PAGE 14
The Hidden Land
by
But when he had gone, and Nancy passed my door on her way to her room, I called her, and she came in.
I was in bed, and I had the letter in my hand. “I want you to read it,” I said. “It is from Olaf Thoresen.”
She looked at it, and asked, “When did it come?”
“Two months ago. The day that he left.”
“Why haven’t you shown it to me?”
“I couldn’t make up my mind. I do not know even now that I am right in letting you see it. But I feel that you have a right to see it. It is you who must answer it. Not I.”
When she had gone, I turned to the chapter in my book where Becky weeps crocodile tears over poor Rawdon Crawley on the night before Waterloo. There is no scene in modern literature to match it. But I couldn’t get my mind on it. Nancy was reading Olaf’s letter!
I kept a copy of it, and here it is:
“I knew when I first saw her in the garden that she was the One Woman. I had wanted sea-blood, and when she came, ready for a dip in the sea, it seemed a sign. One knows these things somehow, and I knew. I shan’t attempt to explain it.
“When you told me of her lover, I felt that Fate had played a trick on me. I could not now with honor pursue the woman who was promised to another. Yet I permitted myself that one day–the day on my boat.
“I learned in those hours that I spent with her that she had been molded by the man she is to marry and that in the years to come she will shrink to the measure of his demands upon her. She is feminine enough to be swayed by masculine will. That is at once her strength and her weakness. Loving a man who will love her for the wonder of her womanhood, she will fulfill her greatest destiny. Loving, on the other hand, one who aspires only to fit her into some attenuated social scheme, she will wither and fade. I think you know that this is true, that you will not accuse me of being unfair to any one.
“And now may I tell you what my dreams have been for her?
“I am not young. I mean I am past those hot and early years when men play–Romeo. The dream that is mine is one which has come to a man of thirty, who, having seen the world, has weighed it and wants–something more.
“I have told you of my house in that hidden land which is washed by the sea. I want to spend the rest of my days there, and I had hoped that some woman might be found whose love of life, whose love of adventure, whose love of me, might be so strong that she would see nothing strange in my demand that she forsake all others and cleave only to me.
“By forsaking all others, I mean, literally, what I say. I should want to cut her off entirely from all former ties. To let any one into our secret, to reveal that hidden land to a gaping world, would be to destroy it. We should be followed, tracked by the newspapers, written up, judged eccentric–mad. And I do not wish to be judged at all. My separation from my kind would have in it more than a selfish whim, an obsession for solitude. I want to get back to primitive civilization. I want my children to face a simpler world than the one I faced. Do you know what it means for a man to inherit money, with nothing back of it for two generations but hard work, although back of that there were, perhaps, kings? It means that I had, unaided, to fit myself into a social scheme so complex that I have not yet mastered its intricacies. I do not want to master them. I do not want my sons to master them. I want them to find life a thing of the day’s work, the day’s worship, the day’s out-of-door delights. I want them to have time to think and to dream. And then some day they shall come back if they wish to challenge civilization–young prophets, perhaps, out of the wilderness–seeing a new vision of God and man because of their detachment from all that might have blinded them.