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NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION

Spinoza and Education

Freedom, understanding and
empowerment

Johan Dahlbeck
‘Spinoza argued that the greatest help to one person seeking knowledge is
another person with the same aim. Johan Dahlbeck presents an engaging,
original account of how we help one another. Spinoza and Education is a well-
informed, useful introduction to Spinoza and a thoughtful application of Spi¬
noza’s views to pressing issues in the philosophy of education.’
Michael LeBufFe, Professor, University of Otago, New Zealand

‘This book contributes to the ongoing reconception of Spinoza as foremost a

moral philosophy, while developing an important conversation about Spinoza’s
philosophy of education. The book adeptly renders a famously obscure and
abstract philosophical system into a comprehensible and practical theory that
speaks productively to the real life concerns facing educators and students.’
Matthew J. Kisner, author of Spinoza on
Human Freedom: Reason, Autonomy and the Good Life,
University of South Carolina, USA

‘Spinoza excites the educational imagination. Johan Dahlbeck’s Spinoza and

Education amplifies this excitement, engaging with the ‘substance’ of Spinoza’s
ethics of self-preservation, and taking care to trace the implications of this eth¬
ics for teachers. As such Dahlbeck’s work reveals the Spinozan roots of many
contemporary critiques of institutionalised education.’
Andrew Gibbons, Associate Professor,
Auckland University ofTechnology, New Zealand
Taylor & Francis
Taylor St Francis Croup
http:/Aay lora ndfra nc i s,tom
Spinoza and Education

Spinoza and Education offers a comprehensive investigation into the educational

implications of Spinoza’s moral theory. Taking Spinoza’s naturalism as its point
of departure, it constructs a considered account of education, taking special care
to investigate the educational implications of Spinoza’s psychological egoism.
What emerges is a counterintuitive form of education grounded in the egoistic
striving of the teacher to persevere and to flourish in existence while still cater¬
ing to the ethical demands of the students and the greater community.
In providing an educational reading of Spinoza’s moral theory, this book
sets up a critical dialogue between educational theory and recent studies that
highlights the centrality of ethics in Spinoza’s overall philosophy By placing
his work in a contemporary educational context, chapters explore a counter¬
intuitive conception of education as an ethical project, aimed at overcoming
the desire to seek short-term satisfaction and troubling the influential concept
of the student as consumer. This book also considers how education, from a
Spinozistic point of view, may be approached in terms of a kind of cognitive
therapy serving to further a more scientifically adequate understanding of the
world and aimed at combating prejudices and superstition.
Spinoza and Education demonstrates that Spinoza’s moral theory can further
an educational ideal where notions of freedom and self-preservation provide
the conceptual core of a coherent philosophy of education. As such, it will
appeal to researchers, academics, and postgraduate students in the fields of phi¬
losophy of education, theory of education, critical thinking, philosophy, ethics,
and Spinoza studies.

Johan Dahlbeck is senior lecturer in child and youth studies at Malmo

University.
New Directions in the Philosophy of Education
Series Editors
Michael A. Peters, University of Waikato, New Zealand;
University of Illinois, USA
Gert Biesta, Brunei University, UK
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

This book series is devoted to the exploration of new directions in the philoso¬
phy of education. After the linguistic turn, the cultural turn, and the historical
turn, where might we go? Does the future promise a digital turn with a greater
return to connectionism, biology, and biopolitics based on new understandings
of system theory and knowledge ecologies? Does it foreshadow a genuinely
alternative radical global turn based on a new openness and interconnected¬
ness? Does it leave humanism behind, or will it reengage with the question of
the human in new and unprecedented ways? How should philosophy of educa¬
tion reflect new forces of globalization? How can it become less Anglo-centric
and develop a greater sensitivity to other traditions, languages, and forms of
thinking and writing, including those that are not rooted in the canon ofWest-
ern philosophy but in other traditions that share the “love of wisdom” that
characterizes the wide diversity within Western philosophy itself. Can this be
done through a turn to intercultural philosophy? To indigenous forms of phi¬
losophy and philosophizing? Does it need a post-Wittgensteinian philosophy
of education? A postpostmodern philosophy? Or should it perhaps leave the
whole construction of “post”-positions behind?
In addition to the question of the intellectual resources for the future of
philosophy of education, what are the issues and concerns that philosophers of
education should engage with? How should they position themselves? What
is their specific contribution? What kind of intellectual and strategic alliances
should they pursue? Should philosophy of education become more global, and
if so, what would the shape of that be? Should it become more cosmopolitan
or perhaps more decentered? Perhaps most importantly in the digital age, the
time of the global knowledge economy that reprofiles education as privatized
human capital and simultaneously in terms of an historic openness, is there a
philosophy of education that grows out of education itself, out of the concerns
for new forms of teaching, studying, learning, and speaking that can provide
comment on ethical and epistemological configurations of economics and pol¬
itics of knowledge? Can and should this imply a reconnection with questions
of democracy and justice?
 This series comprises texts that explore, identify, and articulate new direc¬
tions in the philosophy of education. It aims to build bridges, both geographi¬
cally and temporally: bridges across different traditions and practices and bridges
toward a different future for philosophy of education.

In this series

Buber and Education

Dialogue as conflict resolution
WJohn Morgan and Alexandre Guilherme

Henri Lefebvre and Education

Space, history, theory
Sue Middleton

Thomas Jefferson’s Philosophy of Education

A utopian dream
M. Andrew Holowchak

Edusemiotics
Semiotic philosophy as educational foundation
Andrew Stables and Inna Semetsky

Childhood, Education and Philosophy

New ideas for an old relationship
Walter Kohan

Between Truth and Freedom

Rousseau and out contemporary political and educational culture
Kenneth Wain

Democratic Education and the Public Sphere

Towards John Dewey’s theory of aesthetic experience
Masamichi Ueno

Social Justice and Educational Measurement

John Rawls, The History of Testing, and the Future of Education
Zachary Stein

Towards a Political Theory of the University

Public reason, democracy and higher education
Morgan White

Spinoza and Education

Freedom, understanding and empowerment
Johan Dahlbeck
Taylor & Francis
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 Spinoza and Education
Freedom, understanding and empowerment

Johan Dahlbeck
ROUTLEDGE

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN

and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2017 Johan Dahlbeck

The right ofJohan Dahlbeck to be identified as author of this work

has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or

registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Names: Dahlbeck, Johan.
Title: Spinoza and education : freedom, understanding and empowerment /
Johan Dahlbeck.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2016. | Includes bibliographical
references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016027950 | ISBN 9781138931817 (hardcover) |
ISBN 9781315679495 (electronic)
Subjects: LCSH: Spinoza, Benedictus de, 1632-1677.
Education—Philosophy.
Classification: LCC LB475.S7 A2 2016 | DDC 371.001—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016027950
ISBN: 978-1-138-93181-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-67949-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents

Acknowledgments
Editions used and list of abbreviations

Introduction: Why all education begins and ends in moral

education

1 Spinoza’s ethical project

The metaphysical building blocks of Descartes and Spinoza:
Similarities and differences 4
Degrees of reality: On self-determination, power and perfection 9
Spinoza’s account of human nature: An anti-humanist perspective 12
Outlining Spinoza’s moral theory: Egoism and the theory
of the affects 15
Spinoza’s ethics of self-preservation: Toward empowerment 20
What’s in it for education? Introducing the mental health
perspective 23

2 To be educated is to exist more: Spinoza’s gradualist

notion of reality
Adequate ideas as the key to a virtuous life 29
The limited cognition of a human being 30
Spinoza’s three kinds of knowledge 34
Ethics and education: Enhancing existence through the
reordering of ideas 39
Spinozisticfreedom: To understand God is to understand yourself 45
To be educated is to be liberated 48

3 Self-preservation as an educational ideal

Self-preservation as the foundation of virtue 52
The individual and society: On the relative complexity of bodies 55
A common striving for self-preservation and empowerment 60
x Contents

Teaching for the sake of the teacher: Can good education be grounded
in egoism? 62
Moral education without moral responsibility 66
A brief comparison between a Spinozistic conception of education,
Aristotelian character education and a care ethical approach to
education 12

4 Moderating the passive affects: Education, imagination

and causation 85
The role of the passive affects in education: Accounting for Spinoza’s
perspectivism 85
Learning through the imagination 89
Experience and understanding 95
Understanding natural causes: The art of making intelligent
choices 100

5 Educational implications of the doctrine of the

imitation of affects 105
Education and emulation 105
The imitation of the affects: Egoism and education revisited 109
Role modeling and the cultivation ofjudgment as educational means
for establishing the rational community 113
Conscious striving for self-preservation: The perspective of the
optimistic nutritionist 116
The therapeutic aspects of a Spinozistic education 121

6 Teaching as the art of offering the right amount of

resistance 129
The role of the state and the role of the teacher: Moderating passive
affects and maximizing freedom 129
On teaching and authority 136
What we think we want and what we really want: The optimistic
nutritionist revisited 137
The teacher as therapist: On mental health and mental illness 139
A note on the hazards of treating the student as consumer 145
Educating for true happiness 146

Conclusion: Outlining a Spinozistic account of education 150

Again, what’s in it for education? 150
Toward a Spinozistic understanding of education 162

Index 165
Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Gert Biesta and Michael A. Peters for their keen support
and interest in this book project. I would also like to thank Clare Ashworth
for seeing it through the review process. I am deeply indebted to the two
anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and valuable suggestions —
suggestions that helped shape the finished book in important ways. I am also
grateful to Heidi Lowther and Thomas Storr of Routledge for all their help
during the process of finishing this book. I would especially like to recognize
the invaluable input of my two critical friends, Peter Lilja and Moa De Lucia
Dahlbeck. Without your willingness to read and comment on drafts of this
book, it would be in a considerably worse shape than it is. Any remaining errors
are, of course, my own.
Editions used and list of abbreviations

Primary literature:

John Cottingham, Robert StoothofF, and Dugald Murdoch, trans. The Philo¬
sophical Writings of Descartes. 2 vols. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1984 & 1985)".

Edwin Curley, ed. and trans. The Collected Works of Spinoza.Vol. 1. (Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 1985).

Jonathan Israel, trans. Theological-Political Treatise (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni¬

versity Press, 2007).

Samuel Shirley, trans. Spinoza: Complete Works (Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing

Company, 2002).
The following abbreviations are used for referring to primary literature:

Abbreviations

C Curley, ed. and trans., The Collected Works of Spinoza.

CM Spinoza’s Metaphysical Thoughts (Cogita Metaphysica). Appendix to his
Principles of Cartesian Philosophy (Renati Descartes Principiorum Philoso-
phiae, Pars I et II, More Geometrico demonstratae).
CSM Cottingham, StoothofF, and Murdoch, trans., The Philosophical Writings
of Descartes, vols 1 and 2.
I Israel, ed., Theological-Political Treatise.
KV Spinoza’s Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being (Korte Verhande-
ling van God, de Mensch en des zelfs Welstand).
S Shirley, trans., Spinoza: Complete Works.
TIE Spinoza’s Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (Tractatus de Intellectus
Emendatione)
TP Spinoza’s Political Treatise (Tractatus Politicus)
TTP Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus)
 Editions used and list of abbreviations xiii

The CM is cited by part and chapter number. The KV,TP, and TTP are cited
by chapter number and sometimes by the section number. The TIE is cited by
section number. Spinoza’s correspondence is cited by letter number and page
number from Shirley’s Spinoza: Complete Works. References to Spinoza’s Ethics
first cite the part, and then use the following abbreviations:

a axiom
app appendix
c corollary
d demonstration
1 lemma
D definition
DOE Definition of the Emotions (end of Part 3)
exp explanation
p proposition
post postulate
pref preface
s scholium

Accordingly, 2pl3c refers to Ethics, Part 2, proposition 13, corollary.Translations

of the Ethics are taken from Curley’s The Collected Works of Spinoza.
Taylor & Francis
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Other documents randomly have
different content
that her universe would always revolve about him, that there would
always be a mysterious potency in the mere sound of his voice, or
touch of his hand, where she was concerned.
But discuss her with Sylvia and Aunt Flora, and kindly and with big-
brotherly superiority offer her a “plan,” a plan to accept his name and
his protection, simply because she was so apparently incapable of
taking care of herself! Gabrielle suffocated at the thought. No, David
couldn’t be David and do that.
In the ten days that elapsed before his arrival at Wastewater she
alternated between such violent extremes of feeling, and lay awake
pondering, imagining, and analyzing the situation so constantly at
night that she was genuinely exhausted when the afternoon of his
coming came at last.
There were moments when she felt she could not see him, dared not
face him. There were times when she longed for his arrival, and to
assure herself with a first glance that all this nervous anticipation
was her own ridiculous imagining, and that no thought of it had ever
crossed his mind!
When he finally came Gay was in the garden. For spring had come
to Wastewater, and David’s fancy of finding her before a fire in the
sitting room had been outdated by two full weeks of sunshine. There
was fresh green grass sprouting about the old wall, there were daisy-
starred stretches of it under the massed blossoms of the fruit trees;
gracious shadows lay long and sweet everywhere over new green
leaves; the willows were jade fountains of foliage, the maples
uncurling moist little red and gold tendrils, and the lilacs were rustling
columns of clean new leafage and plumy blossom. The last of the
frost had melted from the newly turned sods; gulls were walking
about, pulling at worms, and spring sunset lay over the broad, gently
heaving surface of an opal sea.
David had taken his bags upstairs, greeted his aunt, who was
knitting in the sitting room, but without the fire, and had spent
perhaps ten restless and excited minutes in outward conversation
and in inner excitement. Where was Gay? When would the door
handle turn and the plainly gowned girl come in, with the smile
flashing into her star-sapphire eyes when she saw him, and the
beautiful hand she extended so quaintly, so demurely enhanced by
the transparent white cuff? David was so shaken by a strange
emotion at the thought that every moment was bringing their meeting
closer, so confused by the undercurrent of his thoughts—the
undercurrent that would dwell upon her greeting, and his introduction
of all he had to say to her—that he could hardly hear what his aunt
was saying. When he did finally escape to search for Gay, and when
Hedda told him that she was in the garden, he found himself
standing quite still in the side passage, with his heart thundering, and
his senses swimming, and an actual unwillingness upon him, after all
these waiting days and weeks, to make real the dream that he had
cherished so long.
There she was, about the western turn of the house, half walking
and half running, with the puppy sometimes keeping his feet and
sometimes swung dizzily in the air on the rope that Gabrielle was
carrying and the little dog biting in a frenzy of joy. There was warm
sweet light in the garden at five o’clock, the day had been balmy
enough to make cooler airs at its close almost a relief.
Pleasant domestic sounds in the barnyard were all about: clucks and
moos, John whistling, and the stamping of big horses’ feet on distant
floors. The scent of violets and syringa, of lilacs and new grass, of
damply turned, sun-warmed earth was like a delicious sharp and
heady ether in the air.
David joined the girl just as she and the dog were turning down a
rambling sort of back road that led toward the sea; Gabrielle turned,
and although indeed she smiled, he saw that she was an older and a
soberer Gabrielle than the little schoolgirl of the Christmas holidays.
They walked the quarter mile to the shore deep in a conversation he
had not anticipated; she talked of her mother, whose life was a
question only of days now, and made one allusion to the deeper
cause of pain to herself.
“My finding out about myself—about my mother’s never having been
married, David—has made a sort of change in everything to me,”
she said, unemotionally. “I seem to feel now that I must do
something—that it is more than ever my duty to do something to
make my own place in life and stand upon my own feet. That’s the
only way that I can ever be happy, and I will be happy so, believe
me!” she added, nervously intercepting an interruption from him.
“Doctor Ensicoe, from Crowchester, says that my mother will not
outlive the month. And then I mean to write to the nuns in Boston
and stay with them until I find something that I can do. I know Aunt
Flora will help me, for indeed she offered to most generously, and,
while I must—I will let her. She was very kind about it all,” Gabrielle
added, reaching safer waters now, and so speaking more quietly.
“We have never spoken of it except at that one time. I said to her
quite suddenly, one night when we were going up to my mother’s
room—I’d had it terribly on my mind, of course, ‘Aunt Flora, answer
me one question. There would be no use in my attempting to trace
Charpentier, my father, would there? There is no record of that
marriage, is there? That is the real reason for all the mystery and
secrecy, isn’t it?’ And she turned very pale,” went on Gay, “and
answered, ‘Yes.’ We never alluded to it again, although many times
since she has told me that Sylvia would always take care of me—
that I must not worry!” And catching a sudden look of determination
and interest in David’s face Gay went on hurriedly, “But indeed I
don’t worry, I shall get along splendidly and make you all proud of
me!”
A sensation of pity so sudden and acute as to dry his mouth and
press like a pain behind his eyes silenced David for a moment. Then
he said:
“But you are very young, Gay, and inexperienced, to face all the
ugliness and coldness of the world. Suppose,” David added,
conscious suddenly of the quickened beat of his heart, “there was
some other plan that eased, or helped to ease, all those worries of
yours——?”
“Oh, my God,” Gay prayed, in a very panic of fear. “Oh, David,” she
cried, in the deeps of her being, “spare me! Oh, God, don’t let him
mean that he is going to ask me to marry him. Oh, no—no—no!”
Aloud she said nothing. They were on the sweet, grassy cliffs above
the sea, now, and Gay was looking out across the level stretches of
the peaceful water, over which shone the last of the long day’s light.
She was so beautiful, as she stood there, that for a moment David
was content to look at her and tell himself that he had not
remembered how lovely she was. Loose delicate tendrils of her
tawny hair were blowing about her white temples; there was a
delicate creamy glow on her warm, colourless skin, her great eyes
seemed to give forth a starry shimmer of their own. In the fine hands,
encircled at the wrists, as David had anticipated they would be, by
transparent white cuffs, she held the restless puppy against the
young curve of her breast; in the old garden and the spring sunset
she looked like a slender, serious impersonation of Memory or
Poetry, or of some mythical young goddess, wandering under the
great trees.
But it was not only the physical beauty that he saw. He saw in her
too the dearly companionable girl of the past mid-winter, whose
husky, sweet laughter had rung out over the card table, whose eager
helpful interest had made bright so many a dark sleety morning in
the upstairs studio, when the oil stove slowly warmed the air and
scented it with hot metal and kerosene vapours. He saw her
buttoning on the big coat, tramping through snowy woods at his side,
with her hands deep in her pockets, and her bright face glowing like
a rose. And a first little chilling fear crept over his bright dream;
suppose—suppose she was not for him, after all?
“Gabrielle,” he said, suddenly, his face reddening and his voice
shaking a little, “will you let me tell you what I planned for you and for
me?”
She gave him an agonized half glance, nodded, and said some
indistinguishable word of assent as she turned away.
“I was wondering——” David began. And suddenly it seemed all to
go flat and dull. He felt himself to have no business to be putting it to
her this way, this half-laughing, half-sympathetic, wholly kind and
comfortable way. The smooth phrases of his imaginings vanished in
air, he was merely a rather stupid man of thirty-one, bungling the
most delicate thing in all the world. It was too late to stop. The girl’s
face was crimson, but she had turned toward him gravely and
expectantly, and was looking at him steadily and bravely.
“This was my idea,” David began again, miserably. “I—I felt—I knew
that you were most unhappy, and that you felt lonely and as if you
were wasting time here, and yet doubtful about making a start
elsewhere. And it occurred to me——” He tried his best at this point
to recapture the affectionate whimsically practical note that these
words had always had in anticipation, but do what he would they
sounded stupidly patronizing and heavy. “It occurred to me,” he said
again, “that you and I are somewhat in the same boat. We’re
Flemings, yet we don’t truly belong at Wastewater—that belongs to
Sylvia now! And wouldn’t it be a very delightful thing for you and me
to give them all a surprise and just take ourselves out of their way,
once and for all?”
She heard him so far. Then she stopped him with a sudden
backward movement of her head, and answered quietly, with a
downward glance at the puppy’s little snuggled form:
“Thank you, David. But you must see that I can’t—I can’t do that! But
thank you very much.”
David was honestly taken aback. Not that he had expected her to fall
into his arms—he did not know just what he had expected her to do.
But certainly not this! He had perhaps imagined her beautiful and
irradiating smile turned toward him, heard a rich cadence half of
reproach and half of pleasure in her voice as she said, something
like, “David Fleming! Are you asking me to marry you?”
This actuality was all confusing and different from the plan, and his
own feelings were disconcertingly different, too. The girl looked
unmistakably hurt and humiliated by what he had said, which was
astonishing enough. But even more astonishing was his own sudden
conviction that she had reason to seem so. What was he saying to
her, anyway? After all, her love affair was the most important thing in
all a girl’s life! It was not something to be flung at her unexpectedly,
between one’s arrival after weeks—after months of absence—and a
family dinner!
A half-analyzed consciousness of being wrong, combined with a
general confusion of mind and senses, was strong upon David as he
blundered on:
“I may be surprising you, Gay. You see, I’ve been thinking about all
this for a long time! You can certainly say, ‘This is so sudden,’ in the
good old-fashioned manner, if you want to,” added David, nervously,
hoping to win back his humorous, comprehending little companion of
January with his anxious and appealing laugh.
But Gay did not laugh.
“I do appreciate your taking my problems so much to heart, David,”
she said, turning to pace staidly back through the twilight greenness
and sweetness toward the house. “But I really blame myself a good
deal for being such a baby! I’ve been selfishly dwelling upon my
troubles, and acting as if no girl ever had them to face before, and of
course it has worried you and Aunt Flora and Sylvia. But that’s over
now, and I want you to know that I do appreciate your sympathy, and
your having thought out this way of escape for me, and having
planned it all with Sylvia.”
“As a matter of fact,” David interposed, eagerly, hoping that matters
might yet adjust themselves, “Sylvia’s letter to me, asking to be set
entirely free of any real or imaginary understanding between us,
crossed my letter to her saying that I—had other plans in mind.”
He looked at Gabrielle hopefully with the words; perhaps when she
knew how completely above-board and deliberated the step had
been she would begin to see it in his light. But Gay merely reddened
the more deeply, if that were possible, and said hastily and
uncomfortably:
“I see. And I do thank you! And I ask you—I beg you—for the little
time I am at Wastewater,” she added, feverishly, as the vertigo of
shame and confusion that had been almost nauseating her
threatened to engulf her in a humiliating burst of tears, “please never
to say anything like this to me again! Please——! There are reasons
——” Gay fought on desperately, feeling with terror that tears might
end in his arms, and that utter capitulation on his own kindly
humorous terms must follow such a break-down, “there are reasons
why it kills me to have you talk so! I beg you, David, to consider it all
settled—all over——”
“Why, of course I will!” David said, in a cold, quiet voice that braced
her like a plunge into icy waters. “I’m only sorry to distress you,” he
added, formally. “I had been thinking about it with a great deal of
pleasure, and I thought you might. I’m sorry. We’ll never speak of it
again.”
Then they were at the side door, and Gay escaped into the gloomy
dark hallway, and fled red-cheeked and panting to her room, where
she could cry, rage, shake herself, walk the floor, and analyse the
whole situation unobserved.
“Oh, you fool!” she said, scornfully, to her panting image in the
mirror. “You hysterical schoolgirl! Oh, how I hate him and his plans
for me!” she gritted, through shut teeth. “And I hate Sylvia worse! I
hate them all. He thought I would die of joy—he knows better now.
Oh, insulting! He wouldn’t have done that to Sylvia or one of the
Montallen girls! But it didn’t matter with me—Aunt Lily’s daughter,
with no father to stand up for me. And it isn’t my fault I haven’t a
father,” Gay said, pitifully, half aloud, leaning her elbows on the
bureau, and beginning to cry into her hands; “it isn’t my fault that I’m
all alone in the world!”
And again she flung herself on the bed, and her whole form was
racked and shaken by the violence of her weeping.
“He’ll see my red eyes at dinner and think it’s for him,” she broke off,
savagely, sitting up in the early dark and reaching for the scrambling
and mystified puppy, who was going upon a whimpering tour of
investigation among the pillows. Gay dried her eyes upon his downy
little back, lighted her lamp, and soused her eyes with cold water.
Half an hour later she went down to dinner, quite restored to calm
and ready to take a cheerful part in the conversation. But she would
not share the sitting room with her aunt and David after dinner.
She said, with that touch of new maturity and decision that David
found so touching and so amusing in little Gabrielle, that she would
go up and sit with her mother, thus releasing Margret for an hour or
two below stairs.
The room seemed to become blank, however, when she had gone
quietly away, and David was surprised to find that the thought of her
had become so habitual with him in the last few weeks that he was
thinking of her still, as steadily as if that strange hour in the garden
were the dream, and the Gay of his plan, the gracious Gay who had
so many, many times promised him, in his thoughts, to marry him,
were the reality.
He found himself restlessly making excuses to follow her upstairs.
Was Aunt Flora going up to see Aunt Lily to-night? Later, Flora said,
sombrely. Was it quite safe for Gabrielle up there alone with the
invalid? Oh, quite. Poor Lily had not the strength of a baby, now.
After an endless time they went upstairs, to find that Margret had just
come up, and Gay was ready to plead fatigue and slip away to bed.
Aunt Lily was a mere colourless slip of flesh and blood, quiet upon
smooth pillows now, with her gray hair brushed and pinned up neatly.
Gay was kneeling beside her in the orderly, lamp-lighted room when
David went in, with one of her beautiful hands clasping the yellowed
old lifeless fingers. She got to her feet with no sign of
embarrassment, and in another two minutes had disappeared for the
night.
David saw a light in her transom, half an hour later, when he went to
his room. She was probably quietly reading, he thought; discomfited,
preferring the society of books to his own, after what had transpired
this afternoon.
He felt disappointed and humiliated, he missed the thrilling dream
that had kept him company for so long, and for a day or two he
managed to persuade himself that it was because Gay had failed
him. She had proved very much less satisfying than his thoughts of
her; he had unconsciously been idealizing her all this time. He had
thought of her as gracious, merry, provocative, responsive, and she
had proved to be merely embarrassed and awkward.
“Well!” he said, going off to sleep, “That’s over—no harm done!” But
he could not dismiss it. Again he said, almost aloud; “That’s over. No
harm done!”
 CHAPTER XIII
He plunged, the next morning, into work, going off to Keyport
immediately after breakfast and returning late in the afternoon. The
day was exquisite beyond words, the sea satiny blue, and there was
real summer warmth in the sweet spring stillness of the air. David
saw Gabrielle in the garden when he came back, and took his
painting gear upstairs, determined not to make himself ridiculous in
her eyes again. But a power stronger than himself immediately took
him downstairs again. He walked, with an air of strolling, to the
hollies, where she had been. But she was gone.
David now felt irrationally and without analysis that he must see her,
and at once. He had nothing to say to her, and if he had, he might
have waited until dinner-time brought them together. But he felt like a
lost child, not seeing that figure in blue gingham—his eyes searched
for it hungrily, swept each new vista; he felt actually sick with
disappointment when moment after moment went by and there was
no sign of her down the lane, on the cliff road, or among the rocks.
He thought of nothing but the finding of her; Gabrielle in her blue
gingham seated by a pool, running along with Ben—just to find her
——
She came into the sitting room just before dinner, and David, who
was actually exhausted from the monotonous hammering of
thoughts about only her, dared not trust himself to look up as she
slipped into her chair. He was glancing over a new Atlantic; he
pretended that he had not heard Gay enter.
“It was young Doctor Ensicoe, the son,” said Gabrielle’s voice,
suddenly, quietly in the silence, to Aunt Flora. “I took him upstairs.
He says to watch, and let his father know if there seems to be any
pain or restlessness.”
If the words had been so many bombs they could scarcely have had
a more extraordinary effect upon David. He felt as if his heart had
given a great plunge, stopped short, raced on again madly; he felt as
if his mouth and throat were dry, a sort of weakness and vertigo that
were yet exquisitely pleasant seized him.
It was impossible for him to speak to this girl, or to look up, while this
state of affairs lasted. If she saw that he was nervous and unlike
himself, she must think what she would——! David could only try to
get a grip upon soul and body, and betray himself as little as
possible.
This moment was the end of all peace for him. For although he did
indeed presently hand his aunt the magazine with some brief
comment, and although dinner and the evening proceeded as usual,
he was beginning to suspect that his whole life had been changed
now, mysteriously changed—partly perhaps his own doing, through
that long-cherished dream of an imaginary scene with an imaginary
Gabrielle.
But no matter how it had come about. The blazing and inescapable
truth was that there was nothing else in the world for him but this
quiet, slender, serious, tawny-headed girl. He did not know what he
felt toward her, or whether the wild confusion of his senses might be
called anything so reasonable as feeling; she was simply in the
world, she was sitting in chairs, opening doors, speaking in that
incredibly thrilling voice, raising those extraordinary eyes—that was
enough.
David had never before been really in love. But he had thought he
loved Sylvia, and he did not put in that same category his feeling for
Gabrielle. This was nothing that could be classified or regulated;
regulate it, indeed, David thought, with an almost audible groan
when he came to this word in his thoughts; as well regulate raging
flames or rushing waters!
It devoured him with fever. He was unable to eat for excitement,
never happy one instant out of Gabrielle’s company, acutely
miserable when in it. He lay awake in the warm spring nights thinking
of what he had said to her during the past day, and as her looks and
words in reply—such quiet words, such rare looks!—came back
before his vision, he would feel his heart stop, and his breath would
fail him with sheer fear and terror and hope and agony of doubt.
He sat at breakfast, pushing about the toast that was so much chalk
and plaster to his palate, scalding himself with his coffee one
morning, forgetting it entirely the next. His eyes never left Gabrielle.
She would glance up, passing him perhaps the omelette that he
would not even see, much less taste, and at his awkward laugh,
muttered words, and hastily averted look she would perhaps colour
confusedly. If she directed a simple question to him, he found it
maddeningly difficult to answer.
“I beg pardon——?” He had to leave the sentence hanging rawly. He
could not say her name.
“I asked you: did Margret say anything about medicines?”
“I—I—you mean on Sunday——?”
“No,” Gay would say, astonished at his manner. “I mean this
morning, five minutes ago.”
“Oh, I see—I see! Did—who? What?”
“Never mind. I’ll ask her,” Gay would finish, deciding that David must
be absolutely absorbed in the picture he was painting. David would
watch her go from the room, gracious, sweet, beautiful in her cotton
gown. All the spring seemed only a setting for her loveliness, the
lilacs and the blue sky, the sunshine and the drifting snow of fruit
blossoms.
It was this wonderful, this incomparable woman, he would remind
himself scathingly, that he had affronted with his insultingly casual
offer of marriage a week ago. No wonder the girl had put a definite
distance between them since! But he knew he would ask her again,
simply because there was no other conceivable thing for him to do.
His dream of the little farmhouse in Keyport returned now, but it was
a dream infinitely enhanced, and haloed by all the colours of the
rainbow. David could hardly bear the poignant sweetness of the
thought of Gay as his wife; Gay perhaps chatting over a late
breakfast on the porch with him; Gay travelling with him, and looking
over a steamer rail as the blue mountains of Sicily or the green
shores of the Isle of Wight slowly formed themselves on the horizon.
Once, when he was quietly painting, the thought of Gay with a child
in her arms came to him suddenly, and David felt his eyes sting and
the palms of his hands suddenly moist.
She was leagues away from him now, never with him when she
could avoid it, never alone with him at all. She was apparently living
a life of her own, coming and going gently and pleasantly, answering,
listening, but no longer the Gabrielle he had known a few months
ago.
And ten days after his return she was still further removed by her
mother’s death. Lily died quite peacefully one sweet May evening,
after an afternoon when she had seemed more normal than for
years. She had had for some days the idea that Gabrielle was her
old nurse, Miss Rosecrans, and made all her few demands of the girl
under that name. But at the very end, when Gabrielle was kneeling
beside her, with sorrowful, tear-brimmed eyes fixed upon the
yellowed little sunken face, Lily opened her eyes, fixed them
affectionately upon Flora, and asked feebly:
“Is this big girl my baby, Flo?”
“This is Gabrielle, Lily,” Flora said, clearing her throat.
Lily smiled with ineffable satisfaction at Gabrielle, and said
contentedly:
“Gabrielle. Isn’t it a pretty name? Do you like it? Did Roger like it?”
“I am going to say some prayers, Mother,” Gabrielle said, smiling
with wet cheeks, and with the salt taste of her own tears in her
mouth. Lily opened her eyes briefly, for the last time.
“Ah, I wish you would!” she said, with a smile and a deep sigh. And
she never moved or spoke again.
Two days later she was buried in the little plot within Wastewater’s
wide walls; the doctor, Flora weeping on David’s arm, Gay standing
straight and alone, and the awestruck maids were all her little funeral
train. It was Flora who seemed to feel the loss most, and with
surprising force; she seemed broken and aged, and it was for
Gabrielle to comfort her.
“I never supposed it would be so,” Flora repeated, over and over.
“That I would be the last—that Will and Roger and Lily would all be
gone before me!”
She would not stay in bed; Flora did not belong to the generation
that can eat and read and idle comfortably under covers. She was up
at her usual hour upon every one of the sweet, warm fragrant
mornings, when dawn crept in across the sea and the wet garden
sent up a very bouquet of perfumes through the open upstairs
windows. But she was silent and sad, and when Sylvia’s long-
awaited happy Commencement came, Flora was really too ill to go,
although she refused to concede to herself the luxury even of one
hour upon a couch, or the satisfaction of a single visit from the
doctor. David went up alone to the Commencement, and brought
Sylvia back with him. It was on that last day of her college life, a day
of flowers and white gowns, crowds, music, laughter, and tears, that
Sylvia found time to say to him pleadingly:
“David dear, my letter didn’t hurt you terribly?”
“I’d had something of the same feeling myself, you know,” he
reminded her. “Our letters crossed. You remember I said just what
you did, that it must either be an engagement or nothing, and that I
knew you would prefer it to be nothing just at this time.”
“Oh, yes!” responded Sylvia, narrowing her eyes, and speaking a
little vaguely. And David saw that while her letter, a letter written in a
charmingly frank fashion, and asking please—please to be free from
any engagement to him for a little while, had made a romantic sort of
impression upon her mind, his had scarcely registered upon her
consciousness at all. In other words, Sylvia was her own whole world
just at the moment, and the only things that mattered were her own
moods, her own ideas, her own individual desires.
The highly distinguished and honourable conclusion of her school
days, her youth, her beauty, her sense of closely impending power
could not but be deliciously stimulating to a nature like Sylvia’s. She
and David stopped two nights in Boston, Sylvia with a schoolmate,
David at a hotel, met on the languid, warm spring mornings to
explore the quiet shops and to discuss various plans for Wastewater:
electric lighting for Wastewater, a furnace for Wastewater, a hot-
water system for Wastewater. There was a delightful new, red, slim
checkbook; there was an imposing balance at the bank. Sylvia
bought herself one or two charming frocks as a sort of promissory
note of the financial independence that was so soon to be, and she
did not forget a broad lacy black hat for dear little Gabrielle, who had
had such a sad year, and a lacy thin black afternoon gown to match
it.
Gabrielle, when they reached Wastewater, met them all in white, and
Sylvia gave her a warm kiss and murmured just the right phrase of
sympathy as they went upstairs to find her mother. The gardens
were exquisite in early June bloom; the whole house smelled of
roses and summer weather; birds were flashing in and out of the
cherry trees; John was on his knees beside the strawberry bed.
But Flora sat upstairs before the cold grate, with the windows shut,
and her first words to Sylvia were broken by tears. Sylvia comforted
her with a sort of loving impatience in her voice.
“Mamma, darling! Is this reasonable! Isn’t it after all a blessed
solution for poor little Aunt Lily?”
“But I never thought it would be so!” Flora faltered, blowing her nose,
sniffling, straightening her glasses with all the unlovely awkwardness
of hard-fought grief. And immediately she regained her composure,
almost with a sort of shame, and David could say truthfully to Sylvia
a little later, when the three young persons were wandering through
the garden, that Sylvia had done her mother good already.
Sylvia indeed did them all good; she was delighted with everything,
appreciative and pleasant with the maids, and sisterly in her manner
toward Gabrielle. David found her sensible and clever in the
business conferences they had on the dreamy summer mornings in
the little office downstairs, where perhaps the first mistress of
Wastewater had transacted her business also, more than a hundred
years before—the business of superintending stores and soap-
making, weaving and dyeing, bartering in cocks and geese and the
selling of lambs. Sylvia waived all unnecessary matters, was brightly
receptive, and in every way businesslike and yet confident in David’s
judgment. Later she would debate with John about fruit, with Trude
about preserving, with Daisy about tablecloths, all in her own
pleasantly unhesitating yet considerate manner. It was evident that
she would assume her responsibilities thoroughly, yet with no jarring
and disrupting of the accustomed course of things.
In one of the late evenings when Sylvia came into Gay’s room to
brush her hair and to gossip, Gay broached her plan of going to a
Boston convent as soon as the hot weather should be over, to look
about her and find some sort of work. Sylvia listened thoughtfully and
looked up with a kindly smile.
“You’d be happier so, Gabrielle?”
“I think so,” Gay answered.
“What is it?” Sylvia questioned, kindly. “Wastewater too lonely?”
Gabrielle did not answer immediately, except by a quick shake of her
head. Presently she said, a little thickly:
“No, I love Wastewater more than any other place in the world.”
“Well,” said Sylvia, musing, “if you must try your wings, by all means
try them! Be sure we’ll all be interested in making it a success, Gay.
Mamma and I may go abroad in the fall—it isn’t definite, of course,
but I think she would like it, if all my various anchors here can be
managed without me.”
Gabrielle had been burning, fearing, hating to ask it; she found
herself saying now, with a little unconquerable incoherence:
“Then you and David——?”
“David and I,” answered Sylvia, with a quick, mysterious smile, “are
quite the best friends in the world!”
Did she know? David, in asking her to free him, had told her how
much? Gay looked at her cousin through the mirror, and her face
blazed. But Sylvia, curling the end of her long braid thoughtfully
about her finger, was unsuspicious. Gay wondered if she could be
acting.
“I don’t mind telling you, dear,” said Sylvia, presently, “that I wrote
David in the spring, feeling that our understanding was an injustice to
us both, and asked him to be just my good friend—my best friend,”
Sylvia interrupted herself to say, with a little emotion, “for to me he is
the finest man in the world!—for a little while longer. And as he has
been my obedient knight ever since I was a little curly-headed
despot in short frocks, of course he obeyed me,” she ended, with a
little whimsical glance and smile. And now, having gotten to her feet,
and come over to the mirror, she laid one arm affectionately about
Gabrielle’s shoulder. “I love that bright thick hair of yours,” Sylvia
said.
Suddenly Gabrielle felt young, crude, hateful because she did not
adore Sylvia, contemptible because she suffered in seeing that this
other girl’s position and happy destiny it was to be always admired,
always superb. Why couldn’t she—why couldn’t she school herself to
think of Sylvia as rich and beautiful and adored, and married to
David, and mistress of Wastewater? Weren’t there other men, other
fortunes, other friends to be won? Gay laid Sylvia’s smooth hand
against her cheek, and said like a penitent child:
“You’re awfully good! I am grateful to you.”
“That’s right!” Sylvia said, laughing. And she went upon her serene
way, to brush her teeth and open her windows and jump into bed
with her book of essays, always adequate and always sweet.
Gabrielle determined, as she usually determined at night, to begin
again to-morrow, to force herself to meet Sylvia’s friendship and
affection, David’s friendship and affection, with what was only, after
all, a normal, natural response. Why must she tremble, suspect,
watch, turn red and turn white in this maddening and idiotic manner,
when these two older and infinitely superior persons only wanted her
to be pleasant, natural, friendly, as they were? The younger girl felt
as if she were living over a powder magazine; at David’s most casual
word her throat would thicken, and her words become either
incredibly foolish or stupidly heavy; and when he and Sylvia were
together and out of her hearing, her soul and mind were in a tumult
beside which actual bodily pain would have been a relief.
When they cheerfully asked her to join them on their way down for
an afternoon of idling or reading on the shore, Gay put herself—as
she furiously felt—in a ridiculous position by gruffly refusing. The
two, and Aunt Flora, spectacled and armed with a book, would look
at her in astonishment.
“Oh, if Aunt Flora’s going——” Gay might stammer, in her
embarrassment using the very phrase she meant not to use. And
Sylvia’s pretty mouth would twitch at the corners, and she would
exchange a demure look with David, as if to say—Gabrielle fancied
—“Isn’t she a deliciously gauche little creature? She is trying to clear
the tracks for our affair!”
If, on the other hand, Gabrielle came innocently from half an hour
among the sweet warmth and flying colour and the buzzing of bees
about the sweet-pea vines, to meet David and Sylvia in the path, she
might hear Sylvia say lightly and good-temperedly—and might lie
awake in the nights remembering it with a thumping heart and
cheeks hot with shame!—“Not now, David. We can discuss this
later!”
On a certain burning July day, several weeks after Sylvia’s
homecoming, all four Flemings had planned to drive into
Crowchester in the new car, for some shopping. Sylvia’s birthday
was but a week ahead, and she was to have a house party for the
event. To-day she had a neat list: gimp, enamel, candles, glue,
lemonade glasses, Japanese lanterns? (with a question mark) and
charcoal? (with another). For there were to be a beach picnic and a
garden fête next week.
Just before they started, however, Gay begged to be excused. She
was feeling the heat of the day, she said, and wanted to spend the
afternoon quietly down on the shore with her Italian grammar.
Instantly, without premeditation, David felt himself growing excited
again—here was his chance at last for a talk alone with her; a
chance that the last few weeks had not afforded him before. The
sudden hope of it put him almost into a betraying confusion of
excuses; but Sylvia, dismissing him amiably, fancied she knew the
cause—and an entirely different cause—of his defection.
For David was in no mood to dance attendance upon his pretty elder
cousin this particular afternoon. He had driven the new car down
from Boston the week before with real enjoyment; it was a beautiful
car, and David, who was not after all an experienced driver, was
rather proud of his safe handling of it. But since it had been at
Wastewater Sylvia had shown a strong preference for Walker’s
driving. Walker was a nice young fellow of perhaps nineteen, a
newcomer, who was to act as chauffeur and to help John with
errands, and perhaps in September, when the road was less used, to
teach Sylvia to drive.
For some obscure reason it angered David to have to sit idle beside
the pleasantly youthful and amiable Walker and hear Sylvia’s clear-
cut directions. He would rather, he thought ungraciously, he would
far rather walk.
And to-day, when Gabrielle was graciously excused by Sylvia, he
determined to stay at home, too. Of course this might mean that
Aunt Flora would also stay, David reflected, to walk up and down
above the sea, leaning upon his arm in her new feebleness and
sadness.
But for once Aunt Flora made no sign of abandoning the trip, and
although Sylvia looked at him steadily, she also offered no
objections. David could hardly believe that he was actually free, after
these crowded weeks, to walk after Gabrielle through the garden,
with no prospect of an immediate interruption.
His heart beat with a quite disproportionate emotion. If any one had
told David Fleming a few weeks ago that the chance to follow his
lonely little cousin down to the shore and to have a few minutes of
talk alone with her would have made his temples hammer and his
breath come quick with sheer emotion, he might have laughed.
But he was shaking to-day, and there was a drumming in his ears.
Since Sylvia’s return he had had no such opportunity for a talk.
Gabrielle was down in a favourite cranny of the great rocks; the blue
tides swelling at her feet. David saw her black hat first, flung down
on the strip of beach, then the slender white-shod feet, braced
against a boulder, and then the white figure, with the tawny head
bent over a book.
It was shady here, for this particular group of gray water-worn stones
faced east, and the cliff was at her back. But there was a soft
shimmer of light even in the shadow, and across the rocks above
and behind her head the reflected sunshine on the sea ran in little
unceasing ripples of brightness. She started as David came across
the strand, and put her hand to her heart with a quite simple gesture
of surprise.
“David, I thought you went with Sylvia!”
“Too hot,” he answered, briefly, flinging himself down at her feet and
falling into contemplation of a weed-fringed pool that was patiently
awaiting the tide. The water brimmed it, and grasses opened and
moved mysteriously, showing exquisite colours as they spread. The
ebb emptied it again, and the ribbons of grass lay lifeless against the
wet and twinkling mosaic of life that coated the rocks. A steamer
going by like a toy boat on the blue water ten miles away sent out a
mild little plume of sound.
“‘Mia sorella ha una casa,’” David stated, with a careless glance at
the book. “I had three Italian lessons once, and I know that!”
Gabrielle laughed, a little fluttered laugh, and extended to him a
white hand and a stout volume, held title out.
“‘Anna Karenina,’” David read aloud, with a reproachful look. “Oh,
you Gay deceiver!”
He had sometimes called her that in her babyhood, years ago, and
he fancied there was a little softening shine, like a flurry of wind on
gray water, in her eyes when she heard it now. But she gave no
other sign.
“Is it the first time you have read it?” David asked, conventionally,
wondering where his dear, confident companion of the January days
had gone, and whether this new dignity and aloofness in Gabrielle
were only a passing effect of sorrow, and of the displeasure his most