The view from Eaglewood was famous—yet visible, Héloïse Spear reflected, to none of those who habitually lived with it except herself. Her mother, she thought, had probably seen it for a while, years ago, in her first eager youth; then it had been lost in a mist of multiple preoccupations, literary, humanitarian, and domestic, from which it emerged only when visitors were led out on the verandah for the first time. “Ah, our view—yes,” Mrs. Spear would then murmur, closing her handsome eyes as if to shut herself in with the unutterable, away from the importunities of spoken praise. And her guests would remain silent, too much impressed by her attitude to find the superlatives expected of them.
As for Mr. Spear, his daughter knew that he had simply never seen the view at all; his eyes had never been still long enough. But he had read of it in verse and prose; he talked of it with vivacity and emotion; he knew the attitude to strike, deprecating yet possessive, lighting a cigarette while the others gazed, and saying: “The poets have sung us, as you know. You remember Bryant’s ‘Eyrie’? Yes—that’s the Eaglewood view. He used to stay here with my wife’s great-grandfather. And Washington Irving, in his Sketch Book. And Whitman—it’s generally supposed …” And at that point Mrs. Spear would open her eyes to interject: “Really? You didn’t know that my husband knew Whitman? I always scold him for not having written down some of their wonderful talks together—”
“Ah, Whitman was a very old man when I knew him—immobilized at Camden. He never came here in my time. But from something he once said I gathered that Eaglewood undoubtedly … yes, I must really jot it all down one of these days. …”
Mr. Spear’s past was full of the dateless blur of the remarkable things he had not jotted down. Slim, dark, well-preserved, with his wavy grayish hair and cleverly dyed moustache, he was the type of the busy dreamer who is forever glancing at his watch, calling impatiently for timetables and calendars (two articles never to be found in the Spear household), calculating and plotting out his engagements, doubting whether there will be time to squeeze in this or that, wondering if after all it will be possible to “make it,” and then, at the end of each day, groaning as he lights his after-dinner cigar: “Devil take it, when I got up this morning I thought of a lot of rather important things I had to do—and like a fool I forgot to jot them down.” It was not to be expected, Halo thought, that a man as busy as her father should ever have time to look at a sunset.
As for Héloïse’s brother Lorry (Lorburn, of course) who sat extended in the hollow of a canvas chair, his handsome contemptuous head tilted back, and his feet on the verandah rail, Lorry, the fool, could see the view when he chose, and out of sheer perversity and posing, wouldn’t—and that was worst of all, to his sister’s thinking. “Oh, for God’s sake, Halo, don’t serve up the view again, there’s a good girl! Shan’t I ever be able to teach you not to have taste? The world’s simply dying of a surfeit of scenery—an orgy of beauty. If my father would cut down some of those completely superfluous trees, and let us get a line on the chimney of the cement factory … It’s a poor little chimney, of course, but it’s got the supreme quality of ugliness. In certain lights, you know, it’s almost as ugly as the Willows … or the Parthenon, say. …”
But unless there were visitors present Lorry seldom got as far as the Parthenon in his monologue, because he knew his family had long since discounted his opinions about beauty, and went on thinking of other things while he was airing them—even old George Frenside did nowadays, though once the boy’s paradoxes had seemed to amuse him.
George Frenside was the other man on the verandah. There he sat, behind his sempiternal cigar, glowering into the tender spaces of the sky as if what he saw there were an offense to the human race; yet Halo wondered if one could say of those small deep-sunk eyes, forever watchful behind their old-fashioned pince-nez, that anything they rested on escaped them. Probably not; for in certain ways he was sensitive to beauty, and not afraid of it, like Lorry. Only, to move him, it had to be beauty of man’s making, something wrung by human genius out of the stubborn elements. The sunset and the woodlands were nothing to him if they had not fed a poet or a painter—a poet preferably. Frenside had often said to Halo: “No, my child; remember I’m not a vegetarian—never could digest raw landscape.” But that did not mean that he did not see it, did not parcel it out into its component parts with those cool classifying eyes. George Frenside was aware of most things; little escaped him of the cosmic spectacle. Only for him the beauty of the earth was something you could take apart, catalogue, and pigeonhole, and not the enveloping harmony it was to the girl who sat beside him looking out on the sunset opalescence at their feet.
George Frenside was an institution at Eaglewood, and wherever else the Spears set up their tents. His short stocky figure, his brooding Socratic head, his cigar and eyeglasses, figured among Halo’s earliest recollections, and she had always seen him as she saw him now: elderly, poor, unsuccessful, and yet more masterful, more stimulating, than anyone else she had known. “A fire that warms everything but itself,” she had once defined him; but he had
