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Bent Twig

<h2 id="id01573" style="margin-top: 4em">CHAPTER XXXI</h2> <h5 id="id01574">SYLVIA MEETS WITH PITY</h5> 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's the 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 you do work!" 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 house and 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 and let it 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 Morrison will manage?" "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, "why I'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. I was 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 hill in driveway, 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! For shame! 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 her flesh creep. She turned a hard, angry face on Page. "Oh, the beast! The beast!" she cried, under her breath. She felt defiled. She hated Arnold. 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. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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