The Making of Americans, Being a History of a Family's Progress (4 page)

     Mr. Dehning had never concerned himself very much with the management of the family's way of living and the social life of his wife and children. These things were all always arranged by Mrs. Dehning and he was well content to let her do it though he often grumbled at the foolishness and the expense and at his children always having everything they ever wanted and so being sure to be always good for nothing.
     But always he was very proud of his wife and of his children, though, a little, he always felt it was not right, their new fangled ways of doing, and yet, truly, he was very proud of them always, and indeed they were a group to gratify the pride that he had in him, they were so vigorous prosperous and good-looking, and honest, and always respectful to him, and surely they had good hope of later winning for themselves all the happiness and success he could wish them.
     Julia Dehning at eighteen had lived through much of the experience that can prepare a girl for womanhood and marriage.
     I have said, there were a number of young men and boys connected with the Dehning family, uncles and cousins, generous decent considerate fellows, frank and honest in their friendships, and simple in the fashion of the elder Dehning. With this kindred Julia had always lived as with the members of one family. These men did not supply for her the training and experience that helps to clear the way for an impetuous woman through a world of passions, they only made a sane and moral back-ground on which she in her later life could learn to lean.
     With any member of this kindred there would be, in a young and ardent mind, no thought of love or marriage; nor were the sober business men, young, old, or middle-aged, who came a great deal to the house, attractive to her temper, for Julia was ambitious for passion and position and she needed, too, a strain of romance. No such kind of a man had really come to her and Julia was all ripe for real experience, for even with her well guarded life she had found the sickened sense that comes with learning that some men do wrong. Passionate tempers have greatly this advantage of the unpassionate variety; you can never guard them with such care but that they find themselves full up with real experience and with the after-taste of disillusion, but vitally as they are always hit they always rise and plunge once more, while their poorly passionate fellows who receive a vital blow never rise to faith again.
     Julia as a little girl had had the usual experiences of governess guarded children. She was first the confidant, then the advisor, and last the arranger of the love affairs of her established guardians. Then at her finishing school she became acquainted with that dubious character, the adventuress, the type to be found always in all kinds of places, a character eternally attractive in its mystery and daring, and always able to attach unto itself the most intelligent and honest of its comrades and introduce them to queer vices.
     And so Julia Dehning, like all other young girls, learnt many kinds of lessons, and she saw many of the kinds of ways that lead to wisdom, and always her life was healthy vigorous and active. She learnt very well all the things young girls of her class were taught then and she learnt too, in all kinds of ways, all the things girls always can learn, somehow, to be wise in. And so Julia was well prepared now to be a woman. She had singing and piano-playing and sport and all regular school learning, she had good looks, honesty, and brilliant courage, and in her young way a certain kind of wisdom.
     Always Julia was a passionate young woman and she had too a heroical kind of sweetness in her way of winning. She was a passionate young woman in the sense that always she was all alive and always all the emotions she had in her being were as intense and present to her feeling as a sensation like a pain is to others who are less alive in their living. And all this time too, Julia Dehning was busily arranging and directing the life and aspirations of her family, for she was strong always in her good right to lead them.
     And so Julia Dehning when she was seventeen came out upon the world, and she was filled full with courage and experience and wisdom, and she was well ready now with this energy and wisdom to cope with and conquer all the world and all men and women.
     There is nothing more joyous than being healthful young and energetic, and loving movement sunshine and clean air. Combine all this with owning of a horse and courage enough to ride him wildly, and God is good to overflowing to his children. It is pleasant too to have occasionally a sympathetic comrade on such rides. Jameson was a pleasant man of thirty five or thereabouts, a good free rider and an easy talker. Julia knew him first at home and met him usually while riding to the station to meet her father and the city train. They would then either gallop home together or go about riding through the glowing meadows of low oaks, racing cheerily along the country roads, and dipping here and there into a pleasant wood that broke the open country into shadow. They met too, occasionally, in riding parties that went in search of new country to discover and explore. It was all very pleasant and unaggressive, but Julia began to notice that Mrs. Jameson frowned on her in anger now, whenever they all met together. Then too Jameson grew gradually less comradely, more intimate, and gross. Julia understood at last and did not ride with him again.
     Such incidents as these are common in the lives of all young women and only are important in those intenser natures that, by their understanding, make each incident into a situation. Such natures suck a full experience from every act, and live so much in what, to others, means so little, for is it not all common and to be expected.
     In Julia Dehning all experience had gone to make her wise now in a desire for a master in the art of life, and it came to pass that in Alfred Hersland brought by a cousin to visit at the house she found a man who embodied her ideal in a way to make her heart beat with surprise.
     To a bourgeois mind that has within it a little of the fervor for diversity, there can be nothing more attractive than a strain of singularity that yet keeps well within the limits of conventional respectability a singularity that is, so to speak, well dressed and well set up. This is the nearest approach the middle class young woman can ever hope to make to the indifference and distinction of the really noble. When singularity goes further and so gets to be always stronger, there comes to be in it too much real danger for any middle class young woman to follow it farther. Then comes the danger of being mixed by it so that no one just seeing you can know it, and they will take you for the lowest, those who are simply poor or because they have no other way to do it. Surely no young person with any kind of middle class tradition will ever do so, will ever put themselves in the way of such danger, of getting so that no one can tell by just looking that they are not like them who by their nature are always in an ordinary undistinguished degradation. No! such kind of a danger can never have to a young one of any middle class tradition any kind of an attraction.
     Now singularity that is neither crazy, sporty, faddish, or a fashion, or low class with distinction, such a singularity, I say, we have not made enough of yet so that any other one can really know it, it is as yet an unknown product with us. It takes time to make queer people, and to have others who can know it, time and a certainty of place and means. Custom, passion, and a feel for mother earth are needed to breed vital singularity in any man, and alas, how poor we are in all these three.
     Brother Singulars, we are misplaced in a generation that knows not Joseph. We flee before the disapproval of our cousins, the courageous condescension of our friends who gallantly sometimes agree to walk the streets with us, from all them who never any way can understand why such ways and not the others are so dear to us, we fly to the kindly comfort of an older world accustomed to take all manner of strange forms into its bosom and we leave our noble order to be known under such forms as Alfred Hersland, a poor thing, and even hardly then our own.
     The Herslands were a Western family. David Hersland, the father, had gone out to a Western state to make his money. His wife had been born and brought up in the town of Bridgepoint. Later Mr. Hersland had sent his son Alfred back there to go to college and then to stay on and to study to become a lawyer. Now it was some years later and Alfred Hersland had come again to Bridgepoint, to settle down there to practice law there, and to make for himself his own money.
     The Hersland family had not had their money any longer than the others of this community, but they had taken to culture and to ideas quicker.
     Alfred Hersland was well put together to impress a courageous crude young woman, who had an ambition for both passion and position and who needed too to have a strain of romance with them.
     Hersland was tall and well dressed and sufficiently good-looking, and he carried himself always with a certain easy dignity and grace. His blond hair, which he wore parted in the middle, a way of doing which at that time showed both courage and conviction, covered a well shaped head. His features were strongly marked, regular and attractive, his expression was pleasing, his talk was always interesting, and his manners were dignified and friendly. His eyes and voice meant knowledge, feeling, and a pleasant mystery.
     Julia Dehning threw herself eagerly into this new acquaintance. She no longer wanted that men should bring with them the feel of out of doors, for out of doors with men now was soiled to her sense by the grossness of the Jamesons. Alfred Hersland brought with him the world of art and things, a world to her but vaguely known. He knew that some things made by men are things of beauty, and he spoke this knowledge with interest and conviction.
     The time passed quickly by with all this joy of fresh experience and new faith.
     Not many months from this first meeting, Julia gave her answer. “Yes, I do care for you,” she said, “and you and I will live our lives together, always learning things and doing things, good things they will be for us whatever other people may think or say.”
     It had been a wonderful time for Julia Dehning these few months of knowing Hersland. She had had, always, stirring within her, a longing for the knowledge of made things, of works of art, of all the wonders that make, she knew, a world, for certain other people. (Twenty years ago, you know, it was still the dark ages in America and lectures on art did not grow on every tongue that had tasted the salt air of the mid-Atlantic. It was a feat then to know about hill towns in Italy, one might have heard of Titian and of Rembrandt but Giorgone and Botticelli were still sacred to the few, one did not then yet have to seek, to find for oneself new painters and new places.) It was a very real desire, this longing for the wisdom of all culture, this that had been always strong in Julia. Of course, mostly, such longing in Julia, took the form of moral idealism, the only form of culture the spare American imagination takes natural refuge in.
     Julia Dehning, like all of her kind of people, needed everything, for anything could feed her. It was not strong meat that Hersland offered to her, but her palate was eager, this had the flavour of the dishes she longed to have eaten and to have inside her. To her young crude virgin desire the food he offered to her was plenty real enough to deeply content her.
     Of the family about her, it was only Julia who found him worthy to be so important to her. The cousins and the uncles, the men who could make for her the sane and moral background that would give a wholesome middle class condition always to her, they did not like it much that Hersland was now so important for her. They said nothing to her, but they did not like to have him always about with her. He was not their kind and every minute they could know it, and they did not need him, either out in the world in business or at home where they were happy in the rich and solid family comfort they always had had with the Dehnings; and these men could not find Hersland's knowledge worth much for them, and they did not have it in them that it had a meaning for them that he Hersland had in him, knowledge and a certain kind of feeling that they never could have inside them. What could a pleasant mystery in a man mean to them except only that any man with any sense in him would not ever trust anything real to him.
     But they said nothing, any of them, they knew nothing real against him, and, anyhow, it was not business for them to interfere with other people's matters, for after all it was to the Dehnings for them, and it did not in any way really concern any of the others of them. As men they could not feel it in them the right to interfere with a woman who did not as a child or a wife really belong to them.
     The boy George and the little sister were too young to think very much about him. The young brother did not feel it in himself much to like him, for young George you may remember was young and heroic, out of doors was not yet in any way soiled for him and he needed that kind of a thing in a man to attract him, but anyhow, Julia liked him and it would be hard for George not to think Julia could judge better about him than any of the other members of the family could have it to know in them.
     Mr. Dehning as yet had said nothing One day he was out walking and his daughter was with him. “Julia hadn't you better be a little careful how much you encourage that young Hersland.”
     Mr. Dehning, always, in his working, began very far away from a thing he meant later to be firmly attacking. And always in such a far away beginning, he would be looking sharply, out from him, in a sidelong, piercing, deprecating, challenging, fashion, the kind of a way he had always of looking when his wife, who, by her more than equal living, as it often is with a woman, had not in any kind of a way any fear in her of him, could be going to rebuke him. And this way he had of looking, always made him an old man to his children, and mostly there was a fear then in them, only now Julia was strong, other things were bright and glowing, and she could not now feel it in him, the old grown man's sharp outward looking that, closing him, went always so straight into them.
     And so, now, filled full with her new warm imagining, Julia Dehning had not any kind of a fear from him, the kind of a fear a young grown woman has almost always from an old man's looking.