PART II.

"Man is an animal like other animals, wants food
and success and women, not truth. Only if the mind
Tortured by some inner tension has despaired of happiness:
then it hates its lifeecage and seeks further,
And finds, if it is powerful enough. But instantly
the private agony that made the search
Muddles the finding."

UNA AND ROBIN IN TAOS

1938.

Dr. Brill was in a holiday mood on his way back from the meeting of the medical association in San Francisco. The very first day he sat in the center of a little group of admirers in the living room at the Big House like a live human representation of the ancient symbol of eternal youth--the dot in the circle that is carved deep in the rock over at Manby's Hot Spring.

He was glowing with kindness, his chin beard twitched up and down and his eyelids fell half over his eyes, which darted here and there like sly fish. He saw every fleeting expression on every face about him, every movement of each person as well as each restraint of movement. There was a pleasure in his own words that gave his turned up lips a look of zest and gusto as though he chewed a delicious morsel. Smack! Smack!

He was talking to us about fulfillment. Fulfillment for a man, he said, lies in the sexual act itself but not so for a woman.

"What fulfills a woman then?" Una asked. She was sitting bolt upright on a small low chair holding her bare elbows in her hands, and her skirt spread around her feet. Just at that instant I thought: "She looks so strained and her hair is growing much thinner." When

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I first knew her her hair was still a thick wreath that stood up
around her head but now it lay flat like silver beaten fine.

"Maternity," replied Brill succinctly.

Una looked, silently, her disagreement.

"Certainly," he laughed. "Man is constituted for sowing
his seed. Woman for receiving it, cherishing and nourishing it.
Life intends this to be so and it is so. Life, then, bestows that
feeling of satisfaction upon those who carry out her will. A certain
pervasive feeling throughout the whole person that all is well:
that we call fulfillment."

He grinned around at us all. He himself seemed content with
this arrangement. Why not? Brett sat listening with popping eyes, her
trumpet turning this way and that to catch every word of this exciting
talk. There was something singularly compelling in the dynamic little
man that geared up the mechanism of social intercourse and made things
move faster even on the deep summer day. No one was languid or weary
or sore distressed in his company! Rose Brill, in the background,
gave small reassuring smiles and nods instinctively trying to tone
down, with a New England propriety, his occasionally startling language.
She had acquired a technique, through their years of companionship
that attempted to deprecate and condone his freedom while at the
same time she completely accepted his hypotheses and this split her
somewhat and gave her countenance a certain mixed expression.

Una changed the subject:

"I'd like to know what you think of all this promiscuity
in sex that's going on among young people. Why, I've heard they

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think nothing more of the sexual act itself than we used to think
of shaking hands!

"Nonsense! I do not believe young people are any different
now than they ever were. There are no facts to prove it. There are
all kinds of young people now just as there always have been. Some
have more super-ego than others . . ."

Una began to raise her voice. "You just ask the boys," she
shouted, "I bet they will bear me out! Why, after a week end Robin
has to go out on our Point and clear away the signs they leave around
them--you know. Boys!" she called loudly. "Donnan? Garth? Where
are you?"

Donnan appeared at the screen door.

"Yes?" he asked raising his eyebrows. His beautiful face
was slightly frozen. He bore himself like a wooden soldier, tilting
back. Una has carved him into an image of an aristocrat and he had
a faintly royal air like an officer in the guards. His major fantasy,
inoculated by his mother, tinctured every drop of his blood.

"Donnan. Isn't it true that girls and boys nowadays
think nothing of sex--that they all treat it as of no consequence
and indulge it whenever they have the impulse to?"

"No. I don't think so," he replied in short clipped sounds.
His voice was toneless and empty of emotion. Where was his true
life, I found myself wondering, where does he live? Brill laughed
and threw back his head.

"Now Donnan darling! You and Garth have told me things--
don't you remember? Things that made my hair stand on end. Where
you just making them up?"

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"Maybe," he jerked out. "You like to be horrified. Maybe we did." When he laughed his lips had a generous width and curve and his teeth gleamed and made his black hair blacker, rippling in broad shining waves, but a sneer underlay his amusement.

"Is that all?" he asked with cold courtesy, raising his eyebrows once more.

"Yes, darling. Where is Garth? I want to ask him."

"I don't know. I'll find him," the boy replied politely. His voice never ended with a period but stayed up unresolved and empty on the air. With a faint hint of a bow he left us. His comings and goings were formal as though technical directions from within ordered every move. As he left us, leaning backwards as he moved gracefully away, slight and silent and cold, it was as though no one had been there or gone. He was like a black Irish ghost!

Soon we heard a heavy step and Garth swaggered into the room. Before us were two hundred pounds of solid pink and white flesh--clad in a red flannel shirt, blue jeans and high boots. There was a dew of sweat upon his nice big curving nose. What red hands he had, from hoeing in the corn field! Self-possessed and poised, he stood there, obedient, a saxon squire. "Did you want me?" he asked in the same unenunciated clipped syllables of his brother.

"Yes darling. Now you tell us the truth. We are talking about the way girls carry on nowadays. Isn't it true that nearly all of them, anyway many of them, are perfectly willing to go to bed with anyone anytime-that they think nothing of it?"

"Well it depends what girls you mean. Some girls will.

5

They hang around together in a pack. If you judged by them you'd think all girls were easy. But that is only one kind. There are lots of kinds." He was trying to be as exact as possible. His voice was curiously unnatural just as his brother's was and had the intonation of a language that seemed foreign to his tongue.

Brill laughed with delight and threw out his hands. "You see? Well, they may not be identical twins, but they have identical viewpoints; because they are telling the truth! No, there are not vast changes in human nature from decade to decade. Girls always have and they always will maintain an appearance of modesty. They are defending themselves, not for moral reasons or for ladylike reasons but (literally) for the purpose of good breeding. They are waiting for the best specimen to appear before they will capitulate. So long as they can hold out the male is inferior but the superior male will overcome them. The best man wins. Look in your barnyard-- you will see the same thing. Ever seen roosters fighting and the hens watching? No. Girls want the best. Not for sex pleasure but for the superior seed. They are the guardians of life."

Garth had stood there listening passively in an uninterested way. He was uninvolved with ideas of any kind whatever, but being well trained and disciplined he was used to perfect obedience. When Dr. Brill ceased to speak the big boy raised his eyebrows and enquired: "May I go?"

"Yes darling, you may go. Why doesn't Donnan help with the corn too?" she asked. "What is he doing with himself anyway?"

"Nothing, probably. Waiting for the mail. Sitting in the log cabin. He doesn't care to work," replied Garth in jerks.

6.

The years of listening to the talk of his mother and the voice of his father reading great works out loud in the evening had had an effect upon the vocabulary and the construction of language of both these boys--if not upon their imaginations. They rarely had a chance to speak but when they did, in their unwonted tones like those of prisoners after years of solitary confinement, a quaint literary flavor often marked their speech.

As he turned and went out, Una flashed to Dr. Brill: "Donnan thinks he is in love! A girl at Berkeley two months older than he and already divorced! Imagine! "

"C'est la vie," replied Dr. Brill in his favorite phrase, shrugging and grinning like a satyr.

"Well!" said Una, getting up. As she left the room I followed her out to the portal and she and I bent our heads together confidentially.

"He's a very interesting man," she admitted. "I didn't expect to like him. But he's so <u>kind</u>, isn't he?"

"Absolutely. And such <u>fun</u>! Don't you feel how he sort of stirs things up?"

"He does. Let's go back. Maybe we're missing something. . ."

In the following days Robin began to emerge from the upstairs room where he had been immured most of the time during their visit this year. In previous summers he had taken more part in the common life about him, riding horseback and swimming in the pool over at the Hot Spring, all of us together. This time there seemed to be a change. In fact among us all, Tony and I were living over at the Tony House. It was so peaceful and removed from noise and

7.

clamor and we loved to go back to it in the evening, leaving everything behind us, now the guests succeeded each other at the Big House where we all ate together. I was not riding my horse yet, and the boys did not seem to care about going out on the horses; Garth was working on Tony's colts every day in the corral, breaking them, and Donnan was very inactive. So our usual month of life together had imperceptibly changed its pattern. Now Robin was rarely to be seen except at meals and in the evening. I had given him and Una our rooms upstairs, and he loved my big bedroom where he could pace up and down undisturbed and unnoticed. His sole companion for long hours at a time was Haig. Haig was their white English bulldog. Once when I was in Carmel I got York, his Brother, from Los Angeles. He was a small slobbering pup with a rolling eye and an inch undershot in the lower jaw and Una had evinced such an instantaneous envy and admiration for him I had sent for another from the same litter. Alas! When he came he was found to be that last disdained member of every batch, the one that is never quite so good as the others. The runt. Una had swallowed her disappointment and gone to work on him. She had fed him up and lavished caresses upon him until she had actually drawn him into a manifest champion, a terrific, grotesque, exaggeration of bulldogginess, wide in the chest, more bowlegged, farther undershot, much more catarrhal than any I had ever seen before. Every breath of his was a prodigious effort. His snores vibrated through the floor of the porch above our living room and interrupted talk. He was a monster, a great, white, lumbering whale of a dog, the creation of Una's will to produce a champion. None of us liked him much but we were all sorry for him, for what a life was his! Forever incarcerated, he passed his existence

8

shut up in porches, bathrooms and automobiles. He was never allowed to know another dog, never let to run free. Twice a day Robin put on his enormous collar and led him on a chain for a short stroll. At sunset when Una and Robin took their customary walk Haig accompanied them, puffing and panting. Every day he was fed one pound of hamburg steak and covered with kisses by Una. "Una's man! Precious love! Does he love his Granny? Where's Garth? Where are the Uncles? Sweetie sweet! Tell Granny!" His fat prevented him from showing any mobile response but his dark farapart eyes were alive in his low brow and sparkled with a vaguely noble intelligence. Una had animated his soul, developed in him a vigorous affectionateness that had a certain heroic dimension.

When the Brills first came Robin met them only at meals. One was conscious that, though he appeared to accept them as he accepted all others in his *laisser aller* way of letting the world go by kindly and tolerantly, yet there was a special quiet attentiveness in him, an infinitely sly and secret observation. One felt an undisclosed tightening of the nerves beneath the muscles of his features. He was a past master in dissimulation and it seemed to me he had, throughout the years, been driven by some personal need to protect his inner workings from all external touch and compulsion. It was as though he contained a consciousness of his own that he was very jealous of and must guard from the enemy, humanity. Whatever his personal contents, they were, he evidently felt, his own. No one should come near, there must be no violation, no contact, no touch upon his soul. There was therefore always about him a sense of rare immolation, a precious, almost sacred, privacy that we all respected and helped him to preserve.

Now at the dinner table his slow moderated gestures to and

9.

fro from his plate to his mouth, his slow glance beneath the hoods,
his silence and his acceptance of the penalty life is, were as before
but from what strange centre in him was I perceiving a new excitement
under the new guardedness? I do not know how I knew him so well. In
all these years I had never had one talk with him alone, nor even
in company. At the very beginning of our family friendship I had
realized Una wouldn't like to have me take Robin separately, so to
speak. I must take him en famille and no other way, so I did. Yet I
knew what his feelings were, I thought. Of course Una had helped me
to know him and perhaps I knew him through a filter and perhaps she
strained him. Anyway I was sure I knew him and I was sure he knew
me though we never spoke to each other. Yes, I forgot! Once we
spoke in Una's presence. We three were sitting together after dinner,
she and I sewing, the boys playing the radio in the Rainbow Room next
to us. Robin smoking his constant pipe. He had been reading aloud to
us as he often did, for it seemed to be one of the only activities in
which he indulged his *viva voce*, since conversation even in a group was
mostly usurped by Una who, I always thought, sought to save him by
taking upon herself the burden of speech. The book I had chosen that
night was, in a sense, a last resort, for little remained to us to
choose from. Robin had read so much aloud, we had all read so much
to ourselves, that unless we repeated an old favorite what could he
read? This book was about the holy men of the East--the yogis, and
saints, and hermits and their recondite researches into the aspects
of spiritual truth. I had had a misgiving when I offered it to him.
Una, like other women I had known did not care much about "the soul",
and this was all about that! He read on in his monotonous unemotional
undertone and we had to be attentive to catch the words. He read

10

of abnegation, sacrifice of all attachment, separateness, and the
attainment and reward for such renunciations. He read of the high
experiences of the embatiated stoics--solitary in the Himalayas, of
the possibility of escape for the spirit through the repression of
the flesh and its clamors. On and on he read. How did I know he liked
what he read and understood it? I don't know but I did.

Suddenly Una threw down her sewing and interrupted him with
an abrupt impatience. "How can you go on with that stuff, Robin,"
she cried. "Consciousness!" she snorted, compressing her lips.

Robin looked up at her. He flicked a minute glance in my
direction which I caught. It made me know we were in agreement.
"It is a mode," he said, rather coldly. Una looked mad in a flash.
"A mode of what? Those filthy, dirty 'holy men.' Do you mean to
tell me you believe in that stuff?"

I interrupted her. "Una, don't you think there are ways of
increasing knowledge that we don't go in for here in the west, but
that other kinds of people practise and that really work for them?"

"I don't think there's anything first rate or decent about a
filthy, lousy, unwashed, inferior black man sitting up on the top of
a mountain staring at his navel and neither do you, Robin. You know
you don't. Why don't you say so?" She bore down on him. This
intense little woman with the flashing blue eyes was bringing all
her will to press some admission from him that would align him with
her. He hesitated for an instant and she was hanging on his words,
then he said: "I do not assume that we in the western world have the
sole method of finding out anything. I can conceive that these
'holy men' do arrive at . . ."

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"Well that's the first time I ever heard you say anything like that! I suppose you and Mabel know things I don't? I suppose you both feel very superior because you think you understand those filthy inferior indians covered with sores, unwashed, irresponsible escapists whom you wouldn't have in the house if they came anywhere near us and thank God they don't!"

"Una! Una!" he protested in an effort to calm her, without avail however. She got her sewing things together with trembling fingers and pattered to the door and was out and gone in a flash. Robin laid down the book and rose in his slow motion tempo. He turned his head as he went out and said, kind and cold and wary: "Good night, Mabel."

It took a good three days to get our natural atmosphere restored and by then it was time for them to go back to Carmel.

The day after the Brills came we were all together again talking, Una, Brett, Rose, Dr. Brill and I, in the living room after lunch. Robin had gone upstairs as usual after sitting all through the meal without uttering a word--just listening to Una's constant talk. He always sat at her right side and it was his way to hang upon her words and his eyes, when they looked at anything but his plate, sought hers and clung to them.

Now we heard him returning down the stairs and we also heard Haig's lumbering, sprawling, falling descent, and when Robin came in--there was the white monster on his chain.

"Hah!" Dr. Brill had not seen him before and he burst into one of his high explosions of laughter which one does not always

12.

understand. He thinks his own thoughts, interpreting life according to his scheme.

Robin smiled his own slow smile, as he held his pipe near his mouth in his economy of movement. He never modes if he can help it yet he can keep moving beyond all others' endurance when he wishes. Haig suddenly perceived little Bilbo through the screen door sitting outside on the cold stone of the portal. There was something vastly contrasted in the dolce far niente freedom of the small black Boston bull and the constrained mass of the great white bull pulling and bristling at the chain that Robin held.

"Precious! Granny's baby! Does he see old Bilbo? Does he?" cried Una, ecstatically. Haig bristled and rumbled. His forelegs drove into the rug, his chest swelled. "R-r-r-r-u-m-ph!" he growled and the hair rose on his back.

"Oh!" exclaimed Brill in his loud kind voice, "let him live out his aggression! "

Una looked amazed, and Robin laughed a little one-sided laugh that left the other corner of his mouth looking paralysed.

"Come on, Una! Let's let him out!" I cried daringly. She took the chain from Robin and opened the screen door and in an instant Haig was swinging along with that light, quick, aerial motion some heavy bodies are able to show on occasion. But oh! poor Bilbo! He had to run to save himself. Haig was ready to pounce upon him, to devour him in an ecstacy of sudden release, and Robin had to be quickly after him catching up his chain again, and he dragged him back into the room and then Haig lay shackled at his feet, his big soft legs spread flat before him, his heavy muzzle flattened on

13.

the ground, his ears pointed and every inch of his ponderous bulk quickened into an exasperated attention as he stared, with eyes suddenly reddened and inflamed, out towards the spot so recently emptied of the little dog. Who knows what a fury of pent up need and desire for natural contact and association with one of his own kind had been momentarily poured into his thick blood and instantly defeated? Dr. Brill laughed with amusement at this drama. He always seemed to find everything entertaining and instructive. Undoubtedly he noticed the pretty picture Una made as she knelt on the floor cupping the gross head in her little hands as she murmured: "Precious love! Granny's baby man! Did he want to go and eat that Bilbo?" Haig's fierce dispairing eyes never blinked nor wavered as he watched and watched.

So now after that Robin was with us oftener than usual throughout the day. He just sat, taking no part in conversations or he strolled in the company of us all listening, perhaps imbibing something from Dr. Brill's refreshing personality. He stood beside Una passive and unselfconscious when Dr. Brill photographed everybody as was his custom in the country. The man never moved without his Lieca kodak hung on his shoulder and he took us all several times. Robin came out, in these pictures, in that familiar pose of his, coached through the years by Una: "Hold your chin up, Robin!" His shoulders drooped a little, his big hands hung flaccid at his sides, but he always held his head up and looked down from under his long sad eyelids, and he resembled, I thought, a noble antique slightly impaired by time and handling. His face was asymmetrical and he had been taught by Una to present his good side. The right side was less mobile and appeared undeveloped; he laughed leftwise and his right

14

eye drooped more than the other.

When we had a party for the Brills for once I asked everybody in town. It was a great success. All the townspeople, the old timers, the district judge, the supreme court judge, the lawyers, doctors, plumbers, as well as the more sophisticated artists, all were there. Everybody in the village had heard of Dr. Brill and were crazy to look upon him. But besides him there were other so called celebrities, for our representative Jack Dempsey was there, and Jose di Limon the dancer from the Humphrey and Weidman group, spending a night in Taos, came with somebody. So it was one of those occasional hodge-podges that are most successful. Of course I had the Indian boys there to dance and Dr. Brill was thrilled with their fresh gaity, their dark glow and flash, their instant impetuous precision, and their delight in motion. Afterwards Judge Kiker, tall and thin as a rail and clad in his wiry smooth grey clothes, raised a hand ten inches long and sank his chin in his collar, resembling Abraham Lincoln, and in a somewhat infelicitous and pedantic speech, he begged "the doctor" to give a little talk to the crowd, so Dr. Brill stood in the centre of that simple gathering, beaming around at all of them and began:

"Now I did not see anything erotic in this Indian dancing . . ."

(My God! I thought!) but he went on in the most characteristic manner to say that in the past it was the fashion to affirm: "I think, therefore I am" but that he preferred to say, "I move therefore I am", for motion is life and dancing is still more life. He told us he had an old friend in New York--a busy man of over eighty, and this old man insisted on going to night clubs and he loved to dance. He even

15

had a little girl friend he visited once a week (here several faces took on that jelled look and I saw old Blanche Grant's mouth drop open but Dr. Brill gave a giggle and went on.) The old man's family were quite nervous about their relative and often consulted Dr. Brill about him. Wasn't it terrible, they asked, he insists on going to those places and dancing! "I said I don't see why, but they said, what if something should happen? He might die there, dancing! And I always answered: "Well, wouldn't that be find? Don't you think it's better for a man to die dancing, than to die in his bed? I think that's a man's death!"

Everyone in the room was won by this--they burst out laughing and clapping, even the spinsters, and especially the Mexicans.

But upstairs, Robin, avoiding the crowd, paced slowly up and down. "Joy is a trick in the air," doubtless he was thinking.

The Brills did not stay long, only a few days, for he was anxious to get back to a piece of work that awaited him in the East and when they left we very definitely missed them. He animated the environment, he was stimulating in different ways, not the least of which was in an affective manner that seemed to release us all into deeper emotions and responses for he was so brimming with kindliness and affection himself that with him one emerged from one's cold cave of introspection, up into the pleasant warmth of sunny life.

Hildegarde arrived soon after the Brills had departed. I had been looking forward to her visit for she was stimulating and interesting, this young woman from New Haven. There was an allure about her that came from a blend of hardy fortitude in the way she carried her head up with the strong chin thrust out above a sorrowful

16.

droop of the mouth and a wistful femininity in her bearing that per-
sisted through her somewhat stoical expression. Hildegarde had
recently passed through the universal experience of paying for her
pleasure and she had not liked it. It had marked her, imprinting upon
her a soft romantic shadow that added a charm to what must have been,
before she suffered loss, perhaps a rather hard and ruthless person-
ality. She must have been riding for a fall with such a ringing
vitality as she had, so zestful and strong an ego. Strange how people
modify themselves by their own wilful acts, choosing just such situations
as will bring about the discipline they need to model and round out
the harsh edges of themselves! I told Una something of her story
before she came. It was not unknown to her own family and to her
friends and I wanted Una to feel sympathetically towards her, and to
help me give her a nice time. I told her how Hildegarde had gone
through a difficult year. In her middle thirties with a nice husband
who had perhaps outlived, for her, his early attentiveness, with two
children growing up to remind her she was nearing the shelf stage
( . . . "I am growing wee-e-ary! Silver threads among the gold! ")
Well, she had tossed her head and stuck out her strong chin and defied
time by smiling upon one of her husband's students in such a way that
he was snared, and instantly, without hesitation. The trap sprang
upon him in the first hour and he was caught. Their passion had the
vigor of his youth and of her desperation and it lasted for six years.
For him it was an initiation and a preparation for love, for her it
was the tragic exercise of her will to live, to hold onto the touch
of life. From the beginning it was a losing game for her, she must

17.

have known that. When he really fell in love with a girl a little
younger than himself and came to Hildegarde confidently leading her
by the hand, presenting her to that older woman like a gift, requiring
her to accept Nancy sweetly, to be a friend to her and to wish them
both well, Hildegarde, as was her habit, threw up her head and took it
on the chin. John had his own wilfulness. He required both of these
women and he insisted on keeping them both, only now he wanted his
former lover to change into a good friend overnight. And she did. No
one knows with what bitterness she passed through her dark hour, for all
of them she showed only her gaity and a firm welcome to this gentle
girl. Nancy, who had been married briefly and unhappily to someone and
been ditched by him. It was only in her moments of absent minded
reverie when Hildegarde's face settled into a relaxed forgetfulness of
others, while listening to music, or to someone reading out loud,
that the melancholy appeared. It was an attractive decorative suffering
that added distinction to her. She had passed her Waterloo successfully,
and had come out on the further side with honor.

And now life was ready to bestow a reward of merit upon
her as it occasionally does when one weathers its storms, for the
first time Robin and she met at the dinner table, the very first even-
ing, they looked across the shining board and plunged in one flash
deep into each other's stream. It was an odd accident that Una, usually
so watchful and alert to all comers, missed the occasion when the
lightning struck, but her eyes were on her plate for once.

Una was in a wild mood that night, her tongue running away
with her even more than usual. I had noticed that nowadays she seemed
to be so easily overstimulated by the cocktails before dinner.

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They went to her head and set her off as they never used to do.
After dinner I had to drive to the Pueblo hospital to see Eliseo
who had driven a nail carelessly into a joist as he lay on his back
under a floor. It had glanced off and pierced his right eye and I
was deeply troubled by this accident and could hardly wait to get to
him. Una and Hildegarde came along with me. Though it was July there
was a boisterous wind shaking the trees and blowing huge stormy
clouds across the moon so that it flashed and disappeared and returned
again, and this seemed to excite Una more and more. Over my shoulder
I saw her eyes now gleaming and then blotted out again, as we drove
rapidly along the empty road in the low open car. Hildegarde sat
beside me and Una leaned behind us, her arms on the back of our seat.
As we started off she began with a rippling laugh:

"You know, I'm dying to tell you something but it's so
awful I hardly dare! "

"Oh come on, Una! What is it? Tell!" I begged.

"Well! It happened in the Christmas Holidays. Robin and
I had been to a dinner in the Highlands. John Evans and Claire were
there, too. On the way home, I don't remember what I said--how it
started--but I said _something_ to which Robin answered:

"Let's end this _now_."

He was driving and he stopped the car beside the road in
one of those empty lonely stretches and my immediate thought was:
"He's going to kill me!" And I looked around wildly for something to
defend myself with. There was nothing. I thought, "If only I
could get hold of the wrench and hit him first!" but I couldn't.
He got out and I followed him and the only thing that occurred to
me was that I could reach his jugular vein and bite through it

19

before he touched me I could save myself. I knew I could reach it
... just, and I knew I was quicker than he, so I sprang and sank
my teeth in his throat. The blood spurted all over him and all over me,
too! He grabbed me by the hair and tried to pull me off but I hung
on. So did he hang on until he had pulled a whole fistful of hair off
my head."

"Good Lord!" I thought, with a wave of disgust going over
me, "that grey hair and that slow quiet man!"

Una chuckled horribly. "I have to comb it over that bare place
to hide it now," she went on. "Well he pulled me loose finally but I
went on fighting him. I clawed his face and tore his clothes off him,
then I scratched him down his arms and bit through where I could get
at him. He was fighting me as hard as he could, just defending
himself. I suppose he could have knocked me out but he didn't. I
don't know why. I couldn't stop once I'd got started and we went on like
that for two hours, at least until I was worn out. Then he said, you
know, in that gentle way of his: "Shall we go home now, darling?" I
looked at him then and you never saw such a wreck of a man. He was
a ruin. He was bleeding all over--and his remaining clothes were
covered with blood--wounds everywhere--gashes, streaks, bites! We
drove home in a complete silence. When we got to the house I washed
him up as best I could but of course his evening clothes were ruined!

"In the morning when the boys came into the kitchen I said:
"Boys, don't pay any attention to Father when he appears. We had a
little trouble last night. Just take no notice. . . . Finally Robin
came down stairs, covered with scars, long wounds and scratches on
his face and hands!"

"Did the boys say anything?" I inquired.

20.

"Not a sign!" she answered, her voice touching a deep ex-
aggerated note. "They acted as though they didn't see anything un-
usual whatever in their father, though there he was, apparently wrecked.
Oh, I had to keep him in the house, upstairs, for days so no one
would see him. John came over that morning and he asked me if we got
home alright and I did tell him about it. He said he knew when we
left that something terrible might happen--he just felt it."

We had reached the silent Pueblo and now we drove up to the
hospital door. When I went in I was trembling.

Eliseo lay long and straight on the high cot with a white
cloth across his eyes. It was very still in the room, though three
people were there; his father and his brother sat on either side of
the bed. When he heard my step he reached out his hand with a fumbling
uncertain movement that was so unlike his usual quick exact gestures
that it made the tears spring to my eyes. I tried not to show any
feeling for I didn't want to increase his anxiety. There might still
be a chance for him to save his eye if the cornea were not pierced. . .

"Well, what happened to you, Eliseo? Why do the Conchas
have these eye accidents?" His brother there beside him had an
empty eye socket where a stick had struck him--his mother was blind
from an early infection for she had contracted Træcoma in school, and
her father lost an eye while mending a fence when a piece of barbed
wire had sprung back and hit him. It seemed mysterious to me. It still
seems so. When I learned later that Insurance Companies recognise
a likelihood of the same type of accident running through a family and
have to calculate its probability when making their ratio, it did not

21.

lessen the feeling of strange fatality. It increased it!

Eliseo answered: "Maybe it was meant so from the beginning."
His voice was low and I felt his shock along with him. It seemed just
insupportable that this fine boy, such a good workman, so ambitious
and eager to excel in his carpentry, should be thrown back like this.
Besides a number of people depended upon him now for their livelihood.

His father gave a deep sigh. "Bad luck," he murmured
and gave a little laugh. The brother smoothed the coverlid gently
but was careful not to touch Eliseo's limp, outstretched hand from
which all the life had run out, leaving it cold and empty of its nervous
energy.

Silence took possession of the room again and in the quiet-
ness and dignity of this pain there was something that wiped away
the agitation I had brought in with me, for even in the agonies of
flesh and spirit the Indians never lose their feeling for form and for
behavior. The disorderly and amorphous scene I had been made a witness
of in Una's narration had no more power to affect me and I felt washed
clean of it when I left these people and returned to the car. They
can always heal one.

At home we went about the business of living in our diff-
erent ways. I worked at our little house in the morning and at the
Big House Hildegarde practiced her violin in the Patio, Robin paced
the floor in his solitary room, Garth spent a lot of time with the
horses and the men and Una and Donnan often walked down to the village
together. Afternoons we sometimes got together. I remember Una and
I took Hildegarde over to play duets with Marina one day--but only

22.

one day for she was too good a musician to endure Marina's somewhat insensitive accompaniments.

It wasn't long before Hildegarde confided to me something that took my breath away. She looked beautiful when she told me quietly triumphant.

"I met Robin out on the mountain behind the house early this morning," she said.

"What?" I exclaimed in amazement.

"I couldn't sleep. Dawn was just coming in that eastern sky and it was so wonderful and calm and fresh I got up and walked over the desert to watch the sun rise over the hill. And Robin did the same. It just happened so. We met there. He loves me, you know."

"Hildegarde!"

"Yes. Mabel, he is so unhappy. He can't stand his life like this."

"Did Una know he went out?"

"No. She was asleep when he went."

"What did he say?"

"Oh. He talked and talked! When we walked back he said: 'I haven't talked to anyone for twenty-five years!'"

"Yes, but what did he tell you?"

"He told me that he must get away if only for a short time--that he is afraid something will happen if he doesn't. He has no life. Nothing."

I remembered that Una had told me the year before that Robin had begun saying in these last years that he wanted to get away to the high Sierras--build a small house and get away from all the people . . .

23.

but, she said: "I told him I just couldn't face starting all over
again--building up another life in a new place." I said now to
Hildegarde.

"Doesn't he have his work? All those books. . . ."

"He says he hates it. . . that he cannot write another line.
He says it is so strange--he feels as though he had been under a
spell of some kind all these years--as though hypnotised."

"Don't you suppose Una saw you come back together? Heavens!
You'd better be careful!"

"No. We separated before we got to the house and he circled
around by the morada."

"Oh, Hildegarde!" I cried. "I am <u>afraid</u>!"

"I wish I could help him," she answered. "He needs help."

"Who doesn't?" I murmured ruefully.

Now, at meals Robin became a trifle more a part of things.
He spoke occasionally, dropping small dry comments, and he smiled at
times. Una as usual always talked more than anyone else. In fact none
of us had to do anything about that for she carried the whole crowd of
us. The boys rarely said anything and Tony never did and actually
absented himself as often as he could for he has never liked Una
though Robin he has been fond of from our first meeting in Carmel.
There is a queer speechless confidence between Tony and Robin.

Donnan, this year, had developed sideburns, and this lent
a ninteenth century air to him. Donnan, in his well fitting dark
coat and his dark red (paper!) carnation in his buttonhole was
like a character from Thackery. Suddenly at lunch Robin showed a quite

24

unwonted aggressiveness towards his black-haired son.

"I think you would improve your appearance if you would shave off those things," he said in his low monotonous voice, looking at the cherished sideburns.

"I do not agree with you," replied Donnan with an ugly hauteur.

Of course I had to jump into this and I exclaimed: "Oh, Robin! I like them! They make him look like a 'character'!"

"He does not necessarily have to look like a pimp to have 'character', does he?" enquired his father, surprising us all.

Donnan turned very pale. "They are my own affair. At least it seems so to me," he said.

Una silenced while this went on, looked from one to the other of them and said finally:

"I will take you down to the barber, darling. You need a haircut, you know."

Now Robin found that Haig needed the air more frequently than he before. He appeared with the frantic dog tugging at his chair, and he slowly circled the house. Once looking out one of the back windows I saw him standing, just standing looking vaguely off into the desert, his pipe poised beside his face. "What is he thinking?" I wondered. Like his astronomer brother, Hamilton Jeffers, Robin raked the distant spaces, he with his mental telescope, Hamilton using a giant one of steel. They were both space lovers, each of them perhaps trying to evade the immediate and imperfect constellations that surrounded them and imagining who knows what beauty or horror or majesty to be found in distance.

That night after dinner when the boys had disappeared to a movie I announced that I had to go out and see Eliseo who had gone back to his own house that day. He expected me--depended upon me. I looked around to see who would offer to go and Una spoke up at once and said: "Alright. I'd like to go along." We both looked at Brett and Hildegard and Robin but none of them offered to join us

25

so we left them peacefully together before the small summer fire that
always burns in the fireplace practically every evening in the year.

We must have been back in an hour and a half. Robin and Brett
were as we left them, both reading.

"Where is Hildegarde?" Una asked instantly for she always
keeps tabs on people.

"I think she went to bed," he said, getting up and knocking out
his pipe on the chimney place, "she said she was sleepy."

"Sleepy?" said Una sarcastically. There was a new sound of
antagonism in her voice.

"I went looking for Hildegarde in her room, early the next morn-
ing. "You'd better look out," I told her. "Una is beginning to feel
sort of disgruntled."

"It's too late," she told me quietly.

"What do you mean?" I asked her, mystified.

"We had each other."

"What? When?"

"Last night. In my room. The instant you and Una left I went
out the front door to my room and he went through the back room and
came. It happened without a word. Happened."

"And Brett?" I asked.

"Oh, she sat there reading. She didn't notice us!"

"(Oh didn't she!" I thought to myself.)

"Then he went back. It was very simple."

"Simple!" I shrieked silently.) "Well, I don't know! This
is terrific." I went on aloud.

26.

"Mabel, he needs me. I love him and he loves me. I think
Una ought to be glad if I can do anything for him."

I was speechless and could think of nothing to say. This was
all beyond me. All I did was to go and get the manuscript called
"Una and Robin" I had written years ago and hand it to her.

"Maybe that will tell you about them," I said.

Brett came to see me later on. She was looking quite ex-
cited and she began:

"Robin and Hildegarde disappeared the moment you left last
night. Went for a walk or something. Imagine Una's feeling if she
knew? I think its mean to worry that poor little thing. I don't
trust Hildegarde. I saw her looking at Una at dinner."

"How?"

"Oh--in a heckling kind of way. She doesn't like her, really."

"Well!" I thought.

I told Tony that Hildegarde and Robin had fallen in love
with each other and he shook his head: "Poor Robin," he murmured in
an undertone. "What a life he has. Not a man's at all."

Soon those two met again in the early morning before sunrise
but this time it was by appointment. They had a rendezvous in the
hills. When Robin returned to the house Una was awake and she had
missed him and was watching out the window for him.

"Where have you been?" she demanded; he told Hildegarde this
and she brought it on to me.

"Haig was uneasy. I got up and took him out," he told her,

27.

dissimulating as readily as though he had had years of practise.

Perhaps it comes easy to men, perhaps it is an acquired characteristic.

"Did you see Hildegarde?" she asked sharply.

"Hildegarde? Oh no," Robin answered in a surprised voice.

Hildegarde came over to my house to talk to me after breakfast. She was both happy and unhappy. She told me that Robin had reiterated his terrible need to get away. "I am finished if I don't go," he had said, "if only for a while." An idea occurred to her. She was on her way home after giving some concerts in the west and when she got there she and her husband would leave in a couple of days for a month in Bermuda where he would take his vacation. Why wouldn't Robin go and stay in their house? Her daughter, who was acting as secretary for someone, would be away all day but the maid would be there to look after him. He would be alone, but in a new place where he could relax and think things out--get away from that eternal vigilance, from Una's perpetual drag upon him.

"Why, I would hardly know how to do such a thing," Robin had replied, smiling ruefully. "You know, I have never had any money in my pocket, for so long!"

"But you have some money, haven't you?" she asked him gently as she could.

"Oh, we have a joint account, the money I have made with my books," he told her, "but I have never drawn upon it. I have never made out a check on it. I have never wanted to. Before."

While they talked they were lying on the slope covered with pine needles. In the distance far below them, they could see the long house they had left, the house that held the fierce little keeper from

28.

whom Robin had escaped for a moment. The sun had just come up over
the dark mountains to warm them through. "So beautiful!" Hildegarde
told me with tears coming to her eyes, "so beautiful and so sad."

"But now I feel as though I had wakened from a sleep," he
said, "and I feel strong--as though I could do anything. Perhaps I
can get away."

A week had passed and they only had a few days more. But
now, Una's instinct smouldering before, was somehow thoroughly aroused.
She began to watch like a crouching tigress. She sat for hours at a
time, concealed in the swing on the platform over the Acequia Madre
that encircles the place. Behind the screen of the willow branches
that hang to the ground she could see every move Robin made in the
upstairs room, for if he paced back and forth he cast a shadow over
the window, or if he came downstairs with Haig and took him for the
usual walk around the house she knew it, for he had to pass the window
on the stairs, and the window opened upon the portal in front of her
eyes, so if he went out the back door she would see him before he
turned that way.

Hildegarde could be observed too. Her door opened onto
the portal, or if she tried to go out the other way she was obliged to
pass through the long row of rooms whose doors always stood open and
thus Una could not miss a movement either of them made.

It was sometime before they realized she was stationed there
for she did not reveal her hiding place nor answer if anyone called.
A strange tension filled the air and at our meals together there was
an unpleasant attentiveness in all of us towards each other. Tony

29.

kept away from us more and more and Garth was the only one who acted really comfortable. His cheerful pink face was a relief to look at and I kept him beside me at the table. Now I wondered if I imagined it or whether Donnan really seemed to be prowling around in a new way. He appeared to make periodical trips back and forth along the portal from the log cabin, into the house, out the back way, and around through the front gates. I reproved myself for this suspicion. Surely Una would not set their son to spy upon his father? But when it continued I drew Hildegarde on one side and asked her if she had noticed anything of it.

"Oh, yes," she exclaimed. "Every hour of the day he watches and watches. I can't stir without meeting him. That pale cold face of his, the way he looks at one from under those drooping eyelids-- it's a terrific. . . ."

"Then you and Robin don't see each other any more?"

"We do. Somehow, once in a while."

"What does he say? What is going to happen?" I pressed her impatiently.

"He says he feels reborn. That I have given him back his life. His gratitude is so pathetic, Mabel."

"But what will happen, afterwards?"

"I wonder," she muttered, "and he wonders, too. He says he can't go back and be as before after this. You see, it's like getting out of a prison."

"Doesn't he love her at all?" My whole previous conception of their life together was becoming destroyed and I could not seem to rebuild a new one.

"Oh yes--I believe he loves her very much. If only Una

30

were wise enough she would be glad I came along and was able to renew him. She could profit by it if she would." She added a trifle bitterly: "But she won't. It has been her mania that she should be the sole factor in his life. That she should be the only provider of everything, the material of his poetry, the inspiration of it, the excitement of his life, his mother, his lover, everything."

"Ego mania," I told her shortly, for I was beginning to get angry and to take sides, which was a thing I had always tried not to do with any couple, realizing that we can never really know what goes on between two people.

"Will he go and stay at your house, do you think?"

"I don't know yet. But if he doesn't do that, he must do something else, and that would be so simple for him. Una is beginning to hate me, though. For no reason that she knows. Just a feeling, Robin says . . . ." She turned to me and faced me directly: "Mabel, you told her about John and me. That hurt me when he told me. She constantly harps on that up in their room." Her eyes were wet and she trembled.

"But Hildegarde, I thought lots of people knew that. I told her to make her sympathetic!"

"Oh! It's had quite the opposite effect!" She laughed a little hysterically. "No--not many people know about it--Henry and a few of John's friends but outside them very few know. Many suspect but people suspect lots of things--that's nothing. It could make a lot of trouble if she wanted to act mean."

"Oh dear!" I groaned. "I am so sorry," but I felt how ineffectual *that* was!

31

"I'm leaving Sunday morning--only four days! I told Robin
Tony was going to drive me over to Raton to take the train. Do you
know--we've thought--if he could drive over with me, I would put off
going until--maybe--Wednesday, and we could stay somewhere there
together."

"Are you crazy? Una would never let him!"

"I don't see how she could help it if he told her he was
just motoring over and coming back with Tony. When he could send a
note back saying he'd decided to take a walk over the Raton Pass or
something and come back on the stage and let Una think I'd gotten on
my train. Would Tony help? Invite Robin to go along?"

"I'll ask him." I was doubtful. That night I said:
"Tony, Robin wants to drive to Raton with Hildegarde and you. They
want a few days together. I wish we could help them!"

But Tony shook his head. He looked far over to the big
mountain and laid down the law:

"I like Robin very much. I am his friend, but it is one
of our customs not to come between any man and woman. God doesn't
like it. He has his own ways." So that was that.

When I told Hildegarde, she was shaken by his refusal for
she was beginning to feel frantic as the time grew so short and sep-
aration faced them. Also the almost insuperable difficulty of
meeting Robin alone any more was making them both feel desperately
nervous. She had begun to question him, too. "Will you be strong,
Robin? Will you go and be yourself--now you have come to your senses?"
And he told her: "I don't know. I don't know how I will feel when
you are gone. While you are here I feel strong enough for anything

32.

but I don't know if I can keep my head above water when you leave.
I do know that if I don't I am lost. After this." So Hildegarde
felt fearful for him and uncertain about the future. How tragic to
come in a flash to mean life to Robin and then to have to give him
back to the deathly hypnosis of the past, for he had made her realize
with a ghastly clarity Una's strength developed through years of
exercise, and her triumphant success in bending every circumstance of
life to her will. Although Hildegarde's recently wounded self-
estem doubtless put a just value upon the triumph she had gained in
attracting this man, this great poet, seemingly without any effort,
away from the woman who had bound him for so long, she was melted
with real tenderness and love for him. She too felt a mother's
yearning over him, and she feared for his precarious balance on the
edge of the new threshold. She knew well that should he succumb and
fall back it would be far worse for him to have had a momentary
awakening than if he had walked like a somnambulist to the end.

I was undergoing a change of sympathy that separated me from
Una with whom for so long I had had such fun. From the first I had
identified myself with her point of view as she had given it to me,
and accepted it complete. Now I saw his side revealed to me by
Hildegarde. Detached from Una I looked at her and wondered how I
had failed to perceive the blind look in her eyes. There was an
opaque flat glassy surface to them. They were not eyes you could
penetrate and enter into her by as you could do with other people,
and I found myself thinking that inside her there was nothing--she
was empty of human substance and had to find life by constantly
drawing it from these people nearest her, and every thought or glance

33.

away from her they gave to another deprived her. So instead of my
supposition that she gave and gave herself to them I was obliged to
realize that she lived only by taking their life from them. Garth
seemed to have escaped her. Or had he not? She did not appear to be
as concentrated upon him as she was upon Robin and Donnan and it may
have been that she had been disappointed and then accepted it when,
years before, Garth showed he had no interest in all the things she
had tried to inculcate in him and Donnan by her talk, and by Robin's
hours of reading aloud all the literature of the world. Now Garth
cared more for wrestling and horses than for anything else. He had
trained and exercised and built himself up into a heavyweight prize-
fighter. In a bathing suit he was grotesquely over muscled--an enormous
boy with great lumps all over him. What had turned him to this? At
the University he was in all the matches and they sent him about the
neighboring towns to fight in amateur events.

Donnan had gone to the other extreme. He cared nothing for
exercise or outdoor life. At most he would play tennis and indoors
if he read it would be a mystery story. Neither of them had read a
line of Robin's verse. They were simply not interested in reading any-
thing. Neither of them were remarkable in their studies and recently
Donnan had been dropped from college because he had taken his girl,
Dorothy, into a hall where girls were prohibited, to the room of a
boy who had something Donnan wanted to show her: Transcriptions of
Sanskrit poetry he said. I wonder.

This had galled Una more than anything that had ever happened
to her. She had, I knew, counted so much on the boys to have brilliant
careers and to make successful marriages. She had been working at it

34.

for years, cultivating smart social people who would provide opportunities for them to enter the great world when they were of age, for that was to her mind the most desirable thing they could do. She had a fantastically romantic notion about aristocratic grandeur, and diplomacy, statesmanship, any position of power in the ruling class was her mecca--perhaps because she was raised on a far-by simple people.

Now the boys were of age, and here was Garth choosing bruisers and professional fighters for his friends and Donnan engaged to an insignificant young divorcee, was at home on her hands. She had to drive him out of the house and make him trim the cedars so he would not sit all day in the window seat reading trash. Heredity? Environment? We have to be wise indeed! But both the boys had confided to me their desires to get going, off and away from the solid masonry Una had had Robin build to hold them all. Garth, as soon as he would finish his course at Christmas time, wanted to get a job as a cowhand so he could learn enough to go down to South America and be a cowboy on one of the enormous ranches there, and Donnan wanted to be a movie actor. They both wanted to start upon these careers, so opposite from Una's ambitions for them as soon as they possibly could, and I had begun to try and find Garth an opening. Donnan's was still to discover--and that opened up very shortly.

At this point the Greenbaums and their two little boys arrived from New York to spend a night on their way to California and I had another Indian Dance for them. Again the house was full of people, again the drum sounded and the boys leap and pranced in the dining room. But this time Robin did not pace in his room above

35.

the gaity. If joy was a trick in the air that was perfectly all
right with him now. During the hours of the evening I saw him once
sitting close to Hildegarde on the dining room steps surrounded
closely with other people and I wondered where Una was and during a
pause Hildegarde told me that she feared he grew too bold. She said
that after dinner she asked him for a cigarette and he said:
"Here--take the package," but then he took it out of her hands again
and said smiling: "Perhaps I'd better keep it after all. I'll see
that you are supplied." Quick thinking for one apparently unversed
in the strategy of love! I saw him cross the room full of dancers
at one moment to offer her one.

Only three days more to go and now these two people, Hildegarde
and Robin, felt the big doors of life slowly and inevitably closing
to shut them out. Now they said to each other, so Hildegarde told
me, they must, they would, have at least one whole day together.
**Saturday.** Robin thought he could manage to tell Una that he wanted
to take Hildegarde for a long walk and have a talk. He said he had
already told Una they had had very interesting talks together. Una
had said fiercely: "What about? Cuckholding her husband, I suppose?
She is a whore." After discovering Una's spy pole Hildegarde went
out and sat there beside her once or twice to try and establish some
kind of relationship with her, but Una took it oddly. She complained
to me that Hildegarde followed her about, "always at my heels!" she
said. Life was ruined by a highly charged electrical atmosphere and
I was extremely bored by it, to tell the truth. I envied Tony his
escape into the work in the fields of wheat and corn and alfalfa. I
felt as though I would like to shrug all my guests off my back.

36

Friday evening before dinner the first overt act occurred. We had had cocktails and were about to go in to dinner when suddenly Una lost her self-control. There was a little Italian ebony and silver box lying on a table beside her. About five inches long and shaped like a coffin, it had a skull and cross-bones and the words "memento Morp" inlaid in the cover. It was for a token of revenge and dated back to the days when outraged lovers, husbands and wives could appease their anger by killing or castration. An ear or an offending organ would readily fit into it, to be sent in vengeance to anyone deserving punishment. As we started for the dining room Una grabbed it up and shook it in Hildegarde's face.

"Do you see *that*?" she cried. "I wouldn't *hesitate* to use it. Not for a moment."

Hildegarde looked surprised and also puzzled. She had no notion what Una meant or what the box was for. Robin looked as inexpressive and unimplicated as he could and smiled his kind perpetual smile. The boys were the only ones who seemed really interested and they perked up.

"Come on! Let's go in to dinner," I said, sweeping them along. Una was chattering like a monkey now, her voice rising higher and higher as she sat opposite me at the table and glared down at Hildegarde who was on the corner at the other end.

"If I thought Robin was unfaithful to me I'd ruin him. I'd make it impossible for him to repeat it. I won't have *my* husband sowing his seed around. Not if I know it, I won't. Robin's seed is precious to me. It's mine. I don't believe in all this..."

I interrupted her for now Robin was looking acutely embarrassed, and Hildegarde was returning Una's look with such hatred and contempt

37.

on her face that I feared Una would be further incited by it.

"The Italians were always so <u>extraverted</u>, weren't they?"
I said sociably. "So expressive! Imagine going to the trouble of
having that little box <u>made</u>! Or do you suppose one could buy them
in shops, picking out the one one liked from a number of styles?"

"Would one's little concubine use it afterwards for pins?"
inquired Donnan in his cold voice, from beside his mother, and Garth
beside me raised his eyebrows and smiled cheerfully and murmured in the
strange pigeon English he employed:

"Conversation is rather broad tonight, isn't it?"

Una subsided, having had her explosion but the meal was
spoiled by bad feeling.

Brett, who had been there and apparently not understood a
word, said to me afterwards.

"I don't know if I like Hildegarde. She heckles Una so!"
So much for accurate observation. I have no recollection whatever
of how we ever got through the evening, but the next morning early
Hildegarde came to see me and said she felt she had to take up that
challenge of Una's. She just couldn't let it pass. Did I think it
would be all right? I thought to myself: "Oh Lord! if today and to-
morrow were only over so we could have peace again," and aloud told
her to go ahead if she felt she had to. She must have caught Una
on the bandstand as soon as she returned for when I went over to the
Big House at eleven Una met me and putting her hand through my arm
she drew me along the cartile and said in a low voice:

"Do you know, I think that little thing is detraquee !
She had been accusing me of being <u>jealous</u> of her! She said she and

38.

Robin could have such wonderful talks together if I were not oppos-
ing them all the time! I don't know what she's talking about!"

"Oh, well," I answered in a placating tone.

Now we had come to their last day. This was the day Robin
had promised to ask Una for! It was also the day the young Meyerberg
couple were arriving for the weekend on their way to California.
The morning had passed and we lunched together and Robin had failed
to secure their last chance.

The Meyerbergs arrived for lunch after it was all over, late
as usual, and I fed them and we sat together in the living room while
they told me the news from New York. The others had all completely
disappeared, faded away, and absently I wondered where they all were.
After a little while, from where I sat I saw the three of them emerge
from the end door of the Portale out of Hildegarde's room, and to-
gether they strolled to the big gates and went out. It looked peace-
ful enough. Then I heard a car drive away and Una came back alone
and joined us. She said in a quite natural voice: "Robin has
driven Hildegarde down to the village to get her kôdak pictures."
Heavens! Their farewell! Their last moments together!

We drifted apart, the Meyerbergs to go to their room
opposite Hildegarde's, and I to change my dress, for we had promised
to go to the Lockwoods for mint julips at five o'clock.

The Jeffers went, all four together in their car which
the boys would take later to go to a picnic the Kikers had invited
them to and I drove Adrienne and Michael and Hildegarde.

Down there the long living room already had several people

39.

gathered in it when we arrived and it seemed singularly light and easy
in its pleasant, natural tone after our tight perfervid and alarming
social music. I relaxed at once and I thought the others did too,
but I was wrong. After the first Julip Kathleen Kiker arrived and
in her mischievous way she exclaimed, loudly, sitting down beside
Una: "Oh! I don't suppose I'll even get a chance to talk to Mr.
Jeffers!" Simultaneously every head turned to locate Robin and
there he was at the other end of the room talking agreeably with Ward
Lockwood and Hildegarde over a book of drawings.

"Robin!" Una called sharply. "Come up here by me." He rose
obediently and joined her and Kathleen and Una made room for him
beside her on the low carved chest on which she was sitting.

After time passed and our dinner hour was near, and we had
all finished our second frosted drink, I rose and gathered my diffi-
cult flock together. The boys and Kathleen had left already, so we
all had to squeeze into my open car, and I hoped I could get them
home in peace. Since Adrienne and Michael reached it first and
hopped voluntarily into the front seat together I let it go--but it
was a great mistake. The instant Hildegarde joined Una and Robin on the
short path to the automobile her proximity set Una off and I saw her
make a sort of clutch at Hildegarde that was so preposterous that
Ward who accompanied them, evidently thought it was fun, for he
laughed. I drove home at top speed. Anything to empty that back
seat as soon as possible! For no sooner did we start than I heard
Una's voice, low and formidable, grinding out horrible words and I
wanted to avoid a bad scene for the sake of the unsuspecting and
carefree young couple beside me who could have no idea of what it

40

all meant, nor need ever know, once this evening was ended. As we
whirled up the road I turned my head slightly to take a look out of
the corner of my eye, and there was Una sitting between the other two
with a face white as milk and her eyes turned black and crazy, and she
had Hildegarde's bare arm in her two hands and she was twisting it with
a mad strength. Hildegarde was reared backwards, a look of horror
and pain on her face and Robin was strangely inert and passive, doing
nothing. Una was gibbering broken phrases I couldn't catch but I
heard: "Harlot . . . Whore . . . I'll teach you . . ."

Praying the Meyerbergs, if they could, would continue to
believe it was just fun, and also hoping they did not understand
French, I exclaimed gaily: "Mesdames! Unpeu de tenue, s'il vous
plait!"

But to no avail. When I looked again Una was drawing her
nails down Hildegarde's arm leaving bloody scratches like narrow red
ribbons. She continued her mad rigamarole. . . .

At the house I hurried the Meyerbergs into the house and
then I confronted the Jeffers who had lingered on the doorstep where
Robin, awake, at last, was trying to appease his frantic wife. Going
to her I implored:

"Una! Now stop that! You're a worldly woman--act like one.
Come in and sit through one hour of dinner decently and then you and
Hildegarde can have it out if you want to. But there's no reason
to mix that young couple up in this. Come on now." I told her as
sternly as I could.

"Why should I take this from that Whore? She thinks I've
ruined Robin. She told him so."

41.

"She did not," exclaimed Robin suddenly.

"She did." Turning to me she cried: "And now that thing you wrote about Robin and me can never be published. How do you like that? She says you have betrayed in it how I have broken Robin. That vile harlot, who deceives her husband, who neglects her children--she thinks she can get my husband! Well, she won't. I'll kill her. I'll ruin her. Yes, I twisted her arm and scratched her. I'll do worse. Let me go! "

She dashed into the house and Robin followed slowly, shaking
his head. He looked like an old man.

"Oh thank goodness," I said aloud when I got to the living
room for there was Tony. He looked so large and serene and pervaded
with so essential a well being that it restored my own disturbed bal-
ance immediately. I knew I need no longer cope--that now he was
in charge of everything.

And it was so. We went into dinner at once and Una, sitting
beside him was calm and silent. Except that she refused every dish
and did not eat a morsel of food, no one could have suspected her
preceding tantrum. One just did not lose control of oneself in
Tony's presence. Even she knew that.

"What's the matter, You not hungry?" He asked her kindly
and she smiled with white lips and shook her head and took a sip of
water. The meal came to an end at last and I suggested to Tony that
he drive the Meyerbergs and me to the Pueblo, so we went out into the
quiet night leaving the others behind to do as they pleased.

I did not even go into the house when we returned. We dropped
them at the door and went home and at last I could let down a little.

42.

"Una is acting terribly," I told Tony as we went upstairs to our room. "I am glad poor Hildegarde is going in the morning."

"What's the matter with her anyway?" he asked.

"Jealous," I said.

"She no good. I always told you. Selfish. Only thinks of herself," he observed.

We were both ready for bed and I was opening all the front windows when I heard an unfamiliar noise across the field. It was like an engine, maybe a low flying plane, and it came nearer . . . "Listen," I exclaimed. Nearer, until it stopped and Robin's voice with a terrible urgency panted: "Mabel! Mabel!"

"Yes, Robin--what . . ."

"Una's shot herself . . . come . . . come . . ." then he turned and the horrible raucous breathless gasping began and disappeared as he rushed back.

"You get on your dressing gown and go over in your car. I'll telephone Dr. Pond and come over in mine," I told Tony who got going at once. For some reason I felt nothing at all. No alarm, no interest. It was only an added straw --something more to cope with.

It was but half past nine so Dr. Pond was up and said he'd come. "Is it bad?" he asked.

"I don't know. I'm at the little house--just going over," I told him. I began to feel cold and annoyed for I realized it might result in a horrid complication of sensational publicity. It seemed an inconsiderate thing for Una to have done to all of us, Robin, the boys and ourselves. Certainly guests should think of their hosts, it seemed to me but of course Una had to think of herself, herself as a

43.

woman in a scotch ballad, I remembered angrily. I recalled that
years before, when Una dashed out into the garden of their house
with bare feet, her plaits hanging down and a revolver in her hand
just because someone had knocked at the door late in the evening, the
boys had laughed and Robin had murmured: "Well, of course if you
have a mother who lives in a scotch ballad . . ."

When I entered the back door leading into the little book
room there was only one light turned on and in the dimness at first
I only saw Tony standing at the foot of the narrow stairs. He was
looking down and when my eyes followed his gaze, there was Hildegarde
lying on her face on the floor, her full cotton skirt twisted around
her. "Oh dear," I exclaimed and hurried to her to lift her up but
Tony barred me with his arm and said: "Don't touch it. Wait till
the doctor comes," so I stepped over her and started upstairs and
then Robin's head appeared leaning over the bend above me. He pointed
his long finger at the crumpled mass on the floor and said in an
anguished voice: "I can't do anything about that, Mabel. I have to
stay with Una."

I went on up, and there was Una in the little bathroom at
the head of the stairs. She was sitting bolt upright in the bath-
tub holding her night gown up above her body and there was a large
round dark hole through her left side. Her face was like that of a
maenad. When she saw me she ground out: "Did she smash her head?
Is she dead? I hope so. I'm dying but I'll meet her in hell."

"Una! Una!" said Robin.

"I've killed myself," Una went on, dabbing at the wound
with a wet bath towel. Blood was flowing about her, and all the time

44.

she continued to try and save her little nightgown from a stain.

"Is the doctor coming?" Robin begged me, his voice shaking.

"Yes, right away," I answered frigidly and went back down-stairs and met him coming in the door.

"Those damned women have been fighting," I told him angrily. "Maybe you'd better look at this one first." They had become just so much trouble to me, not people at all any more. Without a word he knelt down and turned Hildegarde over. She was unconscious and looked as though asleep. He felt her all over carefully and said: "I guess we'd better lift her up and put her on the bed in there."

Tony quickly took her shoulders and Dr. Pond her feet and they carried her into the first bedroom. Then she opened her eyes and moaned and said in a babyish complaining tone: "Is Robin dead?"

"No. He isn't," I answered unsympathetically.

"She's alright. Where is the other one?" asked the young doctor.

I motioned to the stairs and he turned to the next problem, saying to Tony as he left: "You'd better give her some water."

When he saw Una sitting in the bathtub babbling he said to Robin: "Let's get her out of there onto this bed." So they lifted her out.

"She swallowed a whole bottle of sleeping tablets before she did this," Robin told him.

"Well, I guess you'd better call the ambulance and we'll go over to the hospital," Dr. Pond told me. "We'll have to use the stomach pump on her anyway. If we can," he added in a lower tone.

"Well, is it bad?" I asked him in an undertone, certain

45

Robin couldn't hear me, Una was babbling so loud.

"I guess it's pretty serious," he replied.

"Now you see what that harlot did to me," Una was exclaiming, excitedly. "That whole! Robin--promise me you'll take care of Haig?" she suddenly implored in a wheedling voice. "You'll see he has his water all the time?"

"Yes, Una. I will," answered Robin as earnestly as though it were his wedding, and all through this outside the screen door of the sleeping porch Haig was snuffling and grunting with his enormous white face pressed against the wire.

I went down to telephone the undertaker to bring up the ambulance. I thought how all the time I had been there Una had never made a single reference to her sons. Her anxiety was all for the dog. That was pathetic. He was the only one left who needed her.

In a few moments the undertaker, whose face can never conceal his hopes, went up the stairs with his son, carrying a stretcher, but they brought it down empty for it was too wide for the stairs and Robin carried Una down in his arms, a small bundle wrapped in a blanket. She was almost silent now for the sleeping medicine was beginning to drug her. He laid her on the stretcher and the others carried her out. Dr. Pond stopped Robin for an instant and asked:

"Is there anyone else you want called in for a consultation?"

"Yes! The best. Dr. Huddleston, I suppose," he replied.

The trembling of his voice and his whole body continued. When he said "Dr. Huddleston," the young doctor looked at the floor for an instant and then flashed a look at me. I did not take in his thought then but

46.

I understood his hesitation later. As I didn't say anything he said quickly in a business like voice: "Alright. You all go on. I'll telephone him and follow you."

I was sitting on a lower step of the stairs waiting, waiting for them all to be gone, and suddenly Robin reappeared from outside and came up to me, leaning towards me, but spiritually almost all of him left out there with Una. He said:

"Mabel, Una wants you to know she doesn't blame you for any of this."

I stared at him as he turned and plunged away. I could have slapped his face for that.

Now they were all gone and the house was still and it was only ten o'clock. Tony sat beside Hildegarde in the adjoining room and she didn't make a sound. I felt restless and queer and as though I must keep on moving so I went through the living room and down the portal to the Meyerbergs. As I walked along the quiet portal and saw the huge trees along the stream handing so silent and still against the sky they seemed to me to be essentially alcoof from this small chaos beneath them. Even the long adobe house was separate from the event that had occurred in it. It looked calm and indifferent and as though nothing had happened. The trees and the house in the night were more real to me than spilled blood. They could touch me and I was glad of them.

I went on with my task. I imagined the Meyerbergs must be wondering and now I had to take them into this ugly occasion. But when I knocked and went in they looked very cosy, lying on their two beds in dressing gowns, reading and looking at magazines.

"Well," I said. "Haven't you heard anything?"

47

"Not a thing. A car drove up . . . why? Has anything happened?"

"Una tried to kill herself. The doctor came, the ambulance came, and they've all gone to the hospital. Also something happened to Hildegarde--I don't know what. I found her lying on the floor unconscious."

"Isn't that **strange**? I said to Adrienne when we came to bed, "I wouldn't be surprised if that woman shot somebody!" Michael murdered, in a sort of pleasure at his capacity for prophecy.

Still I could not rest. "I'd better go back and see how Hildegarde is," I told them.

"We'll all go," and they sprang up and came along. Hildegarde sat on the couch now in the big room and Tony beside her held a glass of water. He looked very sorry. The poor girl shook so she could not hold the glass and once in a while he put it to her lips.

"I'll make some tea right away," said Adrienne and she was off to the kitchen.

"What happened to you, Hildegarde," I pressed her for I was anxious to clear it up in my mind.

With difficulty, for her teeth were chattering, she told us that when we had gone off in the motor Robin and Una had disappeared upstairs immediately and she had sat trying to read until the Meyerbergs came back. "Then, you know . . . you two sat here a few moments and then went to your room and I waited to finish my cigarette. . . . I heard walking upstairs, then I heard a shot and Robin's voice--terrible--shouted "Help!" I ran to the stairs--I thought she had shot **him**, then I heard him say: "Una! You **fool**!"--I started up and all of a sudden--I don't know what happened . . ."

48.

"I suppose you hit your head on that low crossbeam," I told her. She was pressing her hand to her side.

"Does it hurt you?" Michael asked her.

"I think I've hurt myself inside somewhere."

I heard the boys coming back to their log cabin at the end of the portal. The picnic was over. Now they had to be coped with! I went down and knocked and there they were changing their sweaters for shirts.

"Boys," I began, trying to spare them a shock, "your mother took a little too much sleeping medicine tonight and we thought she should go to the hospital and get rid of it."

I need not have worried about them, however. They looked at me unemotionally, only showing a faint amusement.

"Jealousy, I suppose," remarked Garth with a rising inflection.

"These repeated scenes grow a little tiresome," Donnan contributed.

"We were changing to go to a dance. Should we discontinue?" queried Garth, his blue trousers dangling from one hand.

"Oh, I guess it's alright for you to go," I said wearily. Maybe their mother was dead already, I thought, but I did not want them sitting around with us. So they went cheerfully off to "Mike's" Nite Club."

The others were already drinking tea when I joined them and Hildegarde's teeth still clattered against the glass! My evening was not complete yet and I had to go on. That bathroom couldn't be left in the condition it was for the maids to see in the morning or perhaps for the boys to run into unexpectedly. It was a shambles.

49.

So I went up and washed the blood out of the bathtub and rinsed the soaked towels and threw them into the basket. Then I went down to the others, but I could not stay. I longed to get home and away from every reminder of this disorder.

So Tony and I soon left, and when we got back to our peaceful room it was only half past ten but it seemed as though years had passed.

"That little old thing!" Tony said in a low voice, with unusual condemnation. "We cannot ever invite her here again. She spoil our nice house. I don't want to go upstairs to our rooms there again."

"Maybe she will die," I answered.

"No, I guess not. She too smart," he said strangely. She would certainly have to be smart to shoot herself under her left breast and miss her heart, I thought.

But she was smart. Very. In an hour I called the hospital and found from the sister who answered that they had operated upon her, made a long incision, explored her interior and found the bullet had glanced off a rib just missing the heart. They had then pumped her stomach out, given her horse serum for possible tetanus, and were sewing her up again.

In the night the thought of the revolver came to me. Where was it? If Una should after all not recover, what if Robin's finger prints should be found on it? I visualised an investigation, a trial. Had he tried to take the thing away from her? My last word to poor Hildegarde had been: "Tony will be ready at half-past six to take you to Raton." It was hard of me, perhaps, but I simply wouldn't have any delay now. I wanted to see the last of all these unfortunates.

50.

And she had caught my intention from my voice--so at six she walked over to our house and said good-bye at the foot of the stairs and Tony drove her away. Before she went, though, I called up the hospital to enquire how everything was and the mother Superior said Una was still sleeping. Still sleeping! Then when the dar drove away I dressed and went to look for the gun. How fortunate that I had cleaned away the blood, for Garth had gone up and slept in his father's bed--on Haig's account, perhaps. He was still asleep so I hunted through the bathroom and bedroom as quietly as possible, but the weapon was nowhere to be seen.

Moving against something, I woke the boy and he sat up in bed, rubbing his eyes. "I was looking for something," I told him.

"Have you ascertained how Mother is this morning?" he asked me as though he was inquiring about the weather.

I looked at him and he smiled.

"Father came home in the night and took Haig," he said. "He told me what happened. Too bad," he added lightly.

Somehow he made me angry too. I caught sight of a big bowie knife that belonged to him lying on the chest of drawers. He had sharpened it to a razor edged sharpness and I exclaimed impatiently: "For heaven's sake, Garth, do put that thing away! All these weapons! What on earth do you leave it lying around here for? Anything might happen!"

"Oh, I think it adds to the spice of life," he countered, laughing.

It was necessary to go and explain the absence of the older Jeffers to the maids in the kitchen of course. "Mrs. Jeffers had

51.

a little accident with her revolver last night and had to go over
to the hospital so they won't be here for breakfast."

"Well," said Ernesta looking blank the way they do some-
times and Mrs. Blakemore enquired: "The boys are here, aren't they?"
She was apparently solely concerned with how much bacon to cook.
The kitchen seemed nice and normal in its bluish haze of wood smoke
with the sun shining through it and the dogs standing around watching
everything. I wanted life to be composed only of such elements as
existed there but it was necessary to go back into the others.

After breakfast I went to the hospital and Robin came down-
stairs and we went and sat outside on the bank of the stream under the
trees and had the first talk we'd ever had.

He looked wan and tired now that the worst anxiety was over
and there seemed little risk left if nothing new happened to complicate
recovery, but not in the least as I would have expected him to look--
like a fish out of water--stranded--or ill at ease. He looked rather
comfortable, in fact!

"Robin, hasn't she been different lately?" I asked him and
he said:

"Yes, the strain seems to have been greater the last two
years. Of course these attacks of frenzy have been going on always,
since the first months together," he added, and looked down at his pipe.

"You see it's impossible, don't you, for the boys to 'bring
home their brides' to those rooms Una has been making you add to the
house?" I asked him, plunging into the sudden intimacy. He took to
it as though it were an old habit.

"I'm afraid so," he agreed. "She has been cursing Hildegarde

52.

again this morning," he smiled. "She asked if that harlot was around
here."

"Right in front of the sisters?"

"Oh yes," he assured me. He seemed so outside it still, as
though it never could get into him!

"What are you going to do, Robin?" I asked him.

"Why, I can't imagine." He rubbed his forehead with his
long bony fingers, not sadly but as though it was a little household
problem of string to tie up a package, or a cloth to wash the car
with and not a vital question. Was he like water that could be ruffled
by small winds or tossed high by hurricanes but that left to itself
remained placid and undisturbed? Or was he just a fragment of in-
sentient mineral that could be warmed in a hand? Perhaps one should
not expect him to be different from what he is, I thought, lacking
in inner motivation, cold, slow, stony, as he described himself clearly
in a poem years ago. All this flashed across my mind, as I sat silent
for a moment beside him and looked at his worn face that somehow re-
sembled now, to my imagination, a piece of granite that had been
worked on rather crudely by the conditioned caprices of the sea.
Then it occurred to me that perhaps nothing mattered very much after
all and a cold slow sense of the intangible insignificance of all human
perturbation began to creep through me, an old forgotten realization
that had been covered over for years by a lazy habitual custom of
accepting life at other peoples valuations instead of at the difficult
one arrived at through personal experience. How far away and lonely
one must be, deprived of the illusion of significant emotional stresses!
Yet its replacement by the superior illusion of detachment and

53.

liberation rewarded one with a certain high wide climate to live in.
Robin's eyes were unconsciously communicating to me this long view of
the human riddle. After the slight pause I said:

"Can you get away? Have a change?"

"I must, I guess. I promised Hildegarde I would let her know. . . . I can write her though of course she cannot write to me."
He was looking pretty bleak now. I suddenly foresaw years and years of care and perhaps nursing ahead for him with Una's role and his reversed.

"Her grandfather leaned over a washbowl and slit his throat with a knife when he was ninety, you know. I suppose it was an unconscious memory of him that prompted her to climb into the bathtub."

We were both smiling by this time.

"Where is that gun, Robin? I was worried for you. I thought if anything happened and your fingerprints were on it--"

"Why she laid it neatly in the soap dish that hangs on the bath tub."

Naturally, perhaps, I had overlooked it there. I asked him what had started her off last night and he said that when they went upstairs she had argued and argued with him for a long time and then she laid herself down on the bed with Haig beside her.

She lay so quiet Robin started to speak to her but she said severely:

"I am *thinking*."

"So," went on Robin, "I went up to her and lifted up the dog, "perhap you can think better without him," I said.

54.

"She told me fiercely: 'So you would take the last thing away from me,' and then she jumped up and pattered into the bathroom. I saw her swallow the tablets, then I saw she had the gun and was climbing into the bathtub with it. But I got there too late--"

"You know, Robin, I don't feel the same towards Una now. Maybe I will again later on. I just feel *nothing* for her any more."

"Oh of course. Naturally," he answered nodding his head with complete understanding.

"The last straw was when you came back in last night and told me Una didn't blame *me* for anything. . ." I couldn't keep that back!

"She has always thought you a very dangerous woman," he said gravely, looking at me as though he wanted me to understand her, "but she didn't want anyone to think you had anything to do with this. She asked me to write Noel and the so, if she died."

"Well, I suppose I'd better be getting home," I answered getting up. I was so sick of them *all*. If only Tony and I could be alone again, I thought.

Una prolonged her visit. After she left the hospital she lay convalescing in the first bedroom. It was a most uncomfortable time, for Dr. Huddleston, addicted to morphine had no guard upon his tongue. He had picked up the whole story from Una's ravings and by twelve o'clock the night he was called to the consultation he had related it to everyone in the Martin Hotel where he lived and all the people in town buzzed with various versions of the event and one had to go about looking blank and smug just as though nothing had happened.

55

Of course as usual many of them were eager to attribute it all to me, and that had to be swallowed along with the rest of it. One couldn't very well go about justifying onself! I tried to retain my momentary capture of the long view!

The worst of it was that Una told Robin she wouldn't leave until Thornton came so he could see what a nice woman she was. She was convinced that home in New Haven Hildegarde would blacken her to Thornton, "fill him with lies", she said. Dr. Pond told her she should go as soon as possible and seek psychiatric advice but this only angered her. "Just a young fool," she confided to Robin. She often made loud scenes shut in the room with him, and then I would see him sitting alone on a bench outside, leaning over with his head in one hand and his pipe poised in the other close to his mouth.

Donnan's girl, poor child, seizing a chance to ingratiate herself, wired a great bunch of flowers to Una and they stood in a vase at the foot of her bed, very unpleasing indeed to her! I wish they'd die so I don't have to see them," she whispered to me.

In all the time she stayed I never referred to what had occurred, nor to Hildegarde, nor allowed her to discuss any of it with me. There seemed to be nothing to say between us as I thought of her mainly as an inconsiderate guest, and she never saw herself in that light. Robin told me something that made me think she suspected how I felt.

"Una said this morning, 'Mabel can't blame me. She tried to kill herself twice,'" he said, smiling as at a child's whimsies.

"You do things in your twenties you don't do in your fifties,"

56.

I flashed back at him. ("Or in other people's houses," I wanted to say but refrained.)

"Oh, of course. She's quite irrational about all this," he agreed lightly. He did not seem to miss Hildegarde particularly. When she was not there she was not there. I was polite, attentive but withdrawn. I couldn't pretend. Life went on as before just as though nothing had happened, at most a little storm on the surface of the sea. But I had had a shock that was working deeply into me. Not the shock of blood and death and disharmony, but of finding out the truth of what she had done to him. But gradually I think this passed into another less critical phase. What had she done to him after all? There were all those books of his--great poetry. She had drawn it up out of him somehow. The strain, the strain of living with that amorphous artist began to reveal itself to me finally and I regained a more remote and impersonal attitude towards the two of them, and remembered again that one can never, never take sides.

Still, when they drove away I had a hopeless feeling about what his future had to be. There seemed no hope for him, nor for her either.

But one can never know the end of any human problem. Life is so infinitely rich and ingenious, and the human faculty for the long, long view is infinitely elastic!

57.

"Hope is not for the wise, fear is for fools;
Change and the world, we think, are racing to a fall,
Openeyed and helpless, in every newscast that is the news:
The time's events would seem mere chaos but all
Drift in one deadly direction. But that is only
The August thunder of the age, not the November.
Wise men hope nothing, the wise are naturally lonely
And think November as good as April, the wise remember
That Caesar and even final Augustulus had heirs,
And men lived on; rich unplanned life on earth
After the foreign wars and the civil wars, the border wars
And the barbarians: music and religion, honor and mirth
Renewed life's lost enchantments. But if life even
Had perished utterly, oh perfect loveliness of earth
and heaven."

THE END.

mabel Dodge Luhan
Beverly Hills - 1938
Mabel Dodge Luhan December