All Kneeling/Chapter 14
Christabel was discontented and restless in the months that followed her dismissal of Elliott. Not because she missed him. It was a relief to have him out of her life, for he had begun to be unmanageable. She wanted to be adored. She wanted to prove almost too much for men, to make them love her passionately and almost uncontrollably, in spite of all her efforts to save them. To feel that they were always just about to burst, but never quite bursting, that she was to them not only a woman, but a high star. She basked in an atmosphere of reverent passion as sweet and warm as the atmosphere of her firelit flower-filled rooms, and the fires of love were as well controlled as the fires in her fireplaces, that Alfred kept supplied with logs, and screened when sparks began to fly.
Most of her adorers were willing coöperators. They were dramatic young men, who could throw themselves into their parts so fully that they themselves believed in their firmly closed lips, their dilated nostrils. She and the young man of the moment spoke to each other fragmentarily, their words, she thought, like sunbright leaves floating lightly on deep waters. The Tuesday young man who had done his drawing room in solferino velvet, with beadwork bell-pulls, and wreaths under glass of straw-colored ferns and dark blackberries made from hair; the Friday young man who had designed the curious costumes for the Monday young man's play in which a murderer fell in love with a wax saint. There were mild thrills sometimes as hand touched hand when cups were refilled. But when the soft collars and pastel-tinted neckties were gone, they left no troubled wake, nothing more upset than the crushed silk cushions, the two half-empty teacups, the pile of cigarette stubs, that showed some one else had been understanding Christabel.
But Elliott had shown signs of forgetting to be reverent to an exhausting degree, and was only kept in order by the more exhausting means of being led to talk exclusively about himself and his painting. When she said those things that demanded wordless answers, restraint shown by clenched hand or bitten lip, he was increasingly apt to answer literally. She was glad, for both their sakes, that she had been strong enough to decide they should not see each other again. That was not why she was so depressed. She did not know the cause, she could not find a cure.
She was bored with theaters, bored with dinners; she wept when Curtis suggested Florida. In her mother-in-law's box at the opera, lent them week after week, drifting her feather fan through air vibrating with plump Mimi's last farewells, kilted Edgardo's laments, or the love-making of Pinkerton and Cho-Cho-San, she was so bored she could have screamed. Amusements can't help me, she thought. People can't help me. Yet somewhere there must be a still peace where I can be lost, and find myself again.
She thought of God. She would become one with God.
She had always suspected herself of the mystical temperament. Now she took up contemplation, gazing at an apple until she became one with it, the apple blossom within it that had changed to a star, the seeds, little brown monks in their cells, the dark roots, the branches melting into light, the cycle of the seasons. If I can see this clearly, I can see God, she told herself. One of her best-known poems sprang from that apple she took from the silver fruit dish, wedding gift of Mr. and Mrs. Talbot Emery Towne.
She found she could practice contemplation on anything, a walnut that became a fairy shallop with a wrinkled passenger, a sweet pea, mauve wings netted in green tendrils, rimmed with celestial glory. Even hard things—alley cats, telegraph poles. She was delighted to find that she could see the light of heaven pulsing through them all.
Meditation, too. That was harder, because her thoughts became a swarm of bees when she tried to empty her mind, to hold to the central silence. "Take your seat within the heart of the thousand-petaled lotus," she read in an Eastern book brought her by Gobby, who was charmed by her new ideas, and all for companionably contemplating and meditating with her. And though she wished the words hadn't reminded her of an invitation to mount a sightseeing bus, she found them helpful. She could see the thousand up-curling petals; from the tip of each she could see pure light pouring toward the core of incredible brightness that was herself, sitting cross-legged in the golden heart. Being still, listening for the inner voice, she would think, who of the rest of the people I know is doing anything like this?
God helped her to write Fly in Amber that winter. Each night she placed the next few pages of her novel in His hands. She had never written so easily.
The nights were best of all. Lying in her soft bed under linen and lace and silk, she gave herself up to the life of the spirit. Only to lose myself utterly, utterly, she thought, floating light and warm in the darkness. Only to rid myself of self, to be utterly Thine. Oh, Perfect Love, fill me and flood me! I am a shell that holds the sound of the sea, I am a raindrop that holds the sky and the stars. Come to me, Lover and Beloved. She would lie still, trembling, half-fainting. Sometimes, if she could keep still long enough, light spattered, scarlet or white, on the blackness of closed lids, and in a panic she would jerk herself back to consciousness, her heart pounding. Gobby agreed with her that she had been in great and glorious danger. He had not progressed beyond swimming yellow polka dots, and then he was always distracted by something—a taxi, a blanket tickling him.
In her Secret Journal she described her new absorption.
"To be rid of Self—to cast my Self into the white-hot flame of Thy Love, and be consumed."
And again:
"Oh, happy-torment that Thou givest me! Oh, tide of Love and Blessing and Brightness that Thou pourest into me, and through poor little me into the World! And yet I won't say, poor little me, but Blessed Me, because Thou hast deigned to make me part of Thee, to choose me for Thy Beloved"
These entries seemed rather daring when she read them over, remembering the religion of Dr. Marsh and the congregation in Germantown. Kid gloves, oak pews, green and purple shepherds in memorial windows, hymn 505, the Glory of God bounded by late breakfast with pancakes, by mid-day dinner with roast beef. She could not imagine Dr. Marsh with his glittering cuffs and broad As, or Mrs. Marsh with her feather boa and her pince-nez, shuddering with ecstasy beneath the Divine caresses, or approving of the shudders of any of their flock. But beside the books on mysticism her words were mild. Other people, if they were writing the truth, had been through even more intense experiences than she, and were outspoken in their descriptions. Determinedly she resumed her seat in the heart of the thousand-petaled lotus.
Sometimes her nights of ecstasy left her half-sick and dizzy in the morning. Even when she found it more and more necessary to pump up her interest in the life of the spirit, the sickness and dizziness remained. Her restlessness returned, she repeated to herself again and again what she had said to her mother—if I only had a child!
On her bedside table, with The Imitation of Christ and The Little Flowers of Saint Francis (she must remember to cut the pages! Often after she had gone to bed she would have picked it up, except for that) she placed a baby's dimpled hand in alabaster, and sometimes when she looked at it tears rose to her eyes, surprising her a little, touching her deeply. Children playing in the Park caused her to weep, and she wrote in her Journal:
"When I walk, my Little Dream Boy Tuns by my side"
Some of her most poignant poems were written that winter, on the sorrow of childlessness.
She got into such a low state of mind that Curtis finally persuaded her to see Dr. Deacon.
After the doctor left she lay thinking of what he had told her. In her windows pots of hyacinths with close-packed buds split the pale spring sunshine. It was the first day of April.
April Fool's Day. Her eyes fell on the baby's alabaster hand by her bed, and she gave it a slight push and turned her head away.
Lying there in her white-lace nightgown, under blue coverlet with silver stars, she felt herself floating, a cloud in the sky, a disembodied spirit. She crossed her hands, arching the delicate wrists, and closed her eyes, and she could see herself lying there as if she stood by her own bed. She could see tall white candles with golden flames, a pall of white narcissus, golden-hearted. A voice said, "So young, in all the promise of her genius!" Another voice answered, "Her poor little motherless baby" A tear oozed from her closed lids—another
But Curtis, on his knees by her bed, was adoring and delighted. His family and her family petted and praised her. She had never been given so many presents. A new car, strands of pearls for her wrists, the enormous emerald held in a circle of frost that she had fallen in love with at Cartier's and that Curtis had said he couldn't afford.
Her mother wrote:
"Uncle Johnnie complains that he can't take a step in any of the aunts' houses without getting a loop of pink wool around his ankle, they are all so busy knitting socks and sacques for the darling baby."
The two families worshiped her, solicitous, until they made her feel like a young Madonna rising starry with hope and fear from the dark kneeling circle.
"After all, what career is as great as motherhood?" she asked Boyd Benjamin, who had dropped in for a whisky and soda and to deplore this handicap to Christabel's career.
"I knew it! I knew when you married uptown and got prosperous that you'd go Victorian, too."
"Victoria didn't invent having babies."
"Specious," said Boyd, screwing a cigarette into a foot-long holder.
"To give life isn't a little thing, Boyd; it's a very beautiful and wonderful privilege," Christabel said, gently, and she thought, Frustration! That's what it is. Frustration and subconscious jealousy. Poor old Boyd! Then, as Boyd continued to scowl and puff, regardless of Christabel's hand waving away the smoke or pressing a handkerchief to her nose, she added:
"Boyd darling, would you mind not smoking? I hate to stop you, but one gets silly when one's not very strong"
Poor Boyd! she's getting—well, the only word is coarse—she thought, letting the smoke curl lazily from her nostrils, resting after Boyd had gone. But it's hard on people whose lack of appeal keeps them outside the stream of life. Poor old Boyd, worrying about careers, as if painting eggplants, or even writing poems, mattered at all compared with being what was really the heart of the world, a mother.
She could not help realizing that the Secret Journal touched heights during those months that it had never touched before, could not help believing that when it was published—if it was published—years and years away—those letters in it to her unborn child would comfort and inspire other women, would speak softly as opening petals and clearly as trumpets. Not to mention the poems that made up "First Born""Out of the whirlwind I gathered the small white Flower," "Mystery, small as a seed and more great than the Sun," and the rest.
In November her twins were born, strong and beautiful.
She named them Michael and Marigold, expecting opposition, but the names charmed everyone. Uncle Johnnie was reported as pretending to think they were called Patrick and Petunia, but nothing was sacred to Uncle Johnnie.
Toward the end of her convalescence she granted an audience to Gobby. Coming noiselessly to the door of her sitting room, she found him with his back to her, bending, scooping up something—what on earth was he doing? Then she realized he was practicing kissing a hand of air, and, tactfully withdrawing, made a more audible entrance, and received on her own hand the result of his practice.
"Christabel, I didn't think you could be more beautiful, but you are. I'm not being personal!"
"Dear Gobby! It's wonderful to see you again."
"That Madonna-blue chiffon! And the way the light falls behind your head actually makes a sort of halo."
She smiled on her worshiper, letting her hand rest lightly on his arm.
"You mustn't spoil me!"
"No one could do that!"
"What is this intriguing parcel?"
"Some Balkan toys for the babies."
"Gobby, how divine! Oh! This shell-pink pig is my favorite, so corpulent! So exactly like you! To find such entrancing things, I mean. And oh, this gnome in the pine-cone hat! How the Wunderkinder will adore them, after a while! Oh, Gobby, how I do long to have you see my two absurd kitten-eyed angels! But Miss Hess hardly lets me look at them. A strawberry tart? I had Mrs. Britton make them especially for you."
"Christabel, I do think having a cook you call Mrs. is just the height of style! I really am touched. I believe you remember my weakness for strawberry tarts from the Gay Street days! That reminds me, I didn't tell you about Elliott and Donatia, did I?"
"What about Elliott and Donatia?"
"Well, I think it really is going to happen this time—I think they really are going to get married. They're together the whole time. Of course it's almost happened so many times, but this time does seem different."
"Does he seem happy?"
"He certainly does! I think it would be fine, don't you?"
"I want Elliott to be happy almost more than I want anything in the world, Gobby. I can't see happiness for him with Donatia, but perhaps you're right. I hope so, with all my heart."
After he went she lay thinking of what he had told her. Elliott and Donatia. Elliott and Donatia! Really!
I didn't think you could be more beautiful, but you are. Gobby's voice sounded through her thoughts. She did feel slender and beautiful again. Getting up, she clasped her hands behind her head, then ran them down her sides. Beautiful, a mirror repeated.
Deceived by her courage, the specialists, Dr. Train and Dr. Von Boden, with Dr. Deacon a weak echo, had told Curtis she had had an unusually easy time. She would never trust any of them again. She had come through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. She ought to know. It was she who had had the twins. But now her body was humming with life, she wanted to live again with all her being.
She gazed at her reflection. I didn't think you could be more beautiful, but you are. I've been to a dark place and a far place—unimaginable awfulness—Elliott and Donatia—shadows in blue chiffon—I've come back wiser. I didn't think you could be more beautiful
Going to her desk, she took a sheet of her special paper, with Christabel in her handwriting flung in a silver spray across a corner, and wrote:
Elliott dear:I've been to a dark place and a far place since we last saw each other. And now that it's over—the unimaginable awfulness—I would not for anything give it up, for I've come back stronger and wiser. I've come back knowing that loving-kindness from friend to friend is the only thing that really matters, I've come back longing—longing—to see the few I really care for.
Will you come and see me?