dresses, and the boys' little things. Mending all those masculine clothes; shirts growing larger every year, socks growing larger and all needing mending! Washing and polishing windows so they always shine. Washing the car once a month, she and Robin together. And with it all, finding time to read, time to write letters, for there are people all over the world who love her and have to hear from her every once in a while. Besides, she takes care of all the business correspondence, and it growing heavier every year, with Robin's fame flowing into every crack and crevice of the earth. Or else, when inevitable, she insists upon his writing a letter, and getting him to do that, is harder than turning out fifty herself!

Then the marketing! Going up to the village to shop at Espindola's, to bring it back in the car, saving a little this way, seeing people, everyone stopping her to tell her things. She is so eager for news, things to tell Robin--gossip-interesting things. And later, seeing people at home when the "Not at Home" sign is turned on the gate into the "At Home after Four O'clock" one!

Una is like those tremendous men of affairs who do the work of a dozen, yet always have time for everything. She rarely gets to hustling, like more automatic people. She goes fast, but deliberately, like something highly geared.

36.

The twins, Garth and Donnan, have grown into big boys now:
one dark and Celtic, the other a Saxon blond. Every morning they must
be motored to Monterey High School, carrying the lunch Una has put
up for them; then they must be called for in Carmel when the bus
brings them over at four o'clock. They begin to take Robin into the
village now, more than he went in the past, for sometimes he goes to
fetch them in the car, if Una wants to do something else. Before that,
Robin's rare visits to Carmel were to the barber, for somehow Una
drew the line at cutting his hair for him, no matter how he loathed
going into town to have it done, having to meet people, having them
stop and talk, cooing over him, smiling at him, he not interested or
able to flow out to them, not having any personality built up to meet
them with, no armour and no defense, being so kind and understanding
them all too well.

Robin lives just as fully as Una, only he lives in her and
in the sea and in the rocks, loving the sea-birds and the ships a little
distant from him, feeling fondly towards the doves and the little cocks.
Garth and Donnan and Una are enough people for Robin, and all he needs.
He loves to read out loud to them in the evening, while Una sews.

The boys love to lie on the bridal bed in the cosy
bedroom, with Una at its foot sewing beside the lamp and Robin reading.
He has read all the great books to them this way, through the years,
and talking of everything with them, so that love and lust and all the
facts of life have come to them from Robin's reading and their talk
about it. Shielded forever from meeting bad news about living or the
danger of shock.

37.

Just as Una has always told Robin what to do, so she has told Garth and Donnan. She has always made their life seem so thrilling at Tor House, Robin's ways so dear and strange and acceptable, that they would rather be home than anywhere else. She loves them so--never forgetting them, never letting her attention and her love lapse down in her to be taken for granted, caressing them, hugging them, laughing and questioning them always--she surrounds them with an adorable warmth and stimulation more binding than anything they ever meet at school or in any other house. They see life through Una's eyes and their life seen by her is the loveliest pattern--and not insipid, either. She does not make it merely sweet, but brings danger into it, for glamor: locking all the doors at night, heart leaping at strange sounds, robbers in the night, curious shapes beside the tower...

Waking, they saw her rise, once, in the darkness, and creep with the revolver that is by her bed, to go down the stairs; and they heard a careful footstep feeling its way from the bottom up towards her--and then her breathless cry:

"Oh, Robin! I would have shot you!"

"And would you have shot Mother, Father?"

"Certainly!" came the answer, firmly, out of the darkness, and the sound of the eternal kiss. "If your mother will live in a Scotch ballad, boys, she must take the consequences," Robin's low voice continued from the shadowy west corner under the eaves.

"Oh, Robin!" Una loved to quake and experience the terror, and make a half-real fear into the fun of living.

They all put all they have into their life together. There isn't any meanness, ever; no selfish jerking and pulling. The boys are

38

devoted to each other and without envy. Everything is fair and scrup-
ulously so; there is no end to the giving amoungst them all--no end
to love.

Now the people who see this family, just cannot believe in it.
Outside their own experience, they cannot take it simply for what it is,
a happy family life. There is no end to the talk about them. Up in
the Carmel Highlands and through the village, down the coast to
San Francisco, up the coast to Los Angeles, speculation and conjecture
are exchanged while Una goes merrily on, making a life they all would
fain share if they only could.

Women yearn to get a chance with Robin to see what they could
do with him. Failing to get at him, they even hope some woman will
come along who will succeed where they have failed. Una guards him from
them all, not, as they believe, for her sake alone, so much as for
them all. Robin has no stubborn, resistant denial in him, and when
Marcella, waiting for him to pass her door, called him in and gave him
a drink, he went in smoothly and easily and drank and sat with her--a
little self-conscious, perhaps, but not unwilling, exactly. Una
went home to Tor House for a moment before she joined the Orages and
the Steffens at Marcella's for tea after the lunch party at Steff's.
Robin said:

"Marcella gave me a nice drink a little while ago."

"Where?" demanded Una.

"At her house. I was going by and she called me in."

Una saw that whole small plot in a flash, for Marcella had
left Steff's before them all. She knew Marcella just wanted to see if

39.

she could get Robin the way she got so many other men: she had felt
that minx thing in her. In a flash the compact rage mounted and she
ran all the way to the house nearby, in the door, through the easy-
going, laughing group, to confront Marcella.

"She was as white as a sheet and her eyes simply blazed,"
they told me at the Highland dinner party where, months later, they
were still talking about it.

"Marcella! You leave Robin alone. I won't have you doing
that. Robin isn't for that kind of thing!" She put such an in-
tensity into it, her attack was like a violent explosion. She scared
the usually intrepid Marcella, who burst into tears. Una didn't
care. She turned and marched through the house and back to Robin.
She didn't want Robin to get mixed up in the looser strands of living,
after all her work upon her pattern for his life. She didn't want
it spoiled. Why should she? She knew Robin was no more invulnerable
than any man should be, not being a neurotic nor impotent, not a god,
nor yet a fool--but just a man. Knowing no one could take Robin's love
away from her was not enough for her realistic knowledge of human
nature. She knew and knows their structure has the fragility that
requires daily, hourly creating. It is not something that, once made,
will endure forever. At any moment it could change, be messed up, altered
and spoiled--unless she watches over it. So she stands at the door
with a sword. She likes that, too!

That time, her anger was not over when she left Marcella and
when she drove back to Tor House, leaving the jolly tea-party turned to
stone with the surprise of her unexpected attack upon their stunned
hostess, as she got out of the car, what did she see but a smug, square

40.

bottle of gin sitting there in the seat. Of course! She remembered
then that Marcella had brought it to her at the Steffens' luncheon!
It only succeeded now in enraging her further, for it presented itself
now to her inflamed imagination as one of those propitiatory gestures
women sometimes make to wives while planning depredations upon husbands.

Una leaped from the car and seizing the pretty bottle, she
hurled it against the base of the tower where it broke into a thousand
fragments, its delightful perfume mingling with the salty air and
eucalyptus leaves. The twins came out of the house just in time to
see this exciting act, and Robin, too, behind them. One of the fore-
most cares of this family is to keep the place all nice and tidy so that
nothing ugly can interfere with the beauty of old stone and the
scattered sweet alyssum and the other growing things; and while
Robin came and put his arm around the spluttering Una and drew her
towards the house, the boys set themselves to work right away to pick up
the pieces of broken glass.

Robin took Una into the house. Her eyes were wild and dark,
and she began to rush around the room looking for something, crying,
"I'll **kill** her! I won't have it. I'll go after her and **kill** her."
She remembered the little pistol closet above the fireplace and made a
dash for it; and then Robin took hold of her and held her away from it,
a look of annoyance on his face as the broken rhythm that made the
house shake around him. He held her firmly against him. She only
came heart-high and the odor of sandalwood rose to his nostrils, that
perfume Una had used for thirty years and by which, Robin always says,
he would recognize her in hell.

He spoke to her in his low voice, trying to soothe her, but

41.

this only infuriated her still more and she leaned out over his arms
and seized the spindles of the staircase in both hands and, shaking
them like a monkey, she tore them out from the hand rail one by one
and threw them about her on the floor.

The boys had finished picking up the glass, and they came
back into the house while Una was tearing down the staircase. Without
hesitation they picked up the pieces and, fetching the hammer and
nails, they neatly set to work to repair the damage, even while Mother
raged in Father's arms, tearful now, and full of grief. They hammered
and hammered, not saying anything, just repairing, until finally
Una laughed through her tears and called them "darlings" and the sun
came out!

But it takes an Irishman like Una to produce a regular shindig
like that, and get it all out of her system at once, so she can
laugh at it forever after. And even now, when Una will sigh and
exclaim: "Oh, wouldn't it be *nice*, Robin, to have a fine bottle of
something?" a twin will break in and say:

"Doesn't Mother wish she had that bottle she broke on the
tower?"

"Oh, I *do*!" Una will admit, woefully.

So, naturally, women wonder and men are envious--and the
talk goes on. About Garth and Donnan, too. Are they developing as
they should? Has Una prevented their initiative from growing? What
will happen to them when they get out in the world? Should they not
resist her more than they do? Assert themselves? Poor human nature,
that has produced a theory that character is dependent upon friction for
its growth? We may learn from Una's picture that sons do not have to

42.

hate their fathers and mothers in order to become men. Possibly it is true that there is one thing more powerful than anything else in life, that intelligent love can do the trick better than anything else.

Of course it has been an appeal to reason as well as to love. Donnan, in particular, has always loved ships and the navy, and the army and army system, and he has readily taken to the idea of their house being a ship sailing along in life with Una for Captain. The boys both know someone must be at the head of things for them all, and besides, Una makes everything seem worth-while and exciting.

There has only been one little revolt in all these years, and of course it came from Donnan, the dark Celt who is perhaps more highly strung than the sagacious Garth--Donnan who stands so straight and holds his head haughtily. It was the tired end of the school week--Friday--and he had let things loosen up a bit in school, losing the position of head of his class. Una took him to task about it, vigorously. She told him she wished him to hold his place, and quite to her surprise, he started to argue with her about it. He told her he wasn't going to work so hard anymore, that he didn't care anything about being at the head of the class, that it didn't mean anything to him. Una said what she has been saying all her life:

"Well, if you start a thing, you've got to see it through--and well, too." Donnan was tired and nervous and wouldn't give in and agree, so Una had to have recourse to the final argument to which there is no answer. She said:

"Until a person is financially independent, he has to take orders, and as long as Father and I are taking care of you, you have to do as you are told. And you've been told." Donnan looked at her

43.

under his level brows and said:

"All right. But the time is coming, you know, when we won't."

And this made Una's heart miss a beat. He settled down to
his books, but when the time came to go to bed, he put his arms
around her and held her tight, hugging her as he used to do when he
was a little boy shorter than she--shyly, because they are hardening
themselves a little, these huge boys, trying to be men and not so
given to kisses. Then her heart leapt in her and she turned her face up
to him and cried:

"Oh, my baby! My precious!" And Robin, sitting there, had to suffer and be glad at the same time, to see the ebb and flow of life: Una growing grey and fading a little, year by year, while the boys wax strong and hearty as though her life was still pouring into them, and her strong will to live strengthening them against her dominion.

Of course the psychologists are uncertain about Robin's
complete abnegation, his absolute surrender to Una. He is apparently
utterly selfless, has no personal wishes, is content to let her will
rule them all. If anyone brings him a present (and people are always
wanting to do things for him and give him things, feeling unconsciously
grateful, perhaps, for his assumption of sin!) he instantly gives it
to Una or the boys. "Father being noble," they call it.

The other day, Noel called him out in the garden and gave
him a bottle of old whiskey. He brought it in and, bending on one
knee, smiling at one side of his mouth, he offered it to her--he who

44.

loves good whiskey so much. She took it. They both knew that was
the natural way, and that they would drink it together.

There is a sadness, a low tone of tragedy, over Robin.
His shoulders droop, his long green eyes are fathomless and half-
closed. He is alen to the wishes and the struggles for wealth or emin-
ence like other men. He is sometimes tired of making books, tired
of the suffering in them. Were it not for Tna and the boys, he would
stop.

"It is good for strength not to be merciful
To its own weakness, good for the deep urn to run over,
good to explore
The peaks and the deeps, who can endure it;
Good to be hurt, who can be healed afterward: but you that
have whetted consciousness
Too bitter an edge, too keenly daring,
So that the color of a leaf can make you tremble, and your
own thoughts like harriers
Tear the live mind: were your bones mountains,
You blood rivers to endure it? and all that labor of
discipline labors to death.
Delight is exquisite, pain is more present;
You have sold the armor, you have bought shining with burn-
ning, one should be stronger than strength
To fight baresark in the stabbing field
In the rage of the stars: I tell you unconsciousness is the
treasure, the tower, the fortress;
Referred to that, one may live anything;
The temple and the tower: poor dancer on the flints and
shards in the temple porches, turn home."*

*From "To a Young Artist" in Cawdor.

45.

But he is glad to take care of them, practical minded about
the increasing income they need. He is not given to fantasy and has
no notions.

Now the Point, where they came to build when it was all
empty and bare, is growing crowded with houses. Robin grows more
weary of people and their cars and their love-making and picnics along
the shore in front of Tor House. His eyes are affronted more and
more by the sight of human living, when he is on his afternoon
holiday among his stones and trees. He is being crowded out of his
life of sea and shore where the gulls companioned him among the
rocks, and is elbowed closer by the people whose faces he would rather
not see beside him. When he raises his eyes, they fall too often upon
other eyes, avid to eat him, to swallow him up in the way of
the starved. People hungry for life are attracted to the living,
never knowing how dangerous this hunger of theirs can be.

And also it seems they would rather motor to the strip
of shore in front of Tor House and park their cars and sit there gazing
out to sea, more than any other spot on this whole coast; maybe
because the Jeffers chose the best place of all, but probably only
because that is Robin's view and they want to try and share his
vision of it.

When Robin placed posts along the scanty grass left
untrodden by motor tires along the cliff above the rocks, so
separated that they made it impossible to drive onto the green, then
they parked their cars in the road and went to sit and hold hands
or chat the afternoon away. So he added to the grey weathered strips
of wood that bear the stern injunction:

46.

"No camping. No shooting. Do not leave papers
or other filth. --Jeffers."

others that say:

"Closed to motorists. No trespassing by persons leav-
ing cars on or near these property-lines. --Jeffers.

So now only friends come, they thinking their cars are probably less injurious to his view of the horizon than those of strangers; and when he goes below to see whose company he has along that pure coast-line, silhouetted against the warm sky, they are apt to exclaim: "Oh, Robin, you didn't mean me, did you?"

I think he winses inwardly at the encroachments upon the old privacy he had in the first years here, yet there is no one who could say he has ever been harsh or mean to intruders. Una is quicker to defend every stick and stone of theirs; and once when she was reading by the fire with bare feet, simply but inadequately garbed in a long flannel night-gown, she heard unfamiliar noises down below, between the sounds of breaking waves, and she rushed out and vigorously attacked a couple of men who were stealing her fence-posts; and only afterwards remembered and laughed at their open-mouthed astonishment at this small woman in a rage, with bare feet and two long braids, swinging from side to side.

Of course, Una dressed for tea, with her gold seal on a black silk cord, found afterwards when the guests have gone, opening the Tor House door to late arrivals, with bare legs and small bare feet--that is quite a well-known sight! She always tears off her shoes and stockings whenever she has a chance and thinks they are going to be alone.

But in spite of motor cars and people, there is some-

47

thing that contracts the heart in the completion and the beauty of
this life, removed from everything commonplace or sordid, seemingly
so safe from disaster or accident. Accident is to the accidental,
and these people are not susceptible to it. They know their way and
go in awareness. The pattern will remain and the picture Una has made
will only grow firmer as the years pass. She has brought her vision
into reality and she holds it there.

The strongest element in the whole composite group
is the potent nobility of Robin--at all times--wherever he is. He
has the noble aspect that makes ordinary people feel abashed, but his
gentle, inner, somewhat groping movement towards them, tries to make
them feel at ease, for he sends out a hooded message of kindness and
compassion to everyone he meets.

In the features--in the great nose and lean cheeks,
across the brow and about the mouth, there is a serenity and a quiet-
ness that has fire beneath it. In his eyes, when his infrequent gaze
meets another's, there is the unearthly look of this earth-bound, wounded
hawk, excelling in his submission to the destiny he has chosen. One
finds in him the truth of the old classical formula that one must some-
how find complete expression within limitations.

"I also am not innocent

Of contagion, but have spread my spirit on the deep world

I have gotten sons and sent the fire wider.

I have planted trees, they also feel while they live.

I have humanized the ancient sea-sculptured cliff

And the ocean's wreckage of rock

Into a house and tower,

48

Hastening the sure decay of granite with my hammer,
Its hard dust will make soft flesh;
And have widened in my idleness
The disastrous personality of life with poems,
That are pleasant enough in the breeding but go bitterly
at last
To envy oblivion and the early deaths of nobler
Verse, and much nobler flesh;
And I have projected my spirit
Behind the superb sufficient forehead of nature
To gift the inhuman God with this rankling consciousness."*

* From "Margrave" in Thurso's Landing.