Complete Works of Gertrude Stein Read online

  These relations formed themselves so gradually and gently that only the nicest observer could have noted any change in the relations of the three. Their intercourse was apparently very much what it had been. There were long conversations in which Adele vehemently and with much picturesque vividness explained her views and theories of manners, people and things, in all of which she was steadily opposed by Helen who differed fundamentally in all her convictions, aspirations and illusions.

  Mabel would listen always with immense enjoyment as if it were a play and enacted for her benefit and queerly enough although the disputants were much in earnest in their talk and in their oppositions, it was a play and enacted for her benefit.

  One afternoon Adele was lying in her steamer chair yielding herself to a sense of physical weariness and to the disillusionment of recent failures. Looking up she saw Helen looking down at her. Adele’s expression changed. “I beg your pardon” she said “I didn’t know any one was near. Forgive the indecency of my having allowed the dregs of my soul to appear on the surface.”

  “It is I who ought to apologise for having observed you” Helen answered gravely. Adele gave her a long look of unimpassioned observation. “I certainly never expected to find you one of the most gentle and considerate of human kind,” she commented quietly and then Helen made it clearer. “I certainly did not expect that you would find me so,” she answered.

  This unemphasised interchange still left them as before quite untouched. It was an impartial statement from each one, a simple observation on an event. Time passed and still no charged words, glances or movements passed between them, they gave no recognition of each other’s consciousness.

  One evening lying there in the darkness yielding to a suggestion rather than to an impulse Adele pressed the fluttering fingers to her lips. The act was to herself quite without emphasis and without meaning.

  The next night as she lay down in her berth, she suddenly awakened out of her long emotional apathy. For the first time she recognised the existence of Helen’s consciousness and realised how completely ignorant she was both as to its extent and its meaning. She meditated a long time. Finally she began to explain to herself. “No I don’t understand it at all,” she said. “There are so many possibilities and then there is Mabel,” and she dropped into another meditation. Finally it took form. “Of course Helen may be just drifting as I was, or else she may be interested in seeing how far I will go before my principles get in my way or whether they will get in my way at all, and then again it’s barely possible that she may really care for me and again she may be playing some entirely different game. — And then there is Mabel. — Apparently she is not to know, but is that real; does it make any difference; does Helen really care or is she only doing it secretly for the sense of mystery. Surely she is right. I am very ignorant. Here after ten days of steady companionship I haven’t the vaguest conception of her, I haven’t the slightest clue to her or her meanings. Surely I must be very stupid” and she shook her head disconsolately “and to-morrow is our last day together and I am not likely to find out then. I would so much like to know” she continued “but I can see no way to it, none at all except,” and she smiled to herself “except by asking her and then I have no means of knowing whether she is telling me the truth. Surely all is vanity for I once thought I knew something about women,” and with a long sigh of mystification she composed herself to sleep.

  The next afternoon leaving Mabel comfortable with a book, Adele, with a mind attuned to experiment wandered back with Helen to their favorite outlook. It was a sparkling day and Adele threw herself on the deck joyous with the sun shine and the blue. She looked up at Helen for a minute and then began to laugh, her eyes bright with amusement. “Now what?” asked Helen. “Oh nothing much, I was just thinking of the general foolishness, Mabel and you and I. Don’t you think it’s pretty foolish?” There was nothing mocking in her face nothing but simple amusement.

  Helen’s face gave no response and made no comment but soon she hit directly with words. “I am afraid” she said “that after all you haven’t a nature much above passionettes. You are so afraid of losing your moral sense that you are not willing to take it through anything more dangerous than a mud-puddle.”

  Adele took it frankly, her smile changed to meditation. “Yes there is something in what you say,” she returned “but after all if one has a moral sense there is no necessity in being foolhardy with it. I grant you it ought to be good for a swim of a mile or two, but surely it would be certain death to let it loose in mid-ocean. It’s not a heroic point of view I admit, but then I never wanted to be a hero, but on the other hand,” she added “I am not anxious to cultivate cowardice. I wonder—” and then she paused. Helen gave her a little while and then left her.

  Adele continued a long time to look out on the water. “I wonder” she said to herself again. Finally it came more definitely. “Yes I wonder. There isn’t much use in wondering about Helen. I know no more now than I did last night and I am not likely to be much wiser. She gives me no means of taking hold and the key of the lock is surely not in me. It can’t be that she really cares enough to count, no that’s impossible,” and she relapsed once more into silence.

  Her meditations again took form. “As for me is it another little indulgence of my superficial emotions or is there any possibility of my really learning to realise stronger feelings. If it’s the first I will call a halt promptly and at once. If it’s the second I won’t back out, no not for any amount of moral sense,” and she smiled to herself. “Certainly it is very difficult to tell. The probabilities are that this is only another one of the many and so I suppose I had better quit and leave it. It’s the last day together and so to be honorable I must quit at once.” She then dismissed it all and for some time longer found it very pleasant there playing with the brightness. At last she went forward and joined the others. She sat down by Helen’s side and promptly changed her mind. It was really quite different, her moral sense had lost its importance.

  Helen was very silent that evening all through the tedious table d’hôte dinner. The burden of the entertainment rested on Adele and she supported it vigorously. After dinner they all went back to their old station. It was a glorious night that last one on the ship. They lay on the deck the stars bright overhead and the wine-colored sea following fast behind the ploughing screw. Helen continued silent, and Adele all through her long discourse on the superior quality of California starlight and the incidents of her childhood with which she was regaling Mabel, all through this talk she still wondered if Helen really cared.

  “Was I brutal this afternoon?” she thought it in definite words “and does she really care? If she does it would be only decent of me to give some sign of contrition for if she does care I am most woefully ashamed of my levity, but if she doesn’t and is just playing with me then I don’t want to apologise.” Her mind slowly alternated between these two possibilities. She was beginning to decide in favor of the more generous one, when she felt Helen’s hand pressing gently over her eyes. At once the baser interpretation left her mind quite completely. She felt convinced of Helen’s rare intensity and generosity of feeling. It was the first recognition of mutual dependence.

  Steadily the night grew colder clearer and more beautiful. Finally Mabel left them. They drew closer together and in a little while Adele began to question. “You were very generous,” she said “tell me how much do you care for me.”

  “Care for you my dear” Helen answered “more than you know and less than you think.” She then began again with some abruptness “Adele you seem to me capable of very genuine friendship. You are at once dispassionate in your judgments and loyal in your feelings; tell me will we be friends?” Adele took it very thoughtfully. “One usually knows very definitely when there is no chance of an acquaintance becoming a friendship but on the other hand it is impossible to tell in a given case whether there is. I really don’t know,” she said. Helen answered her with fervor. “I honor you fo
r being honest.”

  “Oh honest,” returned Adele lightly. “Honesty is a selfish virtue. Yes I am honest enough.” After a long pause she began again meditatively, “I wonder if either of us has the slightest idea what is going on in the other’s head.”

  “That means that you think me very wicked?” Helen asked. “Oh no” Adele responded “I really don’t know enough about you to know whether you are wicked or not. Forgive me I don’t mean to be brutal” she added earnestly “but I really don’t know.”

  There was a long silence and Adele looked observingly at the stars. Suddenly she felt herself intensely kissed on the eyes and on the lips. She felt vaguely that she was apathetically unresponsive. There was another silence. Helen looked steadily down at her. “Well!” she brought out at last. “Oh” began Adele slowly “I was just thinking.”

  “Haven’t you ever stopped thinking long enough to feel?” Helen questioned gravely. Adele shook her head in slow negation. “Why I suppose if one can’t think at the same time I will never accomplish the feat of feeling. I always think. I don’t see how one can stop it. Thinking is a pretty continuous process” she continued “sometimes it’s more active than at others but it’s always pretty much there.”

  “In that case I had better leave you to your thoughts” Helen decided. “Ah! don’t go,” exclaimed Adele. “I don’t want to stir.”

  “Why not?” demanded Helen. “Well” Adele put it tentatively “I suppose it’s simply inertia.”

  “I really must go” repeated Helen gently, there was no abruptness in her voice or movement. Adele sat up, Helen bent down, kissed her warmly and left.

  Adele sat for a while in a dazed fashion. At last she shook her head dubiously and murmured, “I wonder if it was inertia.” She sat some time longer among the tossed rugs and finally with another dubious head-shake said with mock sadness, “I asked the unavailing stars and they replied not, I am afraid it’s too big for me” and then she stopped thinking. She kept quiet some time longer watching the pleasant night. At last she gathered the rugs together and started to go below. Suddenly she stopped and dropped heavily on a bench. “Why” she said in a tone of intense interest, “it’s like a bit of mathematics. Suddenly it does itself and you begin to see,” and then she laughed. “I am afraid Helen wouldn’t think much of that if it’s only seeing. However I never even thought I saw before and I really do think I begin to see. Yes it’s very strange but surely I do begin to see.”

  All during the summer Adele did not lose the sense of having seen, but on the other hand her insight did not deepen. She meditated abundantly on this problem and it always ended with a childlike pride in the refrain “I did see a little, I certainly did catch a glimpse.”

  She thought of it as she and her brother lay in the evenings on the hill-side at Tangiers feeling entirely at home with the Moors who in their white garments were rising up and down in the grass like so many ghostly rabbits. As they lay there agreeing and disagreeing in endless discussion with an intensity of interest that long familiarity had in no way diminished, varied by indulgence in elaborate foolishness and reminiscent jokes, she enjoyed to the full the sense of family friendship. She felt that her glimpse had nothing to do with all this. It belonged to another less pleasant and more incomplete emotional world. It didn’t illuminate this one and as yet it was not very alluring in itself but as she remarked to herself at the end of one of her unenlightening discussions on this topic, “It is something one ought to know. It seems almost a duty.”

  Sitting in the court of the Alhambra watching the swallows fly in and out of the crevices of the walls, bathing in the soft air filled with the fragrance of myrtle and oleander and letting the hot sun burn her face and the palms of her hands, losing herself thus in sensuous delight she would murmur again and again “No it isn’t just this, it’s something more, something different. I haven’t really felt it but I have caught a glimpse.”

  One day she was sitting on a hill-side looking down at Granada desolate in the noon-day sun. A young Spanish girl carrying a heavy bag was climbing up the dry, brown hill. As she came nearer they smiled at each other and exchanged greetings. The child sat down beside her. She was one of those motherly little women found so often in her class, full of gentle dignity and womanly responsibility.

  They sat there side by side with a feeling of complete companionship, looking at each other with perfect comprehension, their intercourse saved from the interchange of common-places by their ignorance of each other’s language. For some time they sat there, finally they arose and walked on together. They parted as quiet friends part, and as long as they remained in sight of each other they turned again and again and signed a gentle farewell.

  After her comrade had disappeared Adele returned to her insistent thought. “A simple experience like this is very perfect, can my new insight give me realler joys?” she questioned. “I doubt it very much” she said. “It doesn’t deepen such experiences in fact it rather annoyingly gets in my way and disturbs my happy serenity. Heavens what an egotist I am!” she exclaimed and then she devoted herself to the sunshine on the hills.

  Later on she was lying on the ground reading again Dante’s Vita Nuova. She lost herself completely in the tale of Dante and Beatrice. She read it with absorbed interest for it seemed now divinely illuminated. She rejoiced abundantly in her new understanding and exclaimed triumphantly “At last I begin to see what Dante is talking about and so there is something in my glimpse and it’s alright and worth while” and she felt within herself a great content.

  BOOK 2. MABEL NEATHE

  I

  MABEL NEATHE’S ROOM fully met the habit of many hours of unaggressive lounging. She had command of an exceptional talent for atmosphere. The room with its very good shape, dark walls but mediocre furnishings and decorations was more than successfully unobtrusive, it had perfect quality. It had always just the amount of light necessary to make mutual observation pleasant and yet to leave the decorations in obscurity or rather to inspire a faith in their being good.

  It is true of rooms as of human beings that they are bound to have one good feature and as a Frenchwoman dresses to that feature in such fashion that the observer must see that and notice nothing else, so Mabel Neathe had arranged her room so that one enjoyed one’s companions and observed consciously only the pleasant fire-place.

  But the important element in the success of the room as atmosphere consisted in Mabel’s personality. The average guest expressed it in the simple comment that she was a perfect hostess, but the more sympathetic observers put it that it was not that she had the manners of a perfect hostess but the more unobtrusive good manners of a gentleman.

  The chosen and they were a few individuals rather than a set found this statement inadequate although it was abundantly difficult for them to explain their feeling. Such an Italian type frustrated by its setting in an unimpassioned and moral community was of necessity misinterpreted although its charm was valued. Mabel’s ancestry did not supply any explanation of her character. Her kinship with decadent Italy was purely spiritual.

  The capacity for composing herself with her room in unaccented and perfect values was the most complete attribute of that kinship that her modern environment had developed. As for the rest it after all amounted to failure, failure as power, failure as an individual. Her passions in spite of their intensity failed to take effective hold on the objects of her desire. The subtlety and impersonality of her atmosphere which in a position of recognised power would have had compelling attraction, here in a community of equals where there could be no mystery as the seeker had complete liberty in seeking she lacked the vital force necessary to win. Although she was unscrupulous the weapons she used were too brittle, they could always be broken in pieces by a vigorous guard.

  Modern situations never endure for a long enough time to allow subtle and elaborate methods to succeed. By the time they are beginning to bring about results the incident is forgotten. Subtlety moreover in order to comm
and efficient power must be realised as dangerous and the modern world is a difficult place in which to be subtly dangerous, the risks are too great. Mabel might now compel by inspiring pity, she could never in her world compel by inspiring fear.

  Adele had been for some time one of Mabel’s selected few. Her enjoyment of ease and her habit of infinite leisure, combined with her vigorous personality and a capacity for endless and picturesque analysis of all things human had established a claim which her instinct for intimacy without familiarity and her ready adjustment to the necessary impersonality which a relation with Mabel demanded, had confirmed.

  “It’s more or less of a bore getting back for we are all agreed that Baltimore isn’t much of a town to live in, but this old habit is certainly very pleasant” she remarked as she stretched herself comfortably on the couch “and after all, it is much more possible to cultivate such joys when a town isn’t wildly exciting. No my tea isn’t quite right” she continued. “It’s worth while making a fuss you know when there is a possibility of obtaining perfection, otherwise any old tea is good enough. Anyhow what’s the use of anything as long as it isn’t Spain? You must really go there some time.” They continued to make the most of their recent experiences in this their first meeting.

  “Did you stay long in New York after you landed?” Mabel finally asked. “Only a few days” Adele replied “I suppose Helen wrote you that I saw her for a little while. We lunched together before I took my train,” she added with a consciousness of the embarrassment that that meeting had caused her. “You didn’t expect to like her so much, did you?” Mabel suggested. “I remember you used to say that she impressed you as almost coarse and rather decadent and that you didn’t even find her interesting. And you know” she added “how much you dislike decadence.”

  Adele met her with frank bravado. “Of course I said that and as yet I don’t retract it. I am far from sure that she is not both coarse and decadent and I don’t approve of either of those qualities. I do grant you however that she is interesting, at least as a character, her talk interests me no more than it ever did” and then facing the game more boldly, she continued “but you know I really know very little about her except that she dislikes her parents and goes in for society a good deal. What else is there?”