In the warming glow of the fire and their new-found intimacy they had several more brandies, smoked endless cigarettes, and talked on and on for hours, forgetting the passage of time. It was the kind of talk which, freed of all constricting traces of self-consciousness, lets down the last barriers of natural reserve and lays bare the souls of men. George’s host was in high spirits and told the most engaging stories about himself, his wife, and the good life they were making here in the isolated freedom of their rural retreat. He made it seem not only charming and attractive, full of wholesome country pleasures, but altogether desirable and enviable. It was an idyllic picture that he painted—such a picture of rugged independence, with its simple joys and solid comforts, as has at one time or another haunted the imagination of almost every man in the turmoil, confusion, and uncertainties of the complex world we live in. But as George listened to his host and felt the nostalgic attractiveness of the images that were unfolded before him, he also felt a disquieting sense of something else behind it all which never quite got into the picture, but which lent colourings of doubt and falsity to every part of it.
For Rickenbach Reade, George began to see after a while, was one of those men who are unequal to the conditions of modern life, and who have accordingly retreated from the tough realities which they could not face. The phenomenon was not anew one to George. He had met and observed a number of people like this. And it was now evident to him that they formed another group or family or race, another of those little worlds which have no boundary lines of country or of place. One found a surprising number of them in America, particularly in the more sequestered purlieus of Boston, Cambridge, and Harvard University. One found them also in New York’s Greenwich Village, and when even that makeshift Little Bohemia became too harsh for them, they retired into a kind of desiccated country life.
For all such people the country became the last refuge. They bought little farms in Connecticut or Vermont, and renovated the fine old houses with just a shade too much of whimsey or of restrained good taste. Their quaintness was a little too quaint, their simplicity a little too subtle, and on the old farms that they bought no utilitarian seeds were sown and no grain grew. They went in for flowers, and in time they learned to talk very knowingly about the rarer varieties. They loved the simple life, of course. They loved the good feel of “the earth”. They were just a shade too conscious of “the earth”, and George had heard them say, the women as well as the men, how much they loved to work in it.
And work in it they did. In spring they worked on their new rock garden, with the assistance of only one other man—some native of the region who had hired himself out for wages, and whose homely virtues and more crotchety characteristics they quietly observed and told amusing stories about to their friends. Their wives worked in the earth, too, attired in plain yet not unattractive frocks, and they even learned to clip the hedges, wearing canvas gloves to protect their hands. These dainty and lovely creatures became healthily embrowned: their comely forearms took on a golden glow, their faces became warm with soaked-up sunlight, and sometimes they even had a soft, faint down of gold just barely visible above the cheek-bone. They were good to see.
In winter there were also things to do. The snows came down, and the road out to the main highway became impassable to cars for three weeks at a time. Not even the trucks of the A. & P. could get through. So for three whole weeks on end they had to plod their way out on foot, a good three-quarters of a mile, to lay in provisions. The days were full of other work as well. People in cities might think that country life was dull in winter, but that was because they simply did not know. The squire became a carpenter. He was working on his play, of course, but in between times he made furniture. It was good to be able to do something with one’s hands. He had a workshop fitted up in the old barn. There he had his studio, too, where he could carry on his intellectual labours undisturbed. The children were forbidden to go there. And every morning, after taking the children to school, the father could return to his barn-studio and have the whole morning free to get on with the play.