Volume I Part 6 (1/2)

'I think one might own a Mountly House without greed,' persisted Grace wistfully. 'Having no house at all, I naturally refuse to think of myself as ending my days in any less perfect domicile. What do you mean by the ”ultimate purpose” of our houses?'

'Ah! that,' said Honoria, with a quick indrawing of her breath, 'is the very core of all my thought, and I don't know how to make you see it!'

She rose abruptly and walked to the end of the veranda. She stood there a while, looking across at the spreading gables of her own brown bungalow, with the yearning on her face that only house-mothers know.

Yonder was her home. Set on a mighty shoulder of the earth, facing the sunset and the sea, it clung to the soil as the brown rocks cling.

Behind it were the mighty Sierras with their crests of snow; before it, the sweetest land G.o.d ever smiled upon; within it, all the treasures of her eyes, her mind, her heart. Just as it stood there in the February sun, it was an abode compact of love, of aspiration, of desire. The ancient love of man for his shelter had gone into it, and the love of woman for the place of her appointed suffering. Desire for beauty and hope of peace were in its making. Its walls had heard the birth-cries; her children had played about its doors; out from it had been borne her dead. Inconsiderable speck on the vast hill-shoulder that it was, it could defy time and the elements, even as she defied them, for she had given it of her own immortality.

'I have not yet said it all,' she said a little thickly. 'It is hard to say, even to you. I have found an att.i.tude of mind, a path, a way of life I call intensive, for lack of a better name, and I believe in it, not only because it increases my sane satisfaction in living, but also because it finally leads _out_--out of all this tangle of our material lives, into the eternal s.p.a.ces.

'I see the world of men's business activities chiefly as a place of wrath and greed, and yet even the most grasping must be blindly seeking through their greed an ultimate satisfaction--not more houses or more automobiles, or railroads, or mines, or even power, but something dimly apprehended as beyond all these and more than they--something that is good and that _endures_. For we all want the Enduring Thing. One man sees it here, another there. As for me, I see it in my house. I tell you, the Greeks and Romans did not make a religion of the hearthstone; they merely recognized the religion that the hearthstone _is_. Under that quiet roof I have learned that it is a woman's business to take stones and make them bread. Only she can make our surroundings live and nourish us.

'Beyond the need for bread, a woman's needs are two; deeper than all cravings save the mother's pa.s.sion, firm-rooted in our endless past, is the heart-hunger. The trees that sweep my chimney have their roots at the world's core! The flowers in my dooryard have grown there for a thousand years! What millenniums have done, shall decades undo? We are not so shallow, so plastic as that! We will go into the mills, the shops, the offices, if we must, but we know we are off the track of life. Neither our desire nor our power is there.

'I have talked glibly enough about restricting superfluous possessions for the sake of developing a finer quality in those we have; I have said only personality gives that quality to our surroundings--but I have not said the final thing. It is this: I believe that in the humble business of loving the material things that are given to us to own and love, in shaping our homes around them, in making them vital and therefore beautiful, so that they serve our spirits in their turn, we are not only making the most of our resources in this life, but are doing more than that. Somehow, I cannot tell you how, I know that we are _getting them across_--into the timeless places! In making them vital we are making them enduring.

'Christ tells us to lay up for ourselves treasures in heaven. What did that mean to you when you were young? I thought it meant a procession of self-denials and charities, more or less lifeless because the offering was made slightly against the grain! I had no idea that when I loved somebody very much or pitied somebody very much, when I shared my heart or shared my roof eagerly, that I was doing the commanded thing. Still less did I realize, when I worked hard to make my home more comfortable or more beautiful, that I was sending vibrations from my everyday world right into the eternal one--every deed an actual hammer stroke on my house not made with hands. But so sure as that our mortal shall put on immortality, I now hold it that what we first find in the eternal world will be the things into which we have unstintingly flung our vitality, our _feeling_, while we are briefly here.

'_Here we have no continuing city_. But when I am making my house live, I and no other, putting into it as I best may something of the serenity of Athens and the sacredness of Jerusalem and the beauty of Siena, then it is taking its place beside my greater loves. Then I am creating a home, not only in this world, but in the next. I have put something over into the eternal world that fire cannot burn, nor floods destroy, nor moth and rust corrupt. It is safe, even from myself, forever! No Heaven can be holy to me if I have not made this spot holy. I shall not ask, even from the mercy of the Merciful, a heavenly mansion if I have failed to make this earthly dwelling live. Eternity begins beside my hearth, shaped by my will. A woman knows!'

Reminiscence with Postscript

By Owen Wister

I

Not alone because of their good meat and drink are three meals shrined at the heart of these following impressions. Singly, each one did delightfully engage the palate, but the three together speak appealingly to sentiment. It is of a great house, a little inn, and of the fair region round about them that I shall mainly discourse--and whether I do or don't give a final _x_ to the name of the house, there are people and doc.u.ments to say I have spelt it wrong: which comes very near to saying that both ways are right. The _x_ shall remain, the majority seems to favor it, and I at once beg that you share my relish of these posturing Renaissance lines, written by royal command in honor of Chenonceaux:--

Au saint bal des dryades, A Phbus, ce grand dieu, Aux humides nayades J'ai consacre ce lieu.

This highly plaster-cast lyric was recited during the 'triomphe' held at Chenonceaux to celebrate the arrival there of Francois II and Mary Stuart. The hostess was as distinguished as her visitors; and never, before I went to Chenonceaux, did I a.s.sociate naiads and dryads and poems of welcome with Catherine de'Medici. But we must allow this monstrous personage an eye for good houses. She preferred Chenonceaux to all her dwellings--she preferred it so much, indeed, that she made another lady get out of it, exchanging for it the decidedly inferior residence of Chaumont. And we have Catherine to thank (I fear) for the strangely felicitous fancy that placed upon the arches built from the rear of the house to the farther side of the river by her rejected predecessor, Diane de Poitiers, that enchanting hall or gallery, which rises three stories high, if you count the nine windows in the steeply and gracefully pitched slate roof.

Basti si magnifiquement Il est debout, comme un geant, Dedans le lit de la riviere, C'est-a-dire dessus un pont Qui porte cent toises de long.

These verses b.u.mp down heavily upon the bridge, and, despite their scrupulous statistics as to its length, they scarcely measure the excellence of Chenonceaux, but rather the gap between French verse and French architecture in the sixteenth century. Villon could have come nearer the mark; but Villon was long gone before the ancient mill on the river Cher was transfigured by its purchaser into the chateau he did not live to complete. 'S'il vient a point' said Thomas Bohier, and he graved it in many ornamental places of his edifice, 'me souviendra.'

And here am I writing his name and thinking about him, three hundred and ninety-two years after his death. What a pleasant reason for being remembered! What a quietly ill.u.s.trious introduction to posterity: the originator of the mansion whose sheer beauty brought a succession of kings and queens and other great people to sojourn in it, whose walls have listened to the blandishments of Francois I, the sallies of Fontenelle and Voltaire, the sentimentalities of Rousseau. Do their ghosts walk here upon these terraces? Do they meet in the long gallery over the Cher? If they don't, they are less wise in the next world than they were in this. Almost might one envy some figure in a well-preserved piece of tapestry, hanging in any hall or chamber here and commanding a view out of any window that looked up or down the placid river.

Embroidered thus for ever, amid high company, ladies and gentlemen of importance with hawks and feathers and armor and steeds richly caparisoned, ministered to by esquires and serfs, one would exist admired, valued, and carefully dusted. Daily sight-seers from all lands would be conducted into one's presence (Sundays included, 10-11 A.M., 2-6 P.M.), thus animating one's feudal leisure with sufficient variety.

There one would be, an acknowledged masterpiece, for ever aloof from the unstable present, nevermore driven to enlist against the restless evils of the world. The trouble is, somebody from Pittsburg might buy one. Now I could no more brook living as tapestry in America than I could live as an American in Europe, expatriated and trivially evaporating amid beauties and comforts that were none of my native heritage.

Do you know the country where Chenonceaux stands? Do you know the river?

Have you ever gone there from Tours, or come there the opposite way, from Bourges through Vierzon and Montrichard?

The region shares a secret with certain rare people, whom all of us are glad to count among our acquaintance. Certain men and women, immediately on our first meeting them, make us desire to meet them again; not because they have uttered remarkable thoughts or reminded us of Venus or Apollo: perhaps they have said nothing that you and I couldn't say, and we may know people much better looking. But they radiate--what is it that they radiate? We feel it, we bask in it, it flows over us. It isn't sunlight or moonlight, but a fairy-light of their own. When these s.h.i.+ning creatures come into the room, happiness enters with them. How do they do it? It gets us nowhere to say that there is 'something' in the tone of their voice, or 'something' in the look of their eyes: what is the something? I'm glad I don't know; mystery is growing so scarce, that I am thankful for anything which cannot be explained.

Now this rare quality (and don't flatter yourself that you understand it because you happen to know its name) is possessed not only by men and women, but also by places; and, no more than with people, has it anything to do with their being remarkable or beautiful. The White Mountains in New Hamps.h.i.+re haven't a trace of it; it fills the mountains of North Carolina; there is almost none along our Atlantic seaboard, but it hangs over and haunts nearly every foot of our Pacific Coast.

Whenever one of these happy spots has been long known to man, man has invariably cherished it in word and deed. His chronicles celebrate it; he sets it lovingly like a jewel in his romances, dramas, verse, prose, song; he graces it with his best in architecture; his roads and gardens bring it alike into his hours of work and of ease; in fine, he garlands it with his imagination, weaves it into his life century after century, until it comes to smile upon him from the heart of his History and Literature, as well as upon his daily present. That is what mankind has done beneath the spell of a place which has charm.

Thus Touraine to the Frenchman,--_beau pays de Touraine_, as the page in Meyerbeer's _Huguenots_ sings of it in that opera's second act, which takes place at Chenonceaux. I suppose--indeed I remember--that rain falls in that country; yet, when I think about it, suns.h.i.+ne invariably sparkles through the picture--not the kind that glares and burns, but the kind that plays gently among leaves and sh.o.r.es and shadows; suns.h.i.+ne upon the twinkling, feathered silver of the poplars, the grapes in sloping vineyards, the green islands and tawny bluffs of the Loire, the quiet waters of the Indre and the Cher; a jocund harmony seems to play about the very names,--Beaulieu, Montresor, Saint-Symphorien,--but were I to begin upon the music in the names of France, I should run far beyond the limits of Touraine and of your patience. Say to yourself aloud, properly, Amboise, Chateaurenault, La Chapelle-Blanche, Saint-Martin-le-Beau, and then say Naugatuck, Saugatuck, Pawtucket, Woonsocket, Manayunk, Manunkachunk, and you will catch my drift.