YEARS after, when all his grandparents were dead, Alwyn sat in a watering place in the Austrian Alps, where there was a cluster of iron tables around a café, where nineteenth-century waltzes were played and the cakes were good.
A boy, on whose cheeks the round flush of illness darkened, was insisting wearily in French: "You Americans lack the sense of sin. You have discovered the fountain of youth; it has made you cruel. . . ."
A great psychoanalyst who looked like an old Protestant minister wavered along the path; and a middle-aged princess brought biscuits in a paper bag.
Lifting two heavy rings in the air with his blue-white hand, a hunchbacked critic could be heard saying, "The psychology of love undergoes a complete revolution every twenty-five years. In America, I am told, every fifteen years; but they have no fine arts, so their passions are lacking in interest."
The grave, well-modulated voices rose against the steady crying of a river, somewhere below. Far below, a plain lay, patched with cottages and tidy crops; far above, a number of soft mountains were brocaded. by ice; and over the valley walls seven cataracts fell, shivering on the stone in mourning—seven vines the color of pewter.
Alwyn was glad to be in Austria; but because of the odor and the bells of two or three cattle which were driven past, perhaps because of the poor fat princess who, it seemed, regretted civilization, he began to think of the early days of America, particularly the early days of Wisconsin and his family. And the river beat in the small valley as ardently and roughly as the heart of a Middle Western forest.
Wisconsin, his grandmother's wilderness. . . . He remembered one of its little hills; fancied that he sat, not in Gastein, but on one of its hills, dreaming of its history. Slain trees, and timber wolves slinking in search of young pigs, and weather-beaten children stationed in poor crops to scare off the deer. . . . He tried to picture to himself his ancestors: ignorant men with delicate bodies, hoping for wealth as a reward for virtue; boys with chapped mouths hunting by the light of lanterns; fearless girls becoming sickly mothers. A company of dead or distant relatives, on a continent without much elegance, without palaces, without rest. . . . There sprang up in his mind a great number of stories and fragments of stories, in which they were gesticulating and embracing and working.
Alwyn daydreaming in Austria, a little self-consciously a poet. . . . And for a moment the well- bred voices, the philosophies, the orchestras, were swept away. For a moment all Europe seemed less significant than the vicissitudes of pioneers, men who were anonymous unless they were somebody's relatives. He did not quite like their suffering, their illiterate mysticism, their air of failure; but he understood them, or fancied that he did. It did not matter whether he liked them or not—he was their son.
Among them, of their marriages and love affairs, there had also been born a composite character, the soul of the race that was not actually a race; something so vague that one recognized it only as an atmosphere, a special brightness, or a peculiar quality of the temperaments and customs and fortunes of Americans; as if it were the god of the place—half invisible, and so large that one could see at a given moment only the great arch of its foot, or the dim luxury of its flesh, or the electricity of its eyes, or the jewels on its giant hands and head. It had been born in the stables, the cabins, and the schoolhouses where music, religion, and the three R's had been taught in turn. Who could describe the mask that was its face, or estimate its strength, or define its character? Whatever it was, it was the hero of the stories that he knew, the tales of his grandmothers. By comparison with its dwelling-place, Europe seemed only the scene of a classic play continually repeated; for a moment only. . . . But there was that moment in every day of Alwyn's life.
On another night he was dining with friends at La Turbie. Around the hotel arid meadows ran down to the cliffs, meadows where sooner or later the moonlight would come, gently cropping the stone like a flock of sheep. They sat on a terrace, looking over the balustrade and the cactus upon Monte Carlo—the casino, the harbor, the large rock covered with palaces.
One friend said, "Madame R—is ill."
Another, "I hate myself for gossiping, but after all . . ."
And the first: "The less said about it the better. But I think as you do; the name of her illness is—hate. The young man . . ."
One asked, "So she hates him now?"
And another answered, "Having loved him long enough."