A gaunt roaming figure of ennui and restlessness, Arnold appeared at the door of the pergola and with a petulant movement tore a brilliant autumn leaf to pieces as he lingered for a moment, listening moodily to the talk within. He refused with a grimace the chair to which Sylvia motioned him. "Lord, no! Hear 'em go it!" he said quite audibly and turned away to lounge back towards the house. Sylvia had had time to notice, somewhat absently, that he looked ill, as though he had a headache.
Mrs. Marshall-Smith glanced after him with misgiving, and, under cover of a brilliantly resounding passage at arms between Morrison and Page, murmured anxiously to Sylvia, "I wish Judith would give up her nonsense andmarryArnold!"
"Oh, they've only been engaged a couple of months," said Sylvia. "What's the hurry! She'll get her diploma in January. It'd be a pity to have her miss!"
Arnold's stepmother broke in rather impatiently, "If I were a girl engaged to Arnold, I'dmarryhim!"
"—the trouble with all you connoisseurs, Morrison, is that you're barking up the wrong tree. You take for granted, from your own tastes, when people begin to buy jade Buddhas and Zuloaga bull-fighters that they're wanting to surround themselves with beauty. Not much! It's the consciousness of money they want to surround themselves with!"
Morrison conceded part of this. "Oh, I grant you, there's a disheartening deal of imitation in this matter. But America's new to aesthetics. Don't despise beginnings because they're small!"
"A nettle leaf is small. But that's not the reason why it won't ever grow into an oak. Look here! A sheaf of winter grasses, rightly arranged in clear glass, has as much of the essence of beauty as a bronze vase of the Ming dynasty. I ask you just one question, How many people do you know who are capable of—"
The art-critic broke in: "Oh come! You're setting up an impossibly high standard of aesthetic feeling."
"I'm not presuming to do any such thing as setting up a standard! I'm just insisting that people who can't extract joy from the shadow pattern of a leafy branch on a gray wall, are liars if they claim to enjoy a fine Japanese print. What they enjoy in the print is the sense that they've paid a lot for it. In my opinion, there's no use trying to advance a step towards any sound aesthetic feeling tillsomestep is taken away from the idea of cost as the criterion of value about anything." He drew a long breath and went on, rather more rapidly than was his usual habit of speech: "I've a real conviction on that point. It's come to me of late years that one reason we haven't any national art is because we have too much magnificence. All our capacity for admiration is used up on the splendor of palace-like railway stations and hotels. Our national tympanum is so deafened by that blare of sumptuousness that we have no ears for the still, small voice of beauty. And perhaps," he paused, looking down absently at a crumb he rolled between his thumb and finger on the table, "it's possible that the time is ripening for a wider appreciation of another kind of beauty … that has little to do even with such miracles as the shadow of a branch on a wall."
Morrison showed no interest in this vaguely phrased hypothesis, and returned to an earlier contention: "You underestimate," he said, "the amount of education and taste and time it takes to arrange that simple-looking vase of grasses, to appreciate your leaf-shadows."
"All I'm saying is that your campaign of aesthetic education hasn't made the matter vital enough to people, to any people, not even to people who call themselves vastly aesthetic, so that theygivetime and effort and self-schooling to the acquisition of beauty. They not only want their money to do their dirty work for them, they try to make it do their fine living for them too, with a minimum of effort on their part. They want tobuybeauty, outright, with cash, and have it stay put, where they can get their fingers on it at any time, without bothering about it in the meantime. That's the way a Turk likes his women—same impulse exactly,"
"I've known a few Caucasians too …," Mrs. Marshall-Smith contributed a barbed point of malice to the talk.
Page laughed, appreciating her hit. "Oh, I mean Turk as a generic term." Sylvia, circling warily about the contestants, looking for a chance to make her presence felt, without impairing the masculine gusto with which they were monopolizing the center of the stage, tossed in a suggestion, "Was it Hawthorne's—it's a queer fancy like Hawthorne's—the idea of the miser, don't you remember, whose joy was to roll naked in his gold pieces?"
Page snatched up with a delighted laugh the metaphor she had laid in his hand. "Capital! Precisely! There's the thing in a nutshell. We twentieth century Midases have got beyond the simple taste of that founder of the family for the shining yellow qualities of money, but we love to wallow in it none the less. We like to put our feet on it, in the shape of rugs valued according to their cost, we like to eat it in insipid, out-of-season fruit and vegetables."
"Doesn't it occur to you," broke in Morrison, "that you may be attacking something that's a mere phase, an incident of transition?"
"Is anything ever anything else!" Page broke in to say.
Morrison continued, with a slight frown at the interruption, "America is simply emerging from the frontier condition of bareness, and it is only natural that one, or perhaps two generations must be sacrificed in order to attain a smooth mastery of an existence charged and enriched with possession." He gave the effect of quoting a paragraph from one of his lectures.
"Isn't the end of that 'transition,'" inquired Page, "usually simply that after one or two generations people grow dulled to everythingbutpossession and fancy themselves worthily occupied when they spend their lives regulating and caring for their possessions. I hate," he cried with sudden intensity, "I hate the very sound of the word!"
"Does you great credit, I'm sure," said Morrison, with a faint irony, a hidden acrimony, pricking, for an instant, an ugly ear through his genial manner.
Ever since the day of the fire, since Page had become a more and more frequent visitor in Lydford and had seen more and more of Sylvia, she had derived a certain amount of decidedly bad-tasting amusement from the fact of Morrison's animosity to the other man. But this was going too far. She said instantly, "Do you know, I've just thought what it is you all remind me of—I mean Lydford, and the beautiful clothes, and nobody bothering about anything but tea and ideas and knowing the right people. I knew it made me think of something else, and now I know—it's a Henry James novel!"
Page took up her lead instantly, and said gravely, putting himselfbeside her as another outsider: "Well, of course, that's their ideal.That's what theytryto be like—at least to talk like James people.But it's not always easy. The vocabulary is so limited."
"Limited!" cried Mrs. Marshall-Smith. "There are more words in a HenryJames novel than in any dictionary!"
"Oh yes,wordsenough!" admitted Page, "but all about the same sort of thing. It reminds me of the seminarists in Rome, who have to use Latin for everything. They can manage predestination and vicarious atonement like a shot, but when it comes to ordering somebody to call them for the six-twenty train to Naples they're lost. Now, you can talk about your bric-à-brac in Henry-Jamesese, you can take away your neighbor's reputation by subtle suggestion, you can appreciate a fine deed of self-abnegation, if it's not too definite! I suppose a man could even make an attenuated sort of love in the lingo, but I'll be hanged if I see how anybody could order a loaf of bread,"
"One might do without bread, possibly?" suggested Morrison, pressing the tips of his beautiful fingers together.
"By Jove," cried Page, in hearty assent, "I've a notion that lots of times they do!"
This was getting nowhere. Mrs. Marshall-Smith put her hand to the helm, and addressed herself to Morrison with a plain reminder of the reason for the grotesqueness of his irritability. "Where'sMollykeeping herself nowadays?" she inquired. "She hasn't come over with you, to tea, for ever so long. The pergola isn't itself without her sunny head."
"Molly is a grain of sand in a hurricane, nowadays," said Morrison seriously. "It seems that the exigencies of divine convention decree that a girl who is soon to be married belongs neither to herself, to her family, to her fiancé—oh, least of all to her fiancé—but heart and soul and body to a devouring horde of dressmakers and tailors and milliners and hairdressers and corsetières and petticoat specialists and jewelers and hosiery experts and—"
They were all laughing at the interminable defile of words proceeding with a Spanish gravity, and Mrs. Marshall-Smith broke in, "I don't hear anything about house-furnishers."
"No," said Morrison, "the house-furnisher's name is F. Morrison, and he has no show until after the wedding."
"Whatareyour plans?" asked Mrs. Marshall-Smith.
"Nothing very definite except the great Date. That's fixed for the twenty-first."
"Oh, so soon … less than three weeks from now!"
Morrison affected to feel a note of disapproval in her voice, and said with his faint smile, "You can hardly blame me for not wishing to delay."
"Oh, noblame!" she denied his inference. "After all it's over a month since the engagement was announced, and who knows how much longer before that you and Molly knew about it. No. I'm not one who believes in long engagements. The shorter the better."
Sylvia saw an opportunity to emerge with an appearance of ease from a silence that might seem ungracious. It was an enforced manoeuver with which the past weeks had made her wearily familiar. "Aunt Victoria's hitting at Arnold and Judith over your head," she said to Morrison. "It's delicious, the way Tantine shows herself, for all her veneer of modernity, entirely nineteen century in her impatience of Judith's work. Now that there's a chance to escape from it into the blessed haven of idle matrimony, she can't see why Judith doesn't give up her lifetime dream and marry Arnold tomorrow."
Somewhat to her surprise, her attempt at playfulness had no notable success. The intent of her remarks received from her aunt and Morrison the merest formal recognition of a hasty, dim smile, and with one accord they looked at once in another direction. "And after the wedding?" Mrs. Marshall-Smith inquired—"or is that a secret?"
"Oh no, when one belongs to Molly's exalted class or is about to be elevated into it, nothing is secret. I'm quite sure that the society editor of theHeraldknows far better than I the names of the hotels in Jamaica we're to frequent."
"Oh! Jamaica! How … how … original!" Mrs. Marshall-Smith cast about her rather desperately for a commendatory adjective.
"Yes, quite so, isn't it?" agreed Morrison. "It's Molly's idea. Sheisoriginal, you know. It's one of her greatest charms. She didn't want to go to Europe because there is so much to see there, to do. She said she wanted a honeymoon and not a personally conducted trip."
They all laughed again, and Sylvia said: "HowlikeMolly! How clever! Nobody does her thinking for her!"
"The roads in Jamaica are excellent for motoring, too, I hear," addedMorrison. "That's another reason, of course."
Page gave a great laugh. "Well, as Molly's cousin, let me warn you! Molly driving a car in Jamaica will be like Pavlova doing a bacchante on the point of a needle! You'll have to keep a close watch on her to see that she doesn't absentmindedly dash across the island and jump off the bank right on into the ocean."
"Where does F. Morrison, house-furnishing-expert, come in?" asked Mrs.Marshall-Smith.
"After the wedding, after Jamaica," said Morrison. "We're to come back to New York and for a few months impose on the good nature of Molly's grandfather's household, while we struggle with workmenet al. The Montgomery house on Fifth Avenue, that's shut up for so many years,—ever since the death of Molly's parents,—is the one we've settled on. It's very large, you know. It has possibilities. I have a plan for remodeling it and enlarging it with a large inner court, glass-roofed—something slightly Saracenic about the arches—and what is now a suite of old-fashioned parlors on the north side is to be made into a long gallery. There'll be an excellent light for paintings. I've secured from Duveen a promise for some tapestries I've admired for a long time—Beauvais, not very old, Louis XVII—but excellent in color. Those for the staircase …"
He spoke with no more animation than was his custom, with no more relish than was seemly; his carefully chosen words succeeded each other in their usual exquisite precision, no complacency showed above the surface; his attitude was, as always, composed of precisely the right proportion of dignity and ease; but as he talked, some untarnished instinct in Sylvia shrank away in momentary distaste, the first she had ever felt for him.
Mrs. Marshall-Smith evidently did not at all share this feeling. "Oh, what a house that will be!" she cried, lost in forecasting admiration. "You!with a free hand! A second house of Jacques Coeur!" Sylvia stood up, rather abruptly. "I think I'll go for a walk beside the river," she said, reaching for her parasol.
"May I tag along?" said Page, strolling off beside her with the ease of familiarity.
Sylvia turned to wave a careless farewell to the two thus left somewhat unceremoniously in the pergola. She was in brown corduroy with suede leather sailor collar and broad belt, a costume which brought out vividly the pure, clear coloring of her face. "Good-bye," she called to them with a pointedly casual accent, nodding her gleaming head.
"She's averypretty girl, isn't she?" commented Mrs. Marshall-Smith. Morrison, looking after the retreating figures, agreed with her briefly. "Yes, very. Extraordinarily perfect specimen of her type." His tone was dry.
Mrs. Marshall-Smith looked with annoyance across the stretch of lawn to the house. "I think I would better go to see where Arnold is," she said. Her tone seemed to signify more to the man than her colorless words. He frowned and said, "Oh, is Arnold …?"
She gave a fatigued gesture. "No—not yet—but for the last two or three days …"
He began impatiently, "Why can't you get him off this time before he…."
"An excellent idea," she broke in, with some impatience of her own."But slightly difficult of execution."
Under the scarlet glory of frost-touched maples, beside the river strolled Sylvia, conscious of looking very well and being admired; but contrary to the age-old belief about her sex and age, the sensation of looking very well and being admired by no means filled the entire field of her consciousness. In fact, the corner occupied by the sensation was so small that occasional efforts on her part to escape to it from the less agreeable contents of her mind were lamentable failures. Aloud, in terms as felicitous as she could make them, she was commenting on the beauty of the glass-smooth river, with the sumptuously colored autumn trees casting down into it the imperial gold and crimson of their reflections. Silently she was struggling to master and dominate and suppress a confusion of contradictory mental processes. At almost regular intervals, like a hollow stroke on a brazen gong, her brain resounded to the reverberations of "The wedding is on the twenty-first." And each time that she thrust that away, there sprang up with a faint hissing note of doubt and suspicion, "Why does Aunt Victoria want Arnold married?" A murmur, always drowned out but incessantly recurring, ran: "What about Father and Mother? What about their absurd, impossible, cruel, unreal, and beautiful standards?" Contemptible little echoes from the silly self-consciousness of the adolescence so recently left behind her … "I must think of something clever to say. I must try to seem different and original and independent and yet must attract," mingled with an occasional fine sincerity of appreciation and respect for the humanity of the man beside her. Like a perfume borne in gusts came reaction to the glorious color about her. Quickly recurring and quickly gone, a sharp cymbal-clap of alarm … "What shall I do if Austin Page now … today … or tomorrow … tells me …!" And grotesquely, the companion cymbal on which this smote, gave forth an antiphonal alarm of, "What shall I do if he does not!" While, unheard of her conscious ear, but coloring everything with its fundamental note of sincerity, rose solemnly from the depths of her heart the old cry of desperate youth, "What am I to do with my life?"
No, the eminently successful brown corduroy, present though it was to the mind of the handsome girl wearing it, was hardly the sure and sufficient rock of refuge which tradition would have had it.
With an effort she turned her attention from this confused tumult in her ears, and put out her hand, rather at random, for an introduction to talk. "You spoke, back there in the pergola, of another kind of beauty—I didn't know what you meant." He answered at once, with his usual direct simplicity, which continued to have for Sylvia at this period something suspiciously like the calmness of a reigning sovereign who is above being embarrassed, who may speak, without shamefacedness, of anything, even of moral values, that subject tabu in sophisticated conversation. "Ah, just a notion of mine that perhaps all this modern ferment of what's known as 'social conscience' or 'civic responsibility,' isn't a result of the sense of duty, but of the old, old craving for beauty."
Sylvia looked at him, astonished. "Beauty?"
"Why yes, beauty isn't only a matter of line and color, is it? There's the desire for harmony, for true proportions, for grace and suavity, for nobility of movement. Perhaps the lack of those qualities is felt in human lives as much as on canvases … at least perhaps it may be felt in the future."
"It's an interesting idea," murmured Sylvia, "but I don't quite see what it means, concretely, as applied to our actual America."
He meditated, looking, as was his habit when walking, up at the trees above them. "Well, let's see. I think I mean that perhaps our race, not especially inspired in its instinct for color and external form, may possibly be fumbling toward an art of living. Why wouldn't it be an art to keep your life in drawing as well as a mural decoration?" He broke off to say, laughing, "I bet you the technique would be quite as difficult to acquire," and went on again, thoughtfully: "In this modern maze of terrible closeness of inter-relation, to achieve a life that's happy and useful and causes no undeserved suffering to the untold numbers of other lives which touch it—isn't there an undertaking which needs the passion for harmony and proportion? Isn't there a beauty as a possible ideal of aspiration for a race that probably never could achieve a Florentine or Japanese beauty of line?" He cast this out casually, as an idea which had by chance been brought up to the top by the current of the talk, and showed no indication to pursue it further when Sylvia only nodded her head. It was one of the moments when she heard nothing but the brazen clangor of "the wedding is on the twenty-first," and until the savage constriction around her heart had relaxed she had not breath to speak. But that passed again, and the two sauntered onward, in the peaceable silence which was one of the great new pleasures which Page was able to give her. It now seemed like a part of the mellow ripeness of the day.
They had come to a bend in the slowly flowing river, where, instead of torch-bright maples and poplars, rank upon rank of somber pines marched away to the summit of a steeply ascending foothill. The river was clouded dark with their melancholy reflections. On their edge, overhanging the water, stood a single sumac, a standard-bearer with a thousand little down-drooping flags of crimson.
"Oh," said Sylvia, smitten with admiration. She sat down on a rock partly because she wanted to admire at her leisure, partly because she was the kind of a girl who looks well sitting on a rock; and as she was aware of this latter motive, she felt a qualm of self-scorn. What a cheap vein of commonness was revealed in her—in every one—by the temptation of a great fortune! Morrison had succumbed entirely. She was nowadays continually detecting in herself motives which made her sick.
Page stretched his great length on the dry leaves at her feet. Any other man would have rolled a cigarette. It was one of his oddities that he never smoked. Sylvia looked down at his thoughtful, clean face and reflected wonderingly that he seemed the only person not warped by money. Was it because he had it, or was it because he was a very unusual person?
He was looking partly at the river, at the pines, at the flaming tree, and partly at the human embodiment of the richness and color of autumn before him. After a time Sylvia said: "There's Cassandra. She's the only one who knows of the impending doom. She's trying to warn the pines." It had taken her some moments to think of this.
Page accepted it with no sign that he considered it anything remarkable, with the habit of a man for whom people produced their best: "She's using some very fine language for her warning, but like some other fine language it's a trifle misapplied. She forgets that no doom hangs over the pines.She'sthe fated one. They're safe enough."
Sylvia clasped her hands about her knees and looked across the dark water at the somber trees. "And yet they don't seem to be very cheerful about it." It was her opinion that they were talking very cleverly.
"Perhaps," suggested Page, rolling over to face the river—"perhaps she's not prophesying doom at all, but blowing a trumpet-peal of exultation over her own good fortune. The pines may be black with envy of her."
Sylvia enjoyed this rather macabre fancy with all the zest of healthful youth, secure in the conviction of its own immortality. "Yes, yes, life's ever so much harder than death."
Page dissented with a grave irony from the romantic exaggeration of this generalization. "I don't suppose the statistics as to the relative difficulty of life and death are really very reliable."
Sylvia perceived that she was being, ever so delicately, laughed at, and tried to turn her remark so that she could carry it off. "Oh, I don't mean for those who die, but those who are left know something about it, I imagine. My mother always said that the encounter with death is the great turning-point in the lives of those who live on. She said you might miss everything else irrevocable and vital—falling in love, having children, accomplishing anything—but that sooner or later you have to reckon with losing somebody dear to you." She spoke with an academic interest in the question.
"I should think," meditated Page, taking the matter into serious consideration, "that the vitalness of even that experience would depend somewhat on the character undergoing it. I've known some temperaments of a proved frivolity which seemed to have passed through it without any great modifications. But then I know nothing about it personally. I lost my father before I could remember him, and since then I haven't happened to have any close encounter with such loss. My mother, you know, is very much alive."
"Well, I haven't any personal experience with death in my immediate circle either," said Sylvia. "But I wasn't brought up with the usual cult of the awfulness of it. Father was always anxious that we children should feel it something as natural as breathing—you are dipped up from the great river of consciousness, and death only pours you back. If you've been worth living, there are more elements of fineness in humanity."
Page nodded. "Yes, that's what they all say nowadays. Personal immortality is as out of fashion as big sleeves."
"Do you believe it?" asked Sylvia, seeing the talk take an intimate turn, "or are you like me, and don't know at all what you do believe?" If she had under this pseudo-philosophical question a veiled purpose analogous to that of the less subtle charmer whose avowed expedient is to get "a man to talk about himself" the manoeuver was eminently successful.
"I've never had the least chance to think about it," he said, sitting up, "because I've always been so damnably beset by the facts of living. I know I am not the first of my race to feel convinced that his own problems are the most complicated, but …"
"Yours!" cried Sylvia, genuinely astonished.
"And one of the hardships of my position," he told her at once with a playful bitterness, "is that everybody refuses to believe in the seriousness of it. Because my father, after making a great many bad guesses as to the possible value of mining stock in Nevada, happened to make a series of good guesses about the value of mining stock in Colorado, it is assumed that all questions are settled for me, that I can joyously cultivate my garden, securely intrenched in the certainty that this is the best possible of all possible worlds,"
"Oh yes—labor unions—socialism—I.W.W.," Sylvia murmured vaguely, unable, in spite of her intelligence, to refrain from marking, by a subsidence of interest, her instinctive feeling that those distant questions could not in the nature of things be compared to present, personal complications.
"No—no—!" he protested. "That's no go! I've tried for five years now to shove it out of sight on some one of those shelves. I've learned all the arguments on both sides. I can discuss on both sides of those names as glibly as any other modern quibbler. I can prove the rights of all those labels or I can prove the wrongs of them, according to the way my dinner is digesting. What stays right there, what I never can digest (if you'll pardon an inelegant simile that's just occurred to me), a lump I never can either swallow entirely down or get up out of my throat, is the fact that there are men, hundreds of men, thousands of men, working with picks underground all day, every day, all their lives, and that part of their labor goes to provide me with the wherewithal to cultivate my taste, to pose as a patron of the arts, to endow promising pianists—to go through all the motions suitable to that position to which it has pleased Providence to call me. It sticks in my crop that my only connection with the entire business was to give myself the trouble to be born my father's son."
"But youdowork!" protested Sylvia. "You work on your farm here. You run all sorts of lumbering operations in this region. The first time I saw you, you certainly looked less like the traditional idea of a predatory coal-operator." She laughed at the recollection.
"Oh yes, I work. When my undigested lump gets too painful I try to work it off—but what I do bears the same relation to real sure-enough work that playing tennis does to laying brick. But such as it is, it's real satisfaction I get out of my minute Vermont holdings. They come down to me from my farmer great-grandfather who held the land by working it himself. There's no sore spot there. But speak of Colorado or coal—and you see me jump with the same shooting twinge you feel when the dentist's probe reaches a nerve. An intelligent conscience is a luxury a man in my position can't afford to have." He began with great accuracy to toss small stones at a log showing above the surface of the water.
Sylvia, reverting to a chance remark, now said: "I never happened to hear you speak of your mother before. Does she ever come to Lydford?"
He shook his head. "No, she vibrates between the Madison Avenue houseand the Newport one. She's very happy in those two places. She's Mr.Sommerville's sister, you know. She's one of Morrison's devotees too.She collects under his guidance."
"Collects?" asked Sylvia, a little vaguely.
"Oh, it doesn't matter much what—the instinct, the resultant satisfaction are the same. As a child, it's stamps, or buttons, or corks, later on—As a matter of fact, it's lace that my mother collects. She specializes in Venetian lace—the older the better, of course. The connection with coal-mines is obvious. But after all, her own fortune, coming mostly from the Sommerville side, is derived from oil. The difference is great!"
"Do you live with her?" asked Sylvia.
"My washing is said to be done in New York," he said seriously. "I believe that settles the question of residence for a man."
"Oh, how quaint!" said Sylvia, laughing. Then with her trained instinct for contriving a creditable exit before being driven to an enforced one by flagging of masculine interest, she rose and looked at her watch.
"Oh, don't go!" he implored her. "It's so beautiful here—we never were so—who knows when we'll ever again be in so …"
Sylvia divined with one of her cymbal-claps that he had meant, perhaps, that very afternoon to—She felt a dissonant clashing of triumph and misgiving. She thought she decided quite coolly, quite dryly, that pursuit always lent luster to the object pursued; but in reality she did not at all recognize the instinct which bade her say, turning her watch around on her wrist: "It's quite late. I don't think I'd better stay longer. Aunt Victoria likes dinner promptly." She turned to go.
He took his small defeat with his usual imperturbable good nature, in which Sylvia not infrequently thought she detected a flavor of the unconscious self-assurance of the very rich and much-courted man. He scrambled to his feet now promptly, and fell into step with her quick-treading advance. "You're right, of course. There's no need to be grasping. There's tomorrow—and the day after—and the day after that—and if it rains we can wear rubbers and carry umbrellas."
"Oh, I don't carry an umbrella for a walk in the rain," she told him. "It's one of our queer Marshall ways. We only own one umbrella for the whole family at home, and that's to lend. I wear a rubber coat and put on a sou'wester andletit rain."
"You would!" he said in an unconscious imitation of Arnold's accent.
She laughed up at him. "Shall I confess why I do? Because my hair is naturally curly."
"Confession has to be prompter than that to save souls," he answered. "I knew it was, five weeks ago, when you splashed the water up on it so recklessly there by the brook."
She was astonished by this revelation of depths behind that well-remembered clear gaze of admiration, and dismayed by such unnatural accuracy of observation.
"How cynical of you to make such a mental comment!"
He apologized. "It was automatic—unconscious. I've had a good deal of opportunity to observe young ladies." And then, as though aware that the ice was thin over an unpleasant subject, he shifted the talk. "Upon my word, I wonder how Molly and Morrisonwillmanage?"
"Oh, Molly's wonderful. She'd manage anything," said Sylvia with conviction.
"Morrison is rather wonderful himself," advanced Page. "And that's a magnanimous concession for me to make when I'm now so deep in his bad books. Do you know, by the way," he asked, looking with a quick interrogation at the girl, "whyI'm so out of favor with him?"
Sylvia's eyes opened wide. She gazed at him, startled, fascinated.Could "it" be coming so suddenly, in this casual, abrupt manner? "No,I don't know," she managed to say; and braced herself.
"I don't blame him in the least. It was very vexing. I went back on him—so to speak; dissolved an aesthetic partnership, in which he furnished the brains, and my coal-mines the sinews of art.Iwas one of his devotees, you know. For some years after I got out of college I collected under his guidance, as my mother does, as so many people do. I even specialized. I don't like to boast, but I dare affirm that no man knows more than I about sixteenth century mezza-majolica. It is a branch of human knowledge which you must admit is singularly appropriate for a dweller in the twentieth century. And of great value to the world. My collection was one of Morrison's triumphs."
Sylvia felt foolish and discomfited. With an effort she showed a proper interest in his remarks. "Was?" she asked. "What happened to it?"
"I went back on it. In one of the first of those fits of moral indigestion. One day, I'd been reading a report in one of the newspapers on the status of the coal-miner, and the connection between my bright-colored pots and platters, and my father's lucky guess, became a little too dramatic for my taste. I gave the collection to the Metropolitan, and I've never bought a piece since. Morrison was immensely put out. He'd been to great trouble to find some fine Fontana specimens for me. And then not to have me look at them—He was right too. It was a silly, pettish thing to do. I didn't know any better then. I don't know any better now."
It began to dawn on Sylvia that, under his air of whimsical self-mockery he was talking to her seriously. She tried to adjust herself to this, to be sympathetic, earnest; though she was still smarting with the sense of having appeared to herself as undignified and ridiculous.
"And besides that," he went on, looking away, down the dusty highroad they were then crossing on their way back to the house—"besides that, I went back on a great scheme of Morrison's for a National Academy of Aesthetic Instruction, which I was to finance and he to organize. He had gone into all the details. He had shown wonderful capacity. It's really very magnanimous of him not to bear me more of a grudge. He thought that giving it up was one of my half-baked ideas. And it was. As far as anything I've accomplished since, I might as well have been furthering the appreciation of Etruscan vases in the Middle West. But then, I don't think he'll miss it now. If he still has a fancy for it, he can do it with Molly's money. She has plenty. But I don't believe he will. It has occurred to me lately (it's an idea that's been growing on me about everybody) that Morrison, like most of us, has been miscast. He doesn't really care a continental about the aesthetic salvation of the country. It's only the contagion of the American craze for connecting everything with social betterment, tagging everything with that label, that ever made him think he did. He's far too thoroughgoing an aesthete himself. What he was brought into the world for, was to appreciate, as nobody else can, all sorts of esoterically fine things. Now that he'll be able to gratify that taste, he'll find his occupation in it. Why shouldn't he? It'd be a hideously leveled world if everybody was, trying to be a reformer. Besides, who'd be left to reform? I love to contemplate a genuine, whole-souled appreciator like Morrison, without any qualms about the way society is put together. And I envy him! I envy him as blackly as your pines envied the sumac. He's got out of the wrong rôle into the right one. I wish to the Lord I could!"
They were close to the house now, in the avenue of poplars, yellow as gold above them in the quick-falling autumn twilight. Sylvia spoke with a quick, spirited sincerity, her momentary pique forgotten, her feeling rushing out generously to meet the man's simple openness. "Oh, that's the problem for all of us! To know what rôle to play! If you think it hard for you who have only to choose—how about the rest of us who must—?" She broke off. "What's that? What's that?"
She had almost stumbled over a man's body, lying prone, half in the driveway, half on the close-clipped grass on the side; a well-dressed man, tall, thin, his limbs sprawled about broken-jointedly. He lay on his back, his face glimmering white in the clear, dim dusk. Sylvia recognized him with a cry. "Oh, it's Arnold! He's been struck by a car! He's dead!"
She sprang forward, and stopped short, at gaze, frozen.
The man sat up, propping himself on his hands and looked at her, a wavering smile on his lips. He began to speak, a thick, unmodulated voice, as though his throat were stiff. "Comingtomeetyou," he articulated very rapidly and quite unintelligibly, "an 'countered hill in driveway … no hillindriveway, and climbed and climbed"—he lost himself in repetition and brought up short to begin again, "—labor so 'cessive had to rest—"
Sylvia turned a paper-white face on her companion. "What's the matter with him?" she tried to say, but Page only saw her lips move. He made no answer. That she would know in an instant what was the matter flickered from her eyes, from her trembling white lips; that she did know, even as she spoke, was apparent from the scorn and indignation which like sheet-lightning leaped out on him. "Arnold! Forshame! Arnold! Think of Judith!"
At the name he frowned vaguely as though it suggested something extremely distressing to him, though he evidently did not recognize it. "Judish? Judish?" he repeated, drawing his brows together and making a grimace of great pain. "What's Judish?"
And then, quite suddenly the pain and distress were wiped from his face by sodden vacuity. He had hitched himself to one of the poplars, and now leaned against this, his head bent on his shoulder at the sickening angle of a man hanged, his eyes glassy, his mouth open, a trickle of saliva flowing from one corner. He breathed hard and loudly. There was nothing there but a lump of uncomely flesh.
Sylvia shrank back from the sight with such disgust that she felt herflesh creep. She turned a hard, angry face on Page. "Oh, the beast!The beast!" she cried, under her breath. She felt defiled. She hatedArnold. She hated life.
Page said quietly: "You'll excuse my not going with you to the house? I'll have my car and chauffeur here in a moment." He stepped away quickly and Sylvia turned to flee into the house.
But something halted her flying feet. She hesitated, stopped, and pressed her hands together hard. He could not be left alone there in the driveway. A car might run over him in the dusk. She turned back.
She stood there, alone with the horror under the tree. She turned her back on it, but she could see nothing but the abject, strengthless body, the dreadful ignominy of the face. They filled the world.
And then quickly—everything came quickly to Sylvia—there stood before her the little boy who had come to see them in La Chance so long ago, the little honest-eyed boy who had so loved her mother and Judith, who had loved Pauline the maid and suffered with her pain; and then the bigger boy who out of his weakness had begged for a share of her mother's strength and been refused; and then the man, still honest-eyed, who, aimless, wavering, had cried out to her in misery upon the emptiness of his life; and who later had wept those pure tears of joy that he had found love. She had a moment of insight, of vision, of terrible understanding. She did not know what was taking place within her, something racking—spasmodic throes of sudden growth, the emergence for the first time in all her life of the capacity for pity …
When, only a moment or two later, Page's car came swiftly down the driveway, and he sprang out, he found Sylvia sitting by the drunkard, the quiet tears streaming down her face. She had wiped his mouth with her handkerchief, she held his limp hand in hers, his foolish staring face was hidden on her shoulder….
The two men lifted him bodily, an ignoble, sagging weight, into the car. She stood beside him and, without a word, stooped and gently disposed his slackly hanging arms beside him.
Dark had quite fallen by this time. They were all silent, shadowy forms. She felt that Page was at her side. He leaned to her. Her hand was taken and kissed.
The rest of October was a period never clear in Sylvia's head. Everything that happened was confusing and almost everything was painful; and a great deal happened. She had thought at the time that nothing would ever blur in her mind the shock of finding Aunt Victoria opposed to what seemed to her the first obvious necessity: writing to Judith about Arnold. She had been trying for a long time now with desperate sincerity to take the world as she found it, to see people as they were with no fanatic intolerance, to realize her own inexperience of life, to be broad, to take in without too much of a wrench another point of view; but to Aunt Victoria's idea, held quite simply and naturally by that lady, that Judith be kept in ignorance of Arnold's habits until after marriage, Sylvia's mind closed as automatically, as hermetically as an oyster-shell snaps shut. She could not discuss it, she could not even attend with hearing ears to Mrs. Marshall-Smith's very reasonable presentation of her case; the long tradition as to the justifiability of such ignorance on a bride's part; the impossibility that any woman should ever know all of any man's character before marriage; the strong presumption that marriage with a woman he adored would cure habits contracted only through the inevitable aimlessness of too much wealth; the fact that, once married, a woman like Judith would accept, and for the most part deal competently with, facts which would frighten her in her raw girlish state of ignorance and crudeness. Sylvia did not even hear these arguments and many more like them, dignified with the sanction of generations of women trying their best to deal with life. She had never thought of the question before. It was the sort of thing from which she had always averted her moral eyes with extreme distaste; but now that it was forced on her, her reaction to it was instantaneous. From the depths of her there rose up fresh in its original vigor, never having been dulled by a single enforced compliance with a convention running counter to a principle, the most irresistible instinct against concealment. She did not argue; she could not. She could only say with a breathless certainty against which there was no holding out: "Judith must know! Judith must know!"
Mrs. Marshall-Smith, alarmed by the prospect of a passage-at-arms, decreed quietly that they should both sleep on the question and take it up the next morning. Sylvia had not slept. She had lain in her bed, wide-eyed; a series of pictures passing before her eyes with the unnatural vividness of hallucinations. These pictures were not only of Arnold, of Arnold again, of Arnold and Judith. There were all sorts of odd bits of memories—a conversation overheard years before, between her father and Lawrence, when Lawrence was a little, little boy. He had asked—it was like Lawrence's eerie ways—apropos of nothing at all, "What sort of a man was Aunt Victoria's husband?"
His father had said, "A rich man, very rich." This prompt appearance of readiness to answer had silenced the child for a moment: and then (Sylvia could see his thin little hands patting down the sand-cake he was making) he had persisted, "What kind of a rich man?" His father had said, "Well, he was bald—quite bald—Lawrence, come run a race with me to the woodshed." Sylvia now, ten years later, wondered why her father had evaded. What kind of a manhadArnold's father been?
But chiefly she braced herself for the struggle with Aunt Victoria in the morning. It came to her in fleeting glimpses that Aunt Victoria would be only human if she resented with some heat this entire disregard of her wishes; that the discussion might very well end in a quarrel, and that a quarrel would mean the end of Lydford with all that Lydford meant now and potentially. But this perception was swept out of sight, like everything else, in the singleness of her conviction: "Judith must know! Judith must know!"
There was, however, no struggle with Aunt Victoria in the morning. Mrs. Marshall-Smith, encountering the same passionate outcry, recognized an irresistible force when she encountered it; recognized it, in fact, soon enough to avoid the long-drawn-out acrimony of discussion into which a less intelligent woman would inevitably have plunged; recognized it almost, but not quite, in time to shut off from Sylvia's later meditations certain startling vistas down which she had now only fleeting glimpses. "Very well, my dear," said Mrs. Marshall-Smith, her cherished clarity always unclouded by small resentments,—"very well, we will trust in your judgment rather than my own. I don't pretend to understand present-day girls, though I manage to be very fond of one of them. Judith is your sister. You will do, of course, what you think is right. It means, of course, Judith being what she is, that she will instantly cast him off; and Arnold being what he is, that means that he will drink himself into delirium tremens in six months. His father …" She stopped short, closing with some haste the door to a vista, and poured herself another cup of coffee. They were having breakfast in her room, both in négligée and lacy caps, two singularly handsome representatives of differing generations. Mrs. Marshall-Smith looked calm, Sylvia extremely agitated. She had been awake at the early hour of deadly pale dawn when a swift, long-barreled car had drawn up under the porte-cochère and Arnold had been taken away under the guard of a short, broad, brawny man with disproportionately long arms. She was not able to swallow a mouthful of breakfast.
During the night, she had not looked an inch beyond her blind passion of insistence. Now that Aunt Victoria yielded with so disconcerting a suddenness, she faced with a pang what lay beyond. "Oh, Judith wouldn't cast him off! She loves him so! She'll give him a chance. You don't know Judith. She doesn't care about many things, but she gives herself up absolutely to those that do matter to her. She adores Arnold! It fairly frightened me to see how she was burning up when he was near. She'll insist on his reforming, of course—she ought to—but—"
"Suppose he doesn't reform to suit her," suggested Mrs. Marshall-Smith, stirring her coffee. "He's been reformed at intervals ever since he was fifteen. He never could stay through a whole term in any decent boys' school." Here was a vista, ruthlessly opened. Sylvia's eyes looked down it and shuddered. "Poor Arnold!" she said under her breath, pushing away her untasted cup.
"I'm dull enough to find you take an odd way to show your sympathy for him," murmured Mrs. Marshall-Smith, with none of the acidity the words themselves seemed to indicate. She seemed indeed genuinely perplexed. "It's not been exactly a hilarious element inmylife either. But I've always tried to hold on to Arnold. I thought it my duty. And now, since Felix Morrison has found this excellent specialist for me, it's much easier. I telegraph to him and he comes at once and takes Arnold back to his sanitarium, till he's himself again." For the first time in weeks Morrison's name brought up between them no insistently present, persistently ignored shadow. The deeper shadow now blotted him out.
"But Aunt Victoria, it's for Judith to decide.She'll do the right thing."
"Sometimes people are thrown by circumstances into a situation where they wouldn't have dreamed of putting themselves—and yet they rise to it and conquer it," philosophized Aunt Victoria. "Life takes hold of us with strong hands and makes us greater than we thought. Judith willmeanto do the right thing. If she were married, she'dhaveto do it! It seems to me a great responsibility you take, Sylvia—you may, with the best of intentions in the world, be ruining the happiness of two lives."
Sylvia got up, her eyes red with unshed tears. It was not the first time that morning. "It's all too horrible," she murmured. "But I haven't any right to conceal it from Judith."
Her eyes were still red when, an hour later, she stepped into the room again and said, "I've mailed it."
Her aunt, still in lavender silk négligée, so far progressed towards the day's toilet as to have her hair carefully dressed, looked up from theRevue Bleue, and nodded. Her expression was one of quiet self-possession.
Sylvia came closer to her and sat down on a straight-backed chair. She was dressed for the street, and hatted, as though she herself had gone out to mail the letter. "And now, Tantine," she said, with the resolute air of one broaching a difficult subject, "I think I ought to be planning to go home very soon." It was a momentous speech, and a momentous pause followed it. It had occurred to Sylvia, still shaken with the struggle over the question of secrecy, that she could, in decency, only offer to take herself away, after so violently antagonizing her hostess. She realized with what crude intolerance she had attacked the other woman's position, how absolutely with claw and talon she had demolished it. She smarted with the sense that she had seemed oblivious of an "obligation." She detested the sense of obligation. And having become aware of a debt due her dignity, she had paid it hastily, on the impulse of the moment. But as the words still echoed in the air, she was struck to see how absolutely her immediate future, all her future, perhaps, depended on the outcome of that conversation she herself had begun. She looked fixedly at her aunt, trying to prepare herself for anything. But she was not prepared for what Mrs. Marshall-Smith did.
She swept the magazine from her lap to the floor and held out her arms to Sylvia. "I had hoped—I had hoped you were happy—with me," she said, and in her voice was that change of quality, that tremor of sincerity which Sylvia had always found profoundly moving. The girl was overcome with astonishment and remorse—and immense relief. She ran to her. "Oh, I am! I am! I was only thinking—I've gone against your judgment." Her nerves, stretched with the sleepless night and the strain of writing the dreadful letter to Judith, gave way. She broke into sobs. She put her arms tightly around her aunt's beautiful neck and laid her head on her shoulder, weeping, her heart swelling, her mind in a whirling mass of disconnected impressions. Arnold—Judith … how strange it was that Aunt Victoria really cared for her—did she really care for Aunt Victoria or only admire her?—did she really care for anybody, since she was agreeing to stay longer away from her father and mother?—how good it would be not to have to give up Hélène's services—what a heartless, materialistic girl she was—she cared for nothing but luxury and money—she would be going abroad now to Paris—Austin Page—he had kissed her hand … and yet she felt that he saw through her, saw through her mean little devices and stratagems—how astonishing that he should be so very, very rich—it seemed that a very, very rich man ought to be different from other men—his powers were so unnaturally great—girls could not feel naturally about him … And all the while that these varying reflections passed at lightning speed through her mind, her nervous sobs were continuing.
Aunt Victoria taking them, naturally enough, as signs of continued remorse, lifted her out of this supposed slough of despond with affectionate peremptoriness. "Don't feel so badly about it, darling. We won't have any more talk for the present about differing judgments, or of going away, or of anything uncomfortable"; and in this way, with nothing clearly understood, on a foundation indeed of misunderstanding, the decision was made, in the haphazard fashion which characterizes most human decisions.
The rest of the month was no more consecutive or logical. Into the midst of the going-away confusion of a household about to remove itself half around the world, into a house distracted with packing, cheerless with linen-covers, desolate with rolled-up rugs and cold lunches and half-packed trunks, came, in a matter-of-fact manner characteristic of its writer, Judith's answer to Sylvia's letter. Sylvia opened it, shrinking and fearful of what she would read. She had, in the days since hers had been sent, imagined Judith's answer in every possible form; but never in any form remotely resembling what Judith wrote. The letter stated in Judith's concise style that of course she agreed with Sylvia that there should be no secrets between betrothed lovers, nor, in this case, were there any. Arnold had told her, the evening before she left Lydford, that he had inherited an alcoholic tendency from his father. She had been in communication with a great specialist in Wisconsin about the case. She knew of the sanitarium to which Arnold had been taken and did not like it. The medical treatment there was not serious. She hoped soon to have him transferred to the care of Dr. Rivedal. If Arnold's general constitution were still sound, there was every probability of a cure. Doctors knew so much more about that sort of thing than they used to. Had Sylvia heard that Madame La Rue was not a bit well, that old trouble with her heart, only worse? They'd been obliged to hire a maid—how in the world were the La Rues going to exist on American cooking? Cousin Parnelia said she could cure Madame with some Sanopractic nonsense, a new fad that Cousin Parnelia had taken up lately. Professor Kennedy had been elected vice-president of the American Mathematical Association, and it was funny to see him try to pretend that he wasn't pleased. Mother's garden this autumn was …
"Well!" ejaculated Sylvia, stopping short. Mrs. Marshall-Smith had stopped to listen in the midst of the exhausting toil of telling Hélène which dresses to pack and which to leave hanging in the Lydford house. She now resumed her labors unflaggingly, waving away to the closet a mauve satin, and beckoning into a trunk a favorite black-and-white chiffon. To Sylvia she said, "Now I know exactly how a balloon feels when it is pricked."
Sylvia agreed ruefully. "I might have known Judith would manage to make me feel flat if I got wrought up about it. She hates a fuss made over anything, and she can always take you down if you make one." She remembered with a singular feeling of discomfiture the throbbing phrases of her letter, written under the high pressure of the quarrel with Aunt Victoria. She could almost see the expression of austere distaste in the stern young beauty of Judith's face. Judith was always making her appear foolish!
"We were both of us," commented Mrs. Marshall-Smith dryly, "somewhat mistaken about the degree of seriousness with which Judith would take the information."
Sylvia forgot her vexation and sprang loyally to Judith's defense. "Why, of course she takes it like a trained nurse, like a doctor—feels it a purely medical affair—as I suppose it is. We might have known she'd feel that way. But as to how she really feels inside, personally, you can't tell anything by her letter! You probably couldn't tell anything by her manner if she were here. You never can. She may be simply wild about a thing inside, but you'd never guess."
Mrs. Marshall-Smith ventured to express some skepticism as to the existence of volcanic feelings always so sedulously concealed. "After all, can you be so very sure that she is ever 'simply wild' if she never shows anything?"
"Oh, you'resure, all right, if you've lived with her—you feel it. And then, after about so long a time of keeping it down, she breaks loose anddoessomething awful, that I'd never have the nerve to do, and tears into flinders anything she doesn't think is right. Why, when we were little girls and went to the public schools together, two of our little playmates, who turned out to have a little negro blood, we …" Sylvia stopped, suddenly warned by some instinct that Aunt Victoria would not be a sympathetic listener to that unforgotten episode of her childhood, that episode which had seemed to have no consequences, no sequel, but which ever since that day had insensibly affected the course of her growth, like a great rock fallen into the Current of her life.
Mrs. Marshall-Smith, deliberating with bated breath between broadcloth and blue panama, did not notice the pause. She did, however, add a final comment on the matter, some moments later, when she observed, "How any girl in her senses can go on studying, when she's engaged to a man who needs her as much as Arnold needs Judith!" To which Sylvia answered irrelevantly with a thought which had just struck her thrillingly, "But how perfectly fine of Arnold to tell her himself!"
"She must have hypnotized him," said Mrs. Marshall-Smith with conviction, "but then I don't pretend to understand the ways of young people nowadays." She was now forty-five, in the full bloom of a rarely preserved beauty, and could afford to make remarks about the younger generation. "At any rate," she went on, "it is a comfort to know that Judith has set her hand to the wheel. I have not in years crossed the ocean with so much peace of mind about Arnold as I shall have this time," said his stepmother. "No, leave that blue voile, Hélène, the collar never fitted."
"Oh, he doesn't spend the winters in Paris with you?" asked Sylvia.
"He's been staying here in Lydford of late—crazy as it sounds. He was simply so bored that he couldn't think of anything else to do. He has, besides, an absurd theory that he enjoys it more in winter than in summer. He says the natives are to be seen then. He's been here from his childhood. He knows a good many of them, I suppose. Now, Hélène, let's see the gloves and hats."
It came over Sylvia with a passing sense of great strangeness that she had been in this spot for four months and, with the exception of the men at the fire, she had not met, had not spoken to, had not even consciously seen a single inhabitant of the place.
And in the end, she went away in precisely the same state of ignorance. On the day they drove to the station she did, indeed, give one fleeting glimpse over the edge of her narrow prison-house of self-centered interest. Surrounded by a great many strapped and buckled pieces of baggage, with Hélène, fascinatingly ugly in her serf's uniform, holding the black leather bag containing Aunt Victoria's jewels, they passed along the street for the last time, under the great elms already almost wintry with their bare boughs. Now that it was too late, Sylvia felt a momentary curiosity about the unseen humanity which had been so near her all the summer. She looked out curiously at the shabby vehicles (it seemed to her that there were more of them than in the height of the season), at the straight-standing, plainly dressed, briskly walking women and children (there seemed to be a new air of life and animation about the street now that most of the summer cottages were empty), and at the lounging, indifferent, powerfully built men. She wondered, for a moment, what they were like, with what fortitude their eager human hearts bore the annual display of splendor they might never share. They looked, in that last glimpse, somehow quite strong, as though they would care less than she would in their places. Perhaps they were only hostile, not envious.
"I dare say," said Aunt Victoria, glancing out at a buck-board, very muddy as to wheels, crowded with children, "that it's very forlorn for the natives to have the life all go out of the village when the summer people leave. They must feel desolate enough!"
Sylvia wondered.
The last thing she saw as the train left the valley was the upland pass between Windward and Hemlock mountains. It brought up to her the taste of black birch, the formidably clean smell of yellow soap, and the rush of summer wind past her ears.
They were to sail on the 23d, and ever since the big square invitation had come it had been a foregone conclusion, conceded with no need for wounding words, that there was no way out of attending the Sommerville-Morrison wedding on the 21st. They kept, of course, no constrained silence about it. Aunt Victoria detested the awkwardness of not mentioning difficult subjects as heartily as she did the mention of them; and as the tree toad evolves a skin to answer his needs, she had evolved a method all her own of turning her back squarely on both horns of a dilemma. No, there was no silence about the wedding, only about the possibility that it might be an ordeal, or that the ordeal might be avoided. It could not be avoided. There was nothing to be said on that point. But there was much talk, during the few days of their stay in New York, about the elaborate preparations for the ceremony. Morrison, who came to see them in their temporary quarters, kept up a somewhat satirical report as to the magnificence of the performance, and on the one occasion when they went to see Molly they found her flushed, excited, utterly inconsecutive, distracted by a million details, and accepting the situation as the normal one for a bride-to-be. There were heart-searchings as to toilets to match the grandeur of the occasion; and later satisfaction with the moss-green chiffon for Sylvia and violet-colored velvet for her aunt. There were consultations about the present Aunt Victoria was to send from them both, a wonderfully expensive, newly patented, leather traveling-case for a car, guaranteed to hold less to the square inch and pound than any other similar, heavy, gold-mounted contrivance. Mrs. Marshall-Smith told Morrison frankly, in this connection, that she had tried to select a present which Molly herself would enjoy.
"Am I not to have a present myself?" asked Morrison. "Something that you selected expressly for me?"
"No," said Sylvia, dropping the sugar into his tea with deliberation."You are not to have any present for yourself."
She was guiltily conscious that she was thinking of a certain scene in "The Golden Bowl," a scene in which a wedding present figures largely; and when, a moment later, he said, "I have a new volume of Henry James I'd like to loan you," she knew that the same scene had been in his head. She would not look at him lest she read in his eyes that he had meant her to know. As she frequently did in those days, she rose, and making an excuse of a walk in the park, took herself off.
She was quite calm during this period, her mind full of trivial things. She had the firm conviction that she was living in a dream, that nothing of what was happening was irrevocable. And besides, as at Lydford, for much of the day, she was absorbed in the material details of her life, being rubbed and dressed and undressed, and adorned and fed and catered to. They were spending the few days before sailing in a very grand hotel, overlooking Central Park. Sylvia had almost every day the thought that she herself was now in the center of exactly the same picture in which, as a child, she had enviously watched Aunt Victoria. She adored every detail of it. It was an opening-out, even from the Lydford life. She felt herself expanding like a dried sponge placed in water, to fill every crack and crevice of the luxurious habits of life. The traveling along that road is always swift; and Sylvia's feet were never slow. During the first days in Vermont, it had seemed a magnificence to her that she need never think of dish-washing or bed-making. By this time it seemed quite natural to her that Hélène drew and tempered the water for her bath, and put on her stockings. Occasionally she noticed with a little surprise that she seemed to have no more free time than in the laborious life of La Chance; but for the most part she threw out, in all haste, innumerable greedy root-tendrils into the surcharged richness of her new soil and sent up a rank growth of easeful acquiescence in redundance.
The wedding was quite as grand as the Sommervilles had tried to make it. The street was crowded with staring, curious, uninvited people on either side of the church, and when the carriage containing the bride drove up, the surge forward to see her was as fierce as though she had been a defaulting bank-president being taken to prison. The police had to intervene. The interior, fern and orchid swathed, very dimly lighted by rich purple stained glass and aristocratic dripping wax candles instead of the more convenient electric imitations, was murmurous with the wonderful throbbing notes of a great organ and with the discreet low tones of the invited guests as they speculated about the relative ages and fortunes of the bride and bridegroom. The chancel was filled with a vested choir which, singing and carrying a cross, advanced down the aisle to meet the bridal party. Molly, who had not been in a church since her childhood, had needed to be coached over and over again in the ins and outs of the complicated service.
Sylvia, seated several guests away from the aisle, saw little of the procession as it went up into the chancel. She caught a glimpse of a misty mass of white and, beside it, old Mr. Sommerville's profile, very white and nervous and determined. She did not at that time see the bridegroom at all. The ceremony, which took place far within the chancel, was long and interspersed with music from the choir. Sylvia, feeling very queer and callous, as though, under an anaesthetic, she were watching with entire unconcern the amputation of one of her limbs, fell to observing the people about her. The woman in front of her leaned against the pew and brought her broad, well-fed back close under Sylvia's eyes. It was covered with as many layers as a worm in a cocoon. There were beads on lace, the lace incrusted on other lace, chiffon, fish-net, a dimly seen filmy satin, cut in points, and, lower down, an invisible foundation of taffeta. Through the interstices there gleamed a revelation of the back itself, fat, white, again like a worm in a cocoon.
Sylvia began to plan out a comparison of dress with architecture, bringing out the insistent tendency in both to the rococo, to the burying of structural lines in ornamentation. The cuff, for instance, originally intended to protect the skin from contact with unwashable fabrics, degenerated into a mere bit of "trimming," which has lost all its meaning, which may be set anywhere on the sleeve. Like a strong hand about her throat came the knowledge that she was planning to say all this to please Felix Morrison, who was now within fifty feet of her, being married to another woman.
She flamed to fever and chilled again to her queer absence of spirit…. There was a chorister at the end of the line near her, a pale young man with a spiritual face who chanted his part with shining rapt eyes. While he sang he slipped his hand under his white surplice and took out his watch. Still singing "Glory be to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost," he cast a hasty eye on the watch and frowned impatiently. He was evidently afraid the business in hand would drag along and make him late to another appointment, "—is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen!" he sang fervently. Sylvia repressed an hysterical desire to laugh.
The ceremony was over; the air in the building beat wildly against the walls, the stained-glass windows, and the ears of the worshipers in the excited tumult of the wedding-march; the procession began to leave the chancel. This time Sylvia caught one clear glimpse of the principals, but it meant nothing to her. They looked like wax effigies of themselves, self-conscious, posed, emptied of their personalities by the noise, the crowds, the congestion of ceremony. The idea occurred to Sylvia that they looked as though they had taken in as little as she the significance of what had happened. The people about her were moving in relieved restlessness after the long immobility of the wedding. The woman next her went down on her knees for a devout period, her face in her white gloves. When she rose, she said earnestly to her companion, "Do you know if I had to choose one hat-trimming for all the rest of my life, I should make it small pink roses in clusters. It's perfectly miraculous how, with black chiffon, theynevergo out!" She settled in place the great cluster of costly violets at her breast which she seemed to have exuded like some natural secretion of her plump and expensive person. "Why don't they let us out!" she said complainingly.
A young man, one of those born to be a wedding usher, now came swiftly up the aisle on patent leather feet and untied with pearl-gray fingers the great white satin ribbon which restrained them in the pew. Sylvia caught her aunt's eye on her, its anxiety rather less well hidden than usual. With no effort at all the girl achieved a flashing smile. It was not hard. She felt quite numb. She had been present only during one or two painful, quickly passed moments.
But the reception at the house, the big, old-fashioned, very rich Sommerville house, was more of an ordeal. There was the sight of the bride and groom in the receiving-line, now no longer badly executed graven images, but quite themselves—Molly starry-eyed, triumphant, astonishingly beautiful, her husband distinguished, ugly, self-possessed, easily the most interesting personality in the room; there was the difficult moment of the presentation, the handclasp with Felix, the rapturous vague kiss from Molly, evidently too uplifted to have any idea as to the individualities of the people defiling before her; then the passing on into the throng, the eating and drinking and talking with acquaintances from the Lydford summer colony, of whom there were naturally a large assortment. Sylvia had a growing sense of pain, which was becoming acute when across the room she saw Molly, in a lull of arrivals, look up to her husband and receive from him a smiling, intimate look of possession. Why, they weremarried! It was done!
The delicate food in Sylvia's mouth turned to ashes.
Mrs. Marshall-Smith's voice, almost fluttered, almost (for her) excited, came to her ears: "Sylvia—here is Mr. Page! And he's just told me the most delightful news, that he's decided to run over to Paris for a time this fall."
"I hope Miss Marshall will think that Paris will be big enough for all of us?" asked Austin Page, fixing his remarkably clear eyes on the girl.
She made a great effort for self-possession. She turned her back on the receiving-line. She held out her hand cordially. "I hope Paris will be quite, quite small, so that we shall all see a great deal of each other," she said warmly.