It was part of his elaborate chivalry and she though harsh and crude should never cease to receive from him this respect. He knew she must suffer but what could he do. They were man and wife, their minds and natures were separated by great gulfs, it must be again an armed neutrality but this time it was not as with his parents an armed neutrality between equals but with an inferior who could not learn the rules of the game. It was just so much the more unhappy.
Mrs. Redfern never understood what had happened to her. In a dazed blind way she tried all ways of breaking through the walls that confined her. She threw herself against them with impatient energy and again she tried to destroy them piece by piece. She was always thrown back bruised and dazed and never quite certain whence came the blow, how it was dealt or why. It was a long agony, she never became wiser or more indifferent, she struggled on always in the same dazed eager way.
Such was the relation between Redfern and his wife when Redfern having made some reputation for himself in philosophy was called to Farnham college to fill the chair of philosophy there.
There was then a dean presiding over the college of Farnham who in common with many of her generation believed wholly in the essential sameness of sex and who had devoted her life to the development of this doctrine. The Dean of Farnham had had great influence in the lives of many women. She was possessed of a strong purpose and vast energy. She had an extraordinary instinct for the qualities of men and rarely failed to choose the best of the young teachers as they came from the universities. She rarely kept them many years for either they attained such distinction that the great universities claimed them or they were dismissed as not being able enough to be called away.
Phillip Redfern had taken his doctor's degree in philosophy, had married and presently then he came to hold the chair of philosophy at Farnham college. Two very interesting personalities in the place were the dean Miss Charles and her friend Miss Dounor.
Redfern had previously had no experience of women's colleges, he knew some thing of the character of the dean but had heard nothing of any other member of the institution and went to make his bow to his fellow instructors in some wonder of anticipation and excitement of mind.
The new professor of philosophy was invited by the dean to meet the assembled faculty at a tea at her house two days after his arrival in the place. He entered alone and was met by the dean who was then just about beginning the ending of her middle living. She was a dignified figure with a noble head and a preoccupied abrupt manner. She was a member of a family which was proud of having had in three successive generations three remarkable women.
The first of these three was not known beyond her own community among whom she had great influence by reason of her strength of will, her powerful intellect, her strong common sense and her deep religious feeling. She carried to its utmost the then woman's life with its keen worldly sense, its power of emotion and prayer and its devout practical morality.
The daughter of this vigorous woman was known to a wider circle and sought for truth in all varieties of ecstatic experience. She mingled with her genuine mystic exaltation a basal common sense and though spending the greater part of her life in examining and actively taking part in all the exaggerated religious enthusiasms of her time she never lost her sense of criticism and judgement and though convinced again and again of the folly and hypocrisy of successive saints never doubted the validity of mystic religious experience.
In the third generation the niece of this woman, the dean Hannah Charles, found her expression in still wider experience. She did not expect her regeneration from religious experience and found her exaltation in resisting.
Through her influence she was enabled to keep the college in a flourishing state and to keep the control of all things entirely in her own hands but she was anxious that in the teaching staff there should be some one who would be permanent, who would have great parts and a scholarly mind and would have no influence to trouble hers and before many years she found Miss Dounor who ideally fulfilled these conditions.
Miss Douner was a graduate of an eastern college and had made some reputation. She was utterly unattached, being an only child whose parents died just before she entered college and was equally detached by her nature from all affairs of the world and was always quite content to remain where she was so long as some took from her all management of practical affairs and left her in peace with her work and her dreams. She was possessed of a sort of transfigured innocence which made a deep impression on the vigorous practical mind of Miss Charles who while keeping her completely under her control was nevertheless in awe of her blindness of worldly things and of the intellectual power of her clear sensitive mind.
Though Miss Dounor was detached by the quality of her nature from worldly affairs it was not because she loved best dreams and abstract thought, for her deepest interest was in the varieties of human experience and her constant desire was to partake of all human relations but by some quality of her nature she never succeeded in really touching any human creature she knew. Her transfigured innocence, too, was not an ignorance of the facts of life nor a puritan's instinct indeed her desire was to experience the extreme forms of sensuous life and to make even immoral experiences her own. Her detachment was due to an abstracted spirit that could not do what it would and which was evident in her reserved body, her shy eyes and gentle face.
As I was saying Phillip Redfern had been invited by the dean to meet the assembled faculty at a tea at her house. He entered in some wonder of anticipation and excitement of mind and was met by the dean Miss Charles, “You must meet Miss Dounor” she said to him breaking abruptly through the politeness of the new instructor who was as I said south-western. Redfern looked with interest at this new presentment of gentleness and intelligence who greeted him with awkward shyness. Her talk was serious pleasant and intense, her point of view clear, her arguments just, and her opinions sensitive. Her self-consciousness disappeared during this eager discussion but her manner did not lose its awkward restraint, her voice its gentleness or her eyes their shyness.
While the two were still in the height of the discussion there came up to them a blond, eager, good-looking young woman whom Redfern observing presented as his wife to his new acquaintance. Miss Dounor checked in her talk was thrown into even more than her original shy awkwardness and looking with distress at this new arrival after several efforts to bring her mind to understand said; “Mrs. Redfern yes yes, of course, your wife I had forgotten.” She made another attempt to begin to speak and then suddenly giving it up gazed at them quite helpless.
“Pray go on as I am very anxious to hear what you think,” said Mrs. Redfern nervously and Redfern bowing to his wife turned again to Miss Dounor and went on with the talk.
An observer would have found it difficult to tell from the mere appearance of these three what their relation toward each other was. Miss Dounor was absorbed in her talk and thought and oblivious of everything except the discussion, her shy eyes fixed on Redfern's face and her tall constrained body filled with eagerness, Redfern was listening and answering showing the same degree of courteous deference to both his companions, turned first toward one and then toward the other one with impartial attention and Mrs. Redfern her blond good-looking face filled with eager anxiety to understand listened to one and then the other with the same anxious care.
Later Redfern wandered to a window where Miss Hannah Charles, Miss Dounor and Mrs. Redfern were standing looking out at a fine prospect of sunset and a long line of elms defining a road that led back through the town of Farnham to the wooded hills behind. Redfern stood with them looking out at the scene. Mrs. Redfern was listening intently to each one's thinking. “Ah of course you know Greek,” she said with eager admiration to Miss Dounor who made no reply.
It happens often about the twenty-ninth year of a life that all the forces that have been engaged through the years of childhood, adolescence and youth in confused and sometimes angry combat range themselves in ordered ranks, one is uncertain of one's aims, meaning and power during these years of tumultuous growth when aspiration has no relation to fulfillment and one plunges here and there with energy and misdirection during the strain and stress of the making of a personality until at last we reach the twenty-ninth year, the straight and narrow gateway of maturity and life which was all uproar and confusion narrows down to form and purpose and we exchange a dim possibility for a big or small reality.
Also in our American life where there is no coercion in custom and it is our right to change our vocation as often as we have desire and opportunity, it is a common experience that our youth extends through the whole first twenty-nine years of our life and it is not till we reach thirty that we find at last that vocation for which we feel ourselves fit and to which we willingly devote continued labor. It must be owned that while much labor is lost to the world in these efforts to secure one's true vocation, nevertheless it makes more completeness in individual life and perhaps in the end will prove as useful to the world, and if we believe that there is more meaning in the choice of love than plain propinquity so we may well believe that there is more meaning in vocations than that it is the thing we can first learn about and win an income with.
Redfern had now come to this fateful twenty-ninth year. He had been a public preacher for women's rights, he had been a mathematician, a psychologist and a philosopher, he had married and earned a living and yet the world was to him without worth or meaning and he longed for a more vital human life than to be an instructor of youth, his theme was humanity, his desire was to be in the great world and of it, he wished for active life among his equals not to pass his days as a guide to the immature and he preferred the criticism of life in fiction to the analysis of the mind in philosophy and now the time was come in this his twenty-ninth year for the decisive influence in his career.
Cora Dounor had on her side too her ideals which in this world she had not found complete. She too longed for the real world while wrapped away from it by the perverse reserve of her mind and the awkward shyness of her body. Such friendship as she had yet realised she felt for the dean Miss Hannah Charles but it was not a nearness of affection, it was a recognition of the power of doing and working, and a deference to the representative of effective action and the habitual dependence of years of protection. What ever Miss Charles advised or undertook seemed always to Miss Dounor the best that could be done or affected. She sustained her end of the relation in being a learned mind, a brilliant teacher and a docile subject. She pursued her way expounding philosophy, imbibing beauty, desiring life, never questioning the things nearest her, interested only in abstract ideas and concrete desire and all her life was arranged to leave her untouched and unattached but in this shy abstracted, learned creature there was a desire for sordid life and the common lot.
It was interesting to see the slow growth of interest to admiration and then to love in this awkward reserved woman, unconscious of her meanings and the world's attention and who made no attempt to disguise or conceal the strength of her feeling.
Redfern's life experience had been to learn that where there was woman there was for him danger not through his own affections but by the demand that this sex made upon him. By this extreme chivalry he was always bound to more than fulfill the expectations he gave rise to in the mind of his companion. Indeed this man loved the problem of woman so much that he willingly endured all pain to seek and find the ideal that filled him with such deep unrest and he never tired of meeting and knowing and devoting himself to any woman who promised to fulfill for him his desire and here in Cora Dounor he had found a spirit so delicate so free so gentle and intelligent that no severity of suffering could deter him from seeking the exquisite knowledge that this companionship could give him. And he knew that she too would willingly pay high for the fresh vision that he brought her.
It is the French habit in thinking to consider that in the grouping of two and an extra it is the two that get something from it all who are of importance and whose claim should be considered; the American mind accustomed to waste happiness and be reckless of joy finds morality more important than ecstasy and the lonely extra of more value than the happy two. To our new world feeling the sadness of pain has more dignity than the beauty of joy. It takes time to learn the value of happiness. Truly a single moment snatched out of a distracted existence is hardly worth the trouble it takes to seize it and to obtain such it is wasteful to inflict pain, it is only the cultivators of leisure who have time to feel the gentle approach the slow rise, the deep ecstasy and the full flow of joy and for these pain is of little value, a thing not to be remembered, and it is only the lack of joy that counts.
Martha Redfern eager, anxious and moral had little understanding of the sanctity of joy and hardly a realisation of the misery of pain. She understood little now what it was that had come upon her and she tried to arrange and explain it by her western morality and her new world humanity. She could not escape the knowledge that something stronger than community of interest bound her husband and Miss Dounor together. She tried resolutely to interpret it all in terms of comradeship and great equality of intellectual interests never admitting to herself for a moment the conception of a possible marital disloyalty. But in spite of these standards and convictions she was filled with a vague uneasiness that had a different meaning than the habitual struggle against the hard wall of courtesy that Redfern had erected before her.
