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Bent Twig

<h2 id="id01157" style="margin-top: 4em">CHAPTER XXIV</h2> <h5 id="id01158">ANOTHER BRAND OF MODERN TALK</h5> "Where's Judith?" said Arnold for sole greeting, as he saw Morrison at the piano and Sylvia sitting near it, cool and clear in a lacy white dress. Morrison lifted long fingers from the keys and said gravely, "She came through a moment ago, saying, 'Where's Arnold?' and went out through that door." His fingers dropped and Chopin's voice once more rose plaintively. The sound of Arnold's precipitate rush across the room and out of the door was followed by a tinkle of laughter from Sylvia. Morrison looked around at her over his shoulder, with a flashing smile of mutual understanding, but he finished the prelude before he spoke. Then, without turning around, as he pulled out another sheet from the music heaped on the piano, he remarked: "If that French philosopher was right when he said no disease is as contagious as love-making, we may expect soon to find the very chairs and tables in this house clasped in each other's arms. Old as I am, I feel it going to my head, like a bed of full-blooming valerian." Sylvia made no answer. She felt herself flushing, and could not trust her voice to be casual. He continued for a moment to thumb over the music aimlessly, as though waiting for her to speak. The beautiful room, darkened against the midsummer heat, shimmered dimly in a transparent half-light, the vivid life of its bright chintz, its occasional brass, its clean, daring spots of crimson and purple flowers, subdued into a fabulous, half-seen richness. There was not a sound. The splendid heat of the early August afternoon flamed, and paused, and held its breath. Into this silence, like a bird murmuring a drowsy note over a still pool, there floated the beginning of Am Meer. Sylvia sat, passive to her finger-tips, a vase filled to the brim with melody. She stared with unseeing eyes at the back of the man at the piano. She was not thinking of him, she was not aware that she was conscious of him at all; but hours afterward wherever she looked, she saw for an instant again in miniature the slender, vigorous, swaying figure; the thick brown hair, streaked with white and curling slightly at the ends; the brooding head…. When the last note was still, the man stood up and moved away from the piano. He dropped into an arm-chair near Sylvia, and leaning his fine, ugly head back against the brilliant chintz, he looked at her meditatively. His great bodily suavity gave his every action a curious significance and grace. Sylvia, still under the spell of his singing, did not stir, returning his look out of wide, dreaming eyes. When he spoke, his voice blended with the silence almost as harmoniously as the music…. "Do you know what I wish you would do, Miss Sylvia Marshall? I wish you would tell me something about yourself. Now that I'm no longer forbidden to look at you, or think about you…." "Forbidden?" asked Sylvia, very much astonished. "There!" he said, wilfully mistaking her meaning, and smiling faintly, "I am such an old gentleman that I'm perfectly negligible to a young lady. She doesn't even notice or not whether I look at her, and think about her." A few years before this Sylvia would have burst out impetuously, "Oh yes, I have! I've wondered awfully what made you so indifferent," but now she kept this reflection to herself and merely said, "What in the world did you fancy was 'forbidding' you?" "Honor!" said Morrison, with a note of mock solemnity. "Honor! Victoria was so evidently snatching at you as a last hope for Arnold. She gave me to understand that everybody else but Arnold was to be strictly non-existent. But now that Arnold has found a character beautifully and archaically simple to match his own primitive needs, I don't see why I shouldn't enjoy a little civilized talk with you. In any case, it was absurd to think of you for Arnold. It merely shows how driven poor Victoria was!" Sylvia tried to speak lightly, although she was penetrated with pleasure at this explanation of his holding aloof. "Oh, I like Arnold very much. I always have. There's something … something sort of touching about Arnold, don't you think? Though I must say that I've heard enough about the difference between training quail dogs and partridge dogs to last me the rest of my life. But that's rather touching too, his not knowing what to do with himself but fiddle around with his guns and tennis-racquets. They're all he has to keep him from being bored to death, and they don't go nearly far enough. Some day he will just drop dead from ennui, poor Arnold! Wouldn't he have enjoyed being a civil engineer, and laying out railroads in wild country! He'd have been a good one too! The same amount of energy he puts into his polo playing would make him fight his way through darkest Thibet." She meditated over this hypothesis for a moment and then added with a nod of her head, "Oh yes, I like Arnold ever so much … one kind of 'liking.'" "Of course you like him," assented the older man, who had been watching her as she talked, and whose manner now, as he took up the word himself, resembled that of an exquisitely adroit angler, casting out the lightest, the most feathery, the most perfectly controlled of dry-flies. "You're too intelligent not to like everybody who's not base—and Arnold's not base. And he 'likes' you. If you had cared to waste one of your red-brown tresses on him, you could have drawn him by a single hair. But then, everybody 'likes' you." "Old Mr. Sommerville doesn't!" said Sylvia, on an impulse. Morrison looked at her admiringly, and put the tips of his fingers together with exquisite precision. "So you add second sight to your other accomplishments! How in the world could a girl of your age have the experience and intuition to feel that? Old Sommerville passes for a great admirer of yours. You won't, I hope, go so uncannily far in your omniscience as to pretend to know why he doesn't like you?" "No, I won't," said Sylvia, "because I haven't the very faintest idea. Have you?" "I know exactly why. It's connected with one of the old gentleman's eccentricities. He's afraid of you on account of his precious nephew." "I didn't know he had a nephew." Sylvia was immensely astonished. "Well, he has, and he bows down and worships him, as he does his granddaughter. You see how he adores Molly. It's nice of the old fellow, the cult he has for his descendants, but occasionally inconvenient for innocent bystanders. He thinks everybody wants to make off with his young folks. You and I are fellow-suspects. Haven't you felt him wish he could strike me dead, when Molly makes tea for me, or turns over music as I play?" He laughed a little, a gentle, kind, indulgent laugh. "Molly!" he said, as if his point were more than elucidated by the mere mention of her name. Sylvia intimated with a laugh that her point was clearer yet in that she had no name to mention. "But I never saw his nephew. I never even heard of him until this minute." "No, and very probably never will see him. He's very seldom here. And if you did see him, you wouldn't like him—he's an eccentric of the worst brand," said Morrison tranquilly. "But monomanias need no foundation in fact—" He broke off abruptly to say: "Is this all another proof of your diabolical cleverness? I started in to hear something about yourself, and here I find myself talking about everything else in the world." "I'm not clever," said Sylvia, hoping to be contradicted. "Well, you're a great deal too nice to be consciously so," admitted Morrison. "See here," he went on, "it's evident that you're more than a match for me at this game. Suppose we strike a bargain. You introduce yourself to me and I'll do the same by you. Isn't it quite the most fantastic of all the bizarreries of human intercourse that an 'introduction' to a fellow-being consists in being informed of his name,—quite the most unimportant, fortuitous thing about him?" Sylvia considered. "What do you want to know?" she asked finally. "Well, I'd like to know everything," said the man gaily. "My curiosity has been aroused to an almost unappeasable pitch. But of course I'll take any information you feel like doling out. In the first place, how, coming from such a …" He checked himself and changed the form of his question: "I overheard you speaking to Victoria's maid, and I've been lying awake nights ever since, wondering how it happened that you speak French with so pure an accent." "Oh, that's simple! Professor and Madame La Rue are old friends of the family and I've spent a lot of time with them. And then, of course, French is another mother-language for Father. He and Aunt Victoria were brought up in Paris, you know." Morrison sighed. "Isn't it strange how all the miracles evaporate into mere chemical reactions when you once investigate! All the white-clad, ghostly spirits turn out to be clothes on the line. I suppose there's some equally natural explanation about your way on the piano—the clear, limpid phrasing of that Bach the other day, and then the color of the Bizet afterwards. It's astonishing to hear anybody of your crude youth playing Bach at all—and then to hear it played right—and afterwards to hear a modern given his right note…." Sylvia was perfectly aware that she was being flattered, and she was immensely enjoying it. She became more animated, and the peculiar sparkle of her face more spirited. "Oh, that's old Reinhardt, my music teacher. He would take all the skin off my knuckles if I played a Bach gigue the least bit like that Arlésienne Minuet. He doesn't approve of Bizet very much, anyhow. He's a tremendous classicist." "Isn't it," inquired Morrison, phrasing his question carefully, "isn't it, with no disrespect to La Chance intended, isn't it rather unusually good fortune for a smallish Western city to own a real musician?" "Well, La Chance bears up bravely under its good fortune," said Sylvia dryly. "Old Mr. Reinhardt isn't exactly a prime favorite there. He's a terribly beery old man, and he wipes his nose on his sleeve. Our house was the only respectable one in town that he could go into. But then, our house isn't so very respectable. It has its advantages, not being so very respectable, though it 'most killed me as a young girl to feel us so. But I certainly have a choice gallery of queer folks in my acquaintance, and I have the queerest hodge-podge of scraps of things learned from them. I know a little Swedish from Miss Lindström. She's a Swedish old maid who does uplift work among the negroes—isn't that a weird combination? You just ought to hear what she makes of negro dialect! And I know all the socialist arguments from hearing a socialist editor get them off every Sunday afternoon. And I even know how to manage planchette and write mediumistically—save the mark!—from Cousin Parnelia, a crazy old cousin of Mother's who hangs round the house more or less." "I begin to gather," surmised Morrison, "that you must have a remarkable father and mother. What are they like?" "Well," said Sylvia thoughtfully, "Mother's the bravest thing you ever saw. She's not afraid of anything! I don't mean cows, or the house-afire, or mice, or such foolishness. I mean life and death, and sickness and poverty and fear…." Morrison nodded his head understandingly, a fine light of appreciation in his eyes, "Not to be afraid of fear—that's splendid." Sylvia went on to particularize. "When any of us are sick—it's my little brother Lawrence who is mostly—Judith and I are always well—Father just goes all to pieces, he gets so frightened. But Mother stiffens her back and makes everything in the house go on just as usual, very quiet, very calm. She holds everything together tight. She says it's sneaking and cowardly if you're going to accept life at all, not to accept all of it—the sour with the sweet—and not whimper." "Very fine,—very fine! Possibly a very small bit … grim?" commented Morrison, with a rising inflection. "Oh, perhaps, a little!" agreed Sylvia, as if it did not matter; "but I can't give you any idea of Mother. She's—she's just great! And yet I couldn't live like her, without wanting to smash everything up. She's somebody that Seneca would have liked." "And your father?" queried Morrison. "Oh, he's great too—dear Father—but so different! He and Mother between them have just about all the varieties of human nature that are worth while! Father's red-headed (though it's mostly gray now), and quick, and blustering, and awfully clever, and just adored by his students, and talks every minute, and apparently does all the deciding, and yet … he couldn't draw the breath of life without Mother; and when it comes right down to doing anything, what he always does is what he knows will come up to her standard." Morrison raised delightedly amused hands to heaven. "The Recording Angel domiciled in the house!" he cried. "It had never occurred to me before how appallingly discerning the eye of the modern offspring must be. Go on, go on!" Elated by the sensation of appearing clever, Sylvia continued with a fresh flow of eloquence. "And there never was such a highly moral bringing-up as we children have had. It's no fault of my family's if I've turned out a grasping materialist! I was brought up"—she flamed out suddenly as at some long-hoarded grievance—"I was brought up in a moral hot-house, and I haven't yet recovered from the shock of being transplanted into real earth in the real world." Morrison paid instant tribute to her aroused and serious feeling by a grave look of attention. "Won't you explain?" he asked. "I'm so dull I don't follow you. But I haven't been so interested in years." "Why, I mean," said Sylvia, trying hard to reduce to articulateness a complicated conception, "I mean that Father and Mother just deliberately represented values to me as different from what they really are, with real folks! And now I find that I'm real folks! I can't help it. You are as you are, you know. They kept representing to me always that the best pleasures are the ones that are the most important to folks—music, I mean, and Milton's poetry, and a fine novel—and, in Mother's case, a fine sunset, or a perfect rose, or things growing in the garden." No old associate of Morrison's would have recognized the man's face, shocked as it was by surprise and interest out of his usual habit of conscious, acute, self-possessed observation. The angler had inadvertently stepped off a ledge into deep water, and a very swift current was tugging at him. He leaned forward, his eyes as eager with curiosity as a boy's. "Do I understand you to say that you repudiate those 'best pleasures'?" "Of course you don't understand anything of the sort," said Sylvia very earnestly. "They've soaked me so in music that I'm a regular bond-slave to it. And a perfect rose is associated with so many lovely recollections of Mother's wonderful silent joy in it, that I could weep for pleasure. What I'm talking about—what I'm trying to tell you, is the shock it was to me, when I got out of that artificially unworldly atmosphere of home—for there's no use talking, it is artificial!—to find that those pleasures aren't the ones that are considered important and essential. How did I find things in the real world? Why, I find that people don't give a thought to those 'best pleasures' until they have a lot of other things first. Everything I'd been trained to value and treasure was negligible, not worth bothering about. But money—position—not having to work—elegance—those are vital—prime! Real people can't enjoy hearing a concert if they know they've got to wash up a lot of dishes afterwards. Hiring a girl to do that work is the first thing to do! There isn't another woman in the world, except my mother, who'd take any pleasure in a perfect rose if she thought her sleeves were so old-fashioned that people would stare at her. Folks talk about liking to look at a fine sunset, but what they give their blood and bones for, is a fine house on the best street in town!" "Well, but you're not 'people' in that vulgar sense!" protested Morrison. He spoke now without the slightest arrière-pensée of flattering her, and Sylvia in her sudden burst for self-expression was unconscious of him, save as an opponent in an argument. "You just say that, in that superior way," she flashed at him, "because you don't have to bother your head about such matters, because you don't have to associate with people who are fighting for those essentials. For they are what everybody except Father and Mother—every body feels to be the essentials—a pretty house, handsome clothes, servants to do the unpleasant things, social life—oh, plenty of money sums it all up, 'vulgar' as it sounds. And I don't believe you are different. I don't believe anybody you know is really a bit different! Let Aunt Victoria, let old Mr. Sommerville, lose their money, and you'd see how unimportant Debussy and Masaccio would be to them, compared to having to black their own shoes!" "Well, upon my word!" exclaimed Morrison. "Are you at eighteen presuming to a greater knowledge of life than I at forty?" "I'm not eighteen, I'm twenty-three," said Sylvia. "The difference is enormous. And if I don't know more about plain unvarnished human nature than you, I miss my guess! You haven't gone through five years at a State University, rubbing shoulders with folks who haven't enough sophistication to pretend to be different from what they are. You haven't taught music for three years in the middle-class families of a small Western city!" She broke off to laugh an apologetic depreciation of her own heat. "You'd think I was addressing a meeting," she said in her usual tone. "I got rather carried away because this is the first time I ever really spoke out about it. There are so few who could understand. If I ever tried to explain it to Father and Mother, I'd be sure to find them so deep in a discussion of the relation between Socrates and Christ that they couldn't pay any attention! Professor Kennedy could understand—but he's such a fanatic on the other side." Morrison looked a quick suspicion. "Who is Professor Kennedy?" he inquired; and was frankly relieved when Sylvia explained: "He's the head of the Mathematics Department, about seventy years old, and the crossest, cantankerousest old misanthrope you ever saw. And thinks himself immensely clever for being so! He just loathes people—the way they really are—and he dotes on Mother and Judith because they're not like anybody else. And he hates me because they couldn't all hypnotize me into looking through their eyes. He thinks it low of me to realize that if you're going to live at all, you've got to live with people, and you can't just calmly brush their values on one side. He said once that any sane person in this world was like a civilized man with plenty of gold coin, cast away on a desert island with a tribe of savages who only valued beads and calico, and buttons and junk. And I said (I knew perfectly well he was hitting at me) that if he was really cast away and couldn't get to another island, I thought the civilized man would be an idiot to starve to death, when he could buy food of the savages by selling them junk. And I thought he just wasted his breath by swearing at the savages for not knowing about the value of gold. There I was hitting at him! He's spoiled his digestion, hating the way people are made. And Professor Kennedy said something nasty and neat (he's awfully clever) about that being rather a low occupation for a civilized being—taking advantage of the idiocies of savages—he meant me, of course—and he's right, it is a mean business; I hate it. And that's why I've always wanted to get on another island—not an uninhabited island, like the one Father and Mother have—but one where—well, this is one!" she waved her hand about the lovely room, "this is just one! Where everything's beautiful—costly too—but not just costly; where all the horrid, necessary consequences of things are taken care of without one's bothering—where flowers are taken out of the vases when they wilt and fresh ones put in; and dishes get themselves washed invisibly, inaudibly—and litter just vanishes without our lifting a hand. Of course the people who live so always, can rejoice with a clear mind in sunsets and bright talk. That's what I meant the other day—the day Judith came—when I said I'd arrived in Capua at last; when old Mr. Sommerville thought me so materialistic and cynical. If he did that, on just that phrase—what must you think, after all this confession intime d'un enfant du siècle?" She stopped with a graceful pretense of dreading his judgment, although she knew that she had been talking well, and read nothing but admiration in his very expressive face. "But all this means, you extraordinary young person, that you're not in the least an enfant du siècle!" he cried. "It means that you're dropped down in this groaning, heavy-spirited twentieth century, troubled about many things, from the exact year that was the golden climax of the Renaissance; that you're a perfect specimen of the high-hearted, glorious …" he qualified on a second thought, "unless your astonishing capacity to analyze it all, comes from the nineteenth century?" "No, that comes from Father," explained Sylvia, laughing. "Isn't it funny, using the tool Father taught me to handle, against his ideas! He's just great on analysis. As soon as we were old enough to think at all, he was always practising us on analysis—especially of what made us want things, or not like them. It's one of his sayings—he's always getting it off to his University classes—that if you have once really called an emotion or an ambition by its right name, you have it by the tail, so to speak—that if you know, for instance, that it's your vanity and not your love that's wounded by something, you'll stop caring. But I never noticed that it really worked if you cared hard enough. Diagnosing a disease doesn't help you any, if you keep right on being sick with it." "My dear! My dear!" cried the man, leaning towards her again, and looking—dazzled—into the beauty and intelligence of her eyes, "the idea that you are afflicted with any disease could only occur to the morbid mind of the bluest-nosed Puritan who ever cut down a May-pole! You're wonderfully, you're terrifyingly, you are superbly sound and vigorous!" Breaking in upon this speech, there came the quick, smooth purr of an automobile with all its parts functioning perfectly, a streak of dark gray past the shutters, the sigh of an engine stopped suddenly—Molly Sommerville sprang from behind the steering wheel and ran into the house. She was exquisitely flushed and eager when she came in, but when she saw the two alone in the great, cool, dusky room, filled to its remotest corners with the ineffable aroma of long, intimate, and interrupted talk, she was brought up short. She faltered for an instant and then continued to advance, her eyes on Sylvia. "It's so hot," she said, at random, "and I thought I'd run over for tea—" "Oh, of course," said Sylvia, jumping up in haste, "it's late! I'd forgotten it was time for tea! Blame me! Since I've been here, Aunt Victoria has left it to me—where shall I say to have it set?" "The pergola's lovely," suggested Molly. She took her close motor-hat from the pure gold of her hair with a rather listless air. "All right—the pergola!" agreed Sylvia, perhaps a little too anxiously. In spite of herself, she gave, and she knew she was giving, the effect of needing somehow to make something up to Molly…. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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