Delphi Complete Works of Gertrude Stein (Illustrated) (eBook)

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 command 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?”

Mabel drew a very unpleasant picture of that parentage. Her description of the father a successful lawyer and judge, and an excessively brutal and at the same time small-minded man who exercised great ingenuity in making himself unpleasant was not alluring, nor that of the mother who was very religious and spent most of her time mourning that it was not Helen that had been taken instead of the others a girl and boy whom she remembered as sweet gentle children.

One day when Helen was a young girl she heard her mother say to the father “Isn’t it sad that Helen should have been the one to be left.”

Mabel described their attempts to break Helen’s spirit and their anger at their lack of success. “And now” Mabel went on “they object to everything that she does, to her friends and to everything she is interested in. Mrs. T. always sides with her husband. Of course they are proud of her good looks, her cleverness and social success but she won’t get married and she doesn’t care to please the people her mother wants her to belong to. They don’t dare to say anything to her now because she is so much better able to say things that hurt than they are.”

“I suppose there is very little doubt that Helen can be uncommonly nasty when she wants to be,” laughed Adele, “and if she isn’t sensitive to other people’s pain, a talent for being successful in bitter repartee might become a habit that would make her a most uncomfortable daughter. I believe I might condole with the elders if they were to confide their sorrows to me. By the way doesn’t Helen address them the way children commonly do their parents, she always speaks of them as Mr and Mrs. T.”

“Oh yes” Mabel explained, “they observe the usual forms.”

“It’s a queer game,” Adele commented, “coming as I do from a community where all no matter how much they may quarrel and disagree have strong family affection and great respect for the ties of blood, I find it difficult to realise.”

“Yes there you come in with your middle-class ideals again” retorted Mabel.

She then lauded Helen’s courage and daring. “Whenever there is any difficulty with the horses or anything dangerous to be done they always call in Helen. Her father is also very small-minded in money matters. He gives her so little and whenever anything happens to the carriage if she is out in it, he makes her pay and she has to get the money as best she can. Her courage never fails and that is what makes her father so bitter, that she never gives any sign of yielding and if she decides to do a thing she is perfectly reckless, nothing stops her.”

“That sounds very awful” mocked Adele “not being myself of an heroic breed, I don’t somehow realise that type much outside of story-books. That sort of person in real life doesn’t seem very real, but I guess it’s alright. Helen has courage I don’t doubt that.”

Mabel then described Helen’s remarkable endurance of pain. She fell from a haystack one day and broke her arm. After she got home, her father was so angry that he wouldn’t for some time have it attended to and she faced him boldly to the end. “She never winces or complains no matter how much she is hurt,” Mabel concluded. “Yes I can believe that” Adele answered thoughtfully.

Throughout the whole of Mabel’s talk of Helen, there was an implication of ownership that Adele found singularly irritating. She supposed that Mabel had a right to it but in that thought she found little comfort.

As the winter advanced, Adele took frequent trips to New York. She always spent some of her time with Helen. For some undefined reason a convention of secrecy governed their relations. They seemed in this way to emphasise their intention of working the thing out completely between them. To Adele’s consciousness the necessity of this secrecy was only apparent when they were together. She felt no obligation to conceal this relation from her friends.

They arranged their meetings in the museums or in the park and sometimes they varied it by lunching together and taking interminable walks in the long straight streets. Adele was always staying with relatives and friends and although there was no reason why Helen should not have come to see her there, something seemed somehow to serve as one. As for Helen’s...