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Bent Twig

<h2 id="id01695" style="margin-top: 4em">CHAPTER XXXIV</h2> <h5 id="id01696">SYLVIA TELLS THE TRUTH</h5> They left Mrs. Marshall-Smith with a book, seated on a little yellow-painted iron chair, the fifteen-centime kind, at the top of the great flight of steps leading down to the wide green expanse of the Tapis Vert. She was alternately reading Huysmans' highly imaginative ideas on Gothic cathedrals, and letting her eyes stray up and down the long façade of the great Louis. Her powers of aesthetic assimilation seemed to be proof against this extraordinary mixture of impressions. She had insisted that she would be entirely happy there in the sun, for an hour at least, especially if she were left in solitude with her book. On which intimation Sylvia and Page had strolled off to do some exploring. It was a situation which a month of similar arrangements had made very familiar to them. "No, I don't know Versailles very well," he said in answer to her question, "but I believe the gardens back of the Grand and Petit Trianon are more interesting than these near the Château itself. The conscientiousness with which they're kept up is not quite so formidable." So they walked down the side of the Grand Canal, admiring the rather pensive beauty of the late November woods, and talking, as was the proper thing, about the great Louis and his court, and how they both detested his style of gilded, carved wall ornamentation, although his chairs weren't as bad as some others. They turned off at the cross-arm of the Canal towards the Great Trianon; they talked, again dutifully in the spirit of the place, about Madame de Maintenon. They differed on this subject just enough to enjoy discussing it. Page averred that the whole affair had always passed his comprehension, "—what that ease-loving, vain, indulgent, trivial-minded grandson of Henri Quatre could ever have seen for all those years in that stiff, prim, cold old school-ma'am—" But Sylvia shook her head. "I know how he felt. He had to have her, once he'd found her. She was the only person in all his world he could depend on." "Why not depend on himself?" Page asked. "Oh, he couldn't! He couldn't! She had character and he hadn't." "What do you mean by character?" he challenged her. "It's what I haven't!" she said. He attempted a chivalrous exculpation. "Oh, if you mean by character such hard, insensitive lack of imagination as Madame de Maintenon's—" "No, not that," said Sylvia. "You know what I mean by character as well as I." By the time they were back of the Little Trianon, this beginning had led them naturally enough away from the frivolities of historical conversation to serious considerations, namely themselves. The start had been a reminiscence of Sylvia's, induced by the slow fall of golden leaves from the last of the birches into the still water of the lake in the midst of Marie Antoinette's hamlet. They stopped on an outrageously rustic bridge, constructed quite in the artificially rural style of the place, and, leaning on the railing, watched in a fascinated silence the quiet, eddying descent of the leaves. There was not a breath of wind. The leaves detached themselves from the tree with no wrench. They loosened their hold gradually, gradually, and finally out of sheer fullness of maturity floated down to their graves with a dreamy content. "I never happened to see that effect before," said Page. "I supposed leaves were detached only by wind. It's astonishingly peaceful, isn't it?" "I saw it once before," said Sylvia, her eyes fixed on the noiseless arabesques traced by the leaves in their fall—"at home in La Chance. I'll never forget it." She spoke in a low tone as though not to break the charmed silence about them, and, upon his asking her for the incident, she went on, almost in a murmur: "It isn't a story you could possibly understand. You've never been poor. But I'll tell you if you like. I've talked to you such a lot about home and the queer people we know—did I ever mention Cousin Parnelia? She's a distant cousin of my mother's, a queer woman who lost her husband and three children in a train-wreck years ago, and has been a little bit crazy ever since. She has always worn, for instance, exactly the same kind of clothes, hat and everything, that she had on, the day the news was brought to her. The Spiritualists got hold of her then, and she's been one herself for ever so long—table-rapping—planchette-writing—all the horrid rest of it, and she makes a little money by being a "medium" for ignorant people. But she hardly earns enough that way to keep her from starving, and Mother has for ever so long helped her out. "Well, there was a chance to buy a tiny house and lot for her—two hundred and twenty dollars. It was just a two-roomed cottage, but it would be a roof over her head at least. She is getting old and ought to have something to fall back on. Mother called us all together and said this would be a way to help provide for Cousin Parnelia's old age. Father never could bear her (he's so hard on ignorant, superstitious people), but he always does what Mother thinks best, so he said he'd give up the new typewriter he'd been hoping to buy. Mother gave up her chicken money she'd been putting by for some new rose-bushes, and she loves her roses too! Judith gave what she'd earned picking raspberries, and I—oh, how I hated to do it! but I was ashamed not to—I gave what I'd saved up for my autumn suit. Lawrence just stuck it out that he hated Cousin Parnelia and he wouldn't give a bit. But he was so little that he only had thirty cents or something like that in a tin bank, so it didn't matter. When we put it all together it wasn't nearly enough of course, and we took the rest out of our own little family savings-bank rainy-day savings and bought the tiny house and lot. Father wanted to 'surprise' Cousin Parnelia with the deed. He wanted to lay it under some flowers in a basket, or slip it into her pocket, or send it to her with some eggs or something. But Mother—it was so like her!—the first time Cousin Parnelia happened to come to the house, Mother picked up the deed from her desk and said offhand, 'Oh, Parnelia, we bought the little Garens house for you,' and handed her the paper, and went to talking about cutworms or Bordeaux mixture." Page smiled, appreciative of the picture. "I see her. I see your mother—Vermont to the core." "Well, it was only about two weeks after that, I was practising and Mother was rubbing down a table she was fixing over. Nobody else happened to be at home. Cousin Parnelia came in, her old battered black straw hat on one ear as usual. She was all stirred up and pleased about a new 'method' of using planchette. You know what planchette is, don't you? The little heart-shaped piece of wood spiritualists use, with a pencil fast to it, to take down their silly 'messages,' Some spiritualistic fake was visiting town conducting séances and he claimed he'd discovered some sort of method for inducing greater receptivity—or something like that. I don't know anything about spiritualism but little tags I've picked up from hearing Cousin Parnelia talk. Anyway, he was 'teaching' other mediums for a big price. And it came out that Cousin Parnelia had mortgaged the house for more than it was worth, and had used the money to take those 'lessons.' I couldn't believe it for a minute. When I really understood what she'd done, I was so angry I felt like smashing both fists down on the piano keys and howling! I thought of my blue corduroy I'd given up—I was only fourteen and just crazy about clothes. Mother was sitting on the floor, scraping away at the table-leg. She got up, laid down her sandpaper, and asked Cousin Parnelia if she'd excuse us for a few minutes. Then she took me by the hand, as though I was a little girl. I felt like one too, I felt almost frightened by Mother's face, and we both marched out of the house. She didn't say a word. She took me down to our swimming-hole in the river. There is a big maple-tree leaning over that. It was a perfectly breathless autumn day like this, and the tree was shedding its leaves like that birch, just gently, slowly, steadily letting them go down into the still water. We sat down on the bank and watched them. The air was full of them, yet all so quiet, without any hurry. The water was red with them, they floated down on our shoulders, on our heads, in our laps—not a sound—so peaceful—so calm—so perfect. It was like the andante of the Kreutzer. "I knew what Mother wanted, to get over being angry with Cousin Parnelia. And she was. I could see it in her face, like somebody in church. I felt it myself—all over, like an E string that's been pulled too high, slipping down into tune when you turn the peg. But I didn't want to feel it. I wanted to hate Cousin Parnelia. I thought it was awfully hard in Mother not to want us to have even the satisfaction of hating Cousin Parnelia! I tried to go on doing it. I remember I cried a little. But Mother never said a word—just sat there in that quiet autumn sunshine, watching the leaves falling—falling—and I had to do as she did. And by and by I felt, just as she did, that Cousin Parnelia was only a very small part of something very big. "When we went in, Mother's face was just as it always was, and we got Cousin Parnelia a cup of tea and gave her part of a boiled ham to take home and a dozen eggs and a loaf of graham bread, just as though nothing had happened." She stopped speaking. There was no sound at all but the delicate, forlorn whisper of the leaves. "That is a very fine story!" said Page finally. He spoke with a measured, emphatic, almost solemn accent. "Yes, it's a very fine story," murmured Sylvia a little wistfully. "It's finer as a story than it was as real life. It was years before I could look at blue corduroy without feeling stirred up. I really cared more about my clothes than I did about that stupid, ignorant old woman. If it's only a cheerful giver the Lord loves, He didn't feel much affection for me." They began to retrace their steps. "You gave up the blue corduroy," he commented as they walked on, "and you didn't scold your silly old kinswoman." "That's only because Mother hypnotized me. She has character. I did it as Louis signed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, because Madame de Maintenon thought he ought to." "But she couldn't hypnotize your brother Lawrence, althought he was so much younger. He didn't give up his thirty-seven cents. I think you're bragging without cause if you claim any engaging and picturesque absence of character." "Oh, Lawrence—he's different! He's extraordinary! Sometimes I think he is a genius. And it's Judith who hypnotizes him. She supplies his character." They emerged into an opening and walked in silence for some moments towards the Grand Trianon. "You're lucky, very lucky," commented Page, "to have such an ample supply of character in the family. I'm an only child. There's nobody to give me the necessary hypodermic supply of it at the crucial moments." He went on, turning his head to look at the Great Trianon, very mellow in the sunshine. "It's my belief, however, that at the crucial moments you have plenty of it of your own." "That's a safe guess!" said Sylvia ironically, "since there never have been any crucial moments in a life so uninterestingly eventless as mine. I wonder what I would do," she mused. "My own conviction is that—suppose I'd lived in the days of the Reformation—in the days of Christ—in the early Abolition days—" She had an instant certainty: "Oh, I have been entirely on the side of whatever was smooth, and elegant, and had amenity—I'd have hated the righteous side!" Page did not look very deeply moved by this revelation of depravity. Indeed, he smiled rather amusedly at her, and changed the subject. "You said a moment ago that I couldn't understand, because I'd always had money. Isn't it a bit paradoxical to say that the people who haven't a thing are the only ones who know anything about it?" "But you couldn't realize what losing the money meant to us. You can't know what the absence of money can do to a life." "I can know," said Page, "what the presence of it cannot do for a life." His accent implied rather sadly that the omissions were considerable. "Oh, of course, of course," Sylvia agreed. "There's any amount it can't do. After you have it, you must get the other things too." He brought his eyes down to her from a roving quest among the tops of the trees. "It seems to me you want a great deal," he said quizzically. "Yes, I do," she admitted. "But I don't see that you have any call to object to my wanting it. You don't have to wish for everything at once. You have it already." He received this into one of his thoughtful silences, but presently it brought him to a standstill. They were within sight of the Grand Canal again, looking down from the terrace of the Trianon. He leaned against the marble balustrade and thrust his hands deep into his pockets. His clear eyes were clouded. He looked profoundly grave. "I am thirty-two years old," he said, "and never for a moment of that time have I made any sense out of my position in life. If you call that 'having everything'—" It occurred to Sylvia fleetingly that she had never made any sense out of her position in life either, and had been obliged to do a great many disagreeable things into the bargain, but she kept this thought to herself, and looked conspicuously what she genuinely felt, a sympathetic interest. The note of plain direct sincerity which was Page's hallmark never failed to arrest her attention, a little to arouse her wonder, and occasionally, for a reason that she did not like to dwell upon, somewhat to abash her. The reason was that he never spoke for effect, and she often did. He was not speaking for effect now: he seemed scarcely even to be speaking to her, rather to be musingly formulating something for his own enlightenment. He went on. "The fact is that there is no sense to be made out of my situation in life. I am like a man with a fine voice, who has no ear." He showed surprise that Sylvia failed to follow this, and explained. "I mean the voice is no good to that kind of a man, it's no good to anybody. It's the craziest, accidental affair anyhow, haven't you ever noticed it?—who draws the fine voices. Half the time—more than half the time, most of the time it seems to me when I've been recently to a lot of concerts, the people who have the voices haven't any other qualifications for being singers. And it's so with coal-mines, with everything else that's inherited. For five years now I've given up what I'd like to do, and I've tried, under the best maestri I could find, to make something out of my voice, so to speak. And it's no go. It's in the nature of things that I can't make a go of it. Over everything I do lies the taint that I'm the 'owner'! They are suspicious of me, always will be—and rightly so. Anybody else not connected with the mediaeval idea of 'possession' could do better than I. The whole relation's artificial. I'm in it for the preposterous reason that my father, operating on Wall Street, made a lucky guess,—as though I should be called upon to run a locomotive because my middle initial is L!" Sylvia still felt the same slight sense of flatness when this recurring topic thrust itself into a personal talk; but during the last month she had adjusted herself to Page so that this no longer showed on the surface. She was indeed quite capable of taking an interest in the subject, as soon as she could modulate herself into the new key. "Yes, of course," she agreed, "it's like so many other things that are perfectly necessary to go on with, perfectly absurd when you look closely at them. My father nearly lost his position once for saying that all inheritance was wrong. But even he never had the slightest suggestion as to what to do about it, how to get an inheritance into the hands of the people who might make the best use of it." She was used from her childhood to this sort of academic doubt of everything, conducted side by side with a practical acceptance of everything. Professor and Madame La Rue, in actual life devotedly faithful married lovers, staid, stout, habit-ridden elderly people, professed a theoretical belief in the flexibility of relationships sanctioned by the practice of free love. It was perhaps with this recollection in her mind that she suggested, "Don't you suppose it will be like the institution of marriage, very, very gradually altered till it fits conditions better?" "In the meantime, how about the cases of those who are unhappily married?" "I don't see anything for them but just to get along the best they can," she told him. "You think I'd better give up trying to do anything with my Colorado—?" he asked her, as though genuinely seeking advice. "I should certainly think that five years was plenty long enough for a fair trial! You'd make a better ambassador than an active captain of industry, anyhow," she said with conviction. Whereupon he bestowed on her a long, thoughtful stare, as though he were profoundly pondering her suggestion. They moved forward towards the Grand Canal in silence. Privately she was considering his case hardly one of extreme hardship. Privately also, as they advanced nearer and nearer the spot where they had left Mrs. Marshall-Smith, she was a little dreading the return to the perfect breeding with which Aunt Victoria did not ask, or intimate, or look, the question which was in her mind after each of these strolling tête-à-têtes which consistently led nowhere. There were instants when Sylvia would positively have preferred the vulgar openness of a direct question to which she might have answered, with the refreshing effect to her of a little honest blood-letting: "Dear Aunt Victoria, I haven't the least idea myself what's happening! I'm simply letting myself go because I don't see anything else to do. I have even no very clear idea as to what is going on inside my own head. I only know that I like Austin Page so much (in spite of a certain quite unforgotten episode) there would be nothing at all unpleasant about marrying him; but I also know that I didn't feel the least interest in him until Hélène told me about his barrels of money: I also know that I feel the strongest aversion to returning to the Spartan life of La Chance; and it occurs to me that these two things may throw considerable light on my 'liking' for Austin. As for what's in his mind, there is no subject on which I'm in blacker ignorance. And after being so tremendously fooled, in the case of Felix, about the degree of interest a man was feeling, I do not propose to take anything for granted which is not on the surface. It is quite possible that this singularly sincere and simple-mannered man may not have the slightest intention of doing anything more than enjoy a pleasant vacation from certain rather hair-splitting cares which seem to trouble him from time to time." As they walked side by side along the stagnant waters, she was sending inaudible messages of this sort towards her aunt; she had even selected the particular mauve speck at the top of the steps which might be Mrs. Marshall-Smith. In the glowing yellow gold of the sky, a faintly whirring dark-gray spot appeared: an airman made his way above the Grand Canal, passed above the Château, and disappeared. They had sat down on a bench, the better to crane their heads to watch him out of sight. Sylvia was penetrated with the strangeness of that apparition in that spot and thrilled out: "Isn't it wonderful! Isn't it wonderful! Here!" "There's something more wonderful!" he said, indicating with his cane the canal before them, where a group of neat, poorly dressed, lower middle-class people looked proudly out from their triumphal progress in the ugly, gasping little motor-boat which operates at twenty-five centimes a trip. She had not walked and talked a month with him for nothing. She knew that he did not refer to motor-boats as against aëroplanes. "You mean," she said appreciatively, "you mean those common people going freely around the royal canal where two hundred years ago—" He nodded, pleased by her quickness. "Two hundred years from now," he conjectured, "the stubs of my checkbook will be exhibited in an historical museum along with the regalia of the last hereditary monarch." Here she did not follow, and she was too intelligent to pretend she did. He lifted his eyebrows. "Relic of a quaint old social structure inexplicably tolerated so late as the beginning of the twentieth century," "Oh, coal-mines forever!" she said, smiling, her eyes brilliant with friendly mockery. "Aye! Toujours perdrix!" he admitted. He continued to look steadily and seriously into her smiling, sparkling face, until, with a sudden pulse of premonition, she was stricken into a frightened gravity. And then, with no prelude, no approach, quite simply and directly, he spoke. "I wonder how much you care for me?" he said musingly, as he had said everything else that afternoon: and as she positively paled at the eeriness of this echo from her own thought, he went on, his voice vibrating in the deep organ note of a great moment, "You must know, of course, by this time that I care everything possible for you." Compressed into an instant of acute feeling Sylvia felt the pangs which had racked her as a little girl when she had stood in the schoolyard with Camilla Fingál before her, and the terrifying hostile eyes about her. Her two selves rose up against each other fiercely, murderously, as they had then. The little girl sprang forward to help the woman who for an instant hesitated. The fever and the struggle vanished as instantly as they had come. Sylvia felt very still, very hushed. Page had told her that she always rose to crucial moments. She rose to this one. "I don't know," she said as quietly as he, with as utter a bravery of bare sincerity, "I don't know how much I care for you—but I think it is a great deal." She rose upon a solemn wing of courage to a greater height of honesty. Her eyes were on his, as clear as his. The mere beauty of her face had gone like a lifted veil. For a instant he saw her as Sylvia herself did not dream she could be. "It is very hard," said Sylvia Marshall, with clear eyes and trembling lips of honest humility, "for a girl with no money to know how much she cares for a very rich man." She had never been able to imagine what she would say if the moment should come. She had certainly not intended to say this. But an unsuspected vein of granite in her rang an instant echo to his truth. She was bewildered to see his ardent gaze upon her deepen to reverence. He took her hand in his and kissed it. He tried to speak, but his voice broke. She was immensely moved to see him so moved. She was also entirely at a loss. How strangely different things always were from forecasts of them! They had suddenly taken the long-expected stride away from their former relation, but she did not know where they had arrived. What was the new status between them? What did Austin think she meant? It came to her with a shock that the new status between them was, on the surface, exactly what it was in reality; that the avowed relation between them was, as far as it went, precisely in accord with the facts of the case. The utter strangeness of this in any human relationship filled her with astonishment, with awe, almost with uneasiness. It seemed unnatural not to have to pretend anything! Apparently it did not seem unnatural to the man beside her. "You are a very wonderful woman," he now said, his voice still but partly under his control. "I had not thought that you could exist." He took her hand again and continued more steadily: "Will you let me, for a little while longer, go on living near you? Perhaps things may seem clearer to us both, later—" Sylvia was swept by a wave of gratitude as for some act of magnanimity. "You are the wonderful one!" she cried. Not since the day Hélène had told her who he was, had she felt so whole, so sound, so clean, as now. The word came rushing on the heels of the thought: "You make one feel so clean!" she said, unaware that he could scarcely understand her, and then she smiled, passing with her free, natural grace from the memorable pause, and the concentration of a great moment forward into the even-stepping advance of life. "That first day—even then you made me feel clean—that soap! that cold, clean water—it is your aroma!" Their walk along the silent water, over the great lawn, and up the steps was golden with the level rays of the sun setting back of them, at the end of the canal, between the distant, sentinel poplars. Their mood was as golden as the light. Sometimes they spoke, sometimes they were silent. Truth walked between them. Sylvia's mind, released from the tension of that great moment, began making its usual, sweeping, circling explorations of its own depths. Not all that it found was of an equal good report. Once she thought fleetingly: "This is only a very, very pretty way of saying that it is all really settled. With his great wealth, he is like a reigning monarch—let him be as delicate-minded as he pleases, when he indicates a wish—" More than once—many, many times—Felix Morrison's compelling dark eyes looked at her penetratingly, but she resolutely turned away her head from them, and from the impulse to answer their reproach even with an indignant, well-founded reproach of her own. Again and again she felt a sweet strangeness in her new position. The aroma of utter sincerity was like the scent of a wildflower growing in the sun, spicy, free. She wondered at a heart like his that could be at once ardent and subtle, that could desire so profoundly (the deep vibrations of that voice of yearning were in her ears still) and yet pause, and stand back, and wait, rather than force a hair's breadth of pretense. How he had liberated her! And once she found herself thinking, "I shall have sables myself, and diamonds, and a house as great as Molly's, and I shall learn how to entertain ambassadors, as she will never know." She was ashamed of this, she knew it to be shockingly out of key with the grand passage behind them. But she had thought it. And, as these thoughts, and many more, passed through her mind, as she spoke with a quiet peace, or was silent, she was transfigured into a beauty almost startling, by the accident of the level golden beams of light back of her. Her aureole of bright hair glowed like a saint's halo. The curiously placed lights and unexpected shadows brought out new subtleties in the modeling of her face. Her lightened heart gleamed through her eyes, like a lighted lamp. After a time, the man fell into a complete silence, glancing at her frequently as though storing away a priceless memory…. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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