“‘Couldn’t do anything,’ he said.  ‘I’m a left-handed man.’”

How it delighted them!  I think it was the last speech of any sort he made that season.  A week or two later he went to Dublin, New Hampshire, for the summer—­this time to the Upton House, which had been engaged a year before, the Copley Greene place being now occupied by its owner.

CCXLVI

THE SECOND SUMMER AT DUBLIN

The Upton House stands on the edge of a beautiful beech forest some two or three miles from Dublin, just under Monadnock—­a good way up the slope.  It is a handsome, roomy frame-house, and had a long colonnaded veranda overlooking one of the most beautiful landscape visions on the planet:  lake, forest, hill, and a far range of blue mountains—­all the handiwork of God is there.  I had seen these things in paintings, but I had not dreamed that such a view really existed.  The immediate foreground was a grassy slope, with ancient, blooming apple-trees; and just at the right hand Monadnock rose, superb and lofty, sloping down to the panorama below that stretched away, taking on an ever deeper blue, until it reached that remote range on which the sky rested and the world seemed to end.  It was a masterpiece of the Greater Mind, and of the highest order, perhaps, for it had in it nothing of the touch of man.  A church spire glinted here and there, but there was never a bit of field, or stone wall, or cultivated land.  It was lonely; it was unfriendly; it cared nothing whatever for humankind; it was as if God, after creating all the world, had wrought His masterwork here, and had been so engrossed with the beauty of it that He had forgotten to give it a soul.  In a sense this was true, for He had not made the place suitable for the habitation of men.  It lacked the human touch; the human interest, and I could never quite believe in its reality.

The time of arrival heightened this first impression.  It was mid-May and the lilacs were prodigally in bloom; but the bright sunlight was chill and unnatural, and there was a west wind that laid the grass flat and moaned through the house, and continued as steadily as if it must never stop from year’s end to year’s end.  It seemed a spectral land, a place of supernatural beauty.  Warm, still, languorous days would come, but that first feeling of unreality would remain permanent.  I believe Jean Clemens was the only one who ever really loved the place.  Something about it appealed to her elemental side and blended with her melancholy moods.  She dressed always in white, and she was tall and pale and classically beautiful, and she was often silent, like a spirit.  She had a little retreat for herself farther up the mountain-side, and spent most of her days there wood-carving, which was her chief diversion.