elaborately avoided the slightest appearance of rivalry that their good taste, like a cloth thrown over an unknown object, inevitably excited curiosity as to what was concealed beneath it.
And Sylvia was not to be outdone. She turned her own eyes away from it as sedulously as they. She never let a conscious thought dwell on it–and like all other repressed and strangled currents of thought, it grew swollen and restive, filling her subconsciousness with monstrous, unformulated speculations. She was extremely absorbed in the luxury, the amenity, the smooth-working perfection of the life about her. She consciously concentrated all her faculties on her prodigious opportunity for aesthetic growth, for appreciation of the fine and marvelous things about her. She let go the last scruple which had held her back from accepting from Aunt Victoria the shower of beautiful things to wear which that connoisseur in wearing apparel delighted to bestow upon an object so deserving. She gave a brilliant outward effect of enjoying life as it came which was as impersonal as that of the two men who looked at her so frequently, and this effect went as deep as her will-power had command. But beneath–unacknowledged waves beating on the shore of her life and roughly, irresistibly, rudely fashioning it–rolled a ground-swell of imperious questionings….
Was Felix’ perfect manner of impersonal interest solely due to the delicacy of his situation? Did he feel now that he was as rich as Austin …? But, on the other hand, why did he come now and put himself in a situation which required the utmost efforts for unconsciousness on everybody’s part if not because Austin’s being there had meant he dared not wait? And Austin’s change of manner since the arrival of the other man, the film of ceremony which had slid imperceptibly over the tender friendliness of his manner, did that mean that he would not take advantage of Morrison’s temporarily tied hands, but, with a scrupulousness all his own, would wait until the race was even and they stood foot to foot on the same level? Or had he noticed at once, with those formidably clear eyes of his, some shade of her manner to Felix which she had not been able to command, and was he waiting for some move from her? And how could she move until she had some sign from Felix and how could he give a sign? There was nothing to do but to wait, to hope that the thin ice which now bent perilously under the pleasant ceremonies of their life in common, would hold them until…. Even the wildest up-leaping wave of that tossing tide never went beyond the blank wall which came after the “until….”
There were other moments when all that surge swung back and forth to the rhythm of the poisoned recollection of her unacknowledged humiliation in Lydford; when, inflamed with determination to avoid another such blow in the face, Sylvia almost consciously asked herself, self-contemptuously, “Who am I, an obscure, poverty-stricken music-teacher out of the West, to fancy that I have but to choose between two such men, two such fortunes?” but against this counted strongly the constantly recurring revelations of the obscure pasts of many of the women whom she met during those days, women who were now shining, acknowledged firsts in the procession of success. The serene, stately, much-admired Princesse de Chevrille had been a Miss Sommers from Cleveland, Ohio, and she had come to Paris first as a governess. The beautiful Mrs. William Winterton Perth, now Aunt Victoria’s favorite friend, who entertained lesser royalty and greater men of letters with equal quiet dignity, had in her youth, so she chanced casually one day to mention, known what it was to be thrifty about car-fares. There was nothing intrinsically impossible in any of the glittering vistas down which Sylvia’s quick eye cast involuntary glances.
But inevitably, when the heaving dark tide rose as high as this, there came a swift and deadly ebbing away of it all, and into Sylvia’s consciousness (always it seemed to her with the most entire irrelevance) there flared up the picture of Molly as she had seen her last, shimmering like a jewel in her white veil–then the other picture, the over-turned car, the golden head bruised and bloody and forever stilled–and always, always beyond that, the gaunt, monstrous possibility, too awful ever to be put into words, too impossible for credence …
From that shapeless, looming, black mass, Sylvia fled away actually and physically, springing to her feet wherever she was, entering another room, taking up some other occupation.
Just once she had the faintest sign from beyond the wall that she was not alone in her fear of this horror. She was sitting near Austin Page at a tea, one of the frequent, small, richly chosen assemblages which Mrs. Marshall-Smith gathered about her. Part of the ensuing chatter on one of these occasions turned, as modern chatter frequently does, on automobiles. The husband of Mrs. William Winterton Perth was an expert on such matters, having for some years diverted by an interest in mechanics the immense enforced leisure of a transplanted male American. He was talking incessantly that day of the wonderful improvement in steering mechanism the last few years had brought about. “I tell you what, Miss Marshall!” he insisted, as though she had disputed the point with him, “I tell you _what_, there used to be some excuse for piling your car up by the side of the road, but nowadays any one who doesn’t keep in the road and right side up must be just plain _looking_ for a chance to use his car like a dose of cold poison.” For a moment Sylvia could not conceive why she felt so sickening a thrust at her heart. She turned her eyes from the speaker. They fell on a man’s hand, on the arm of the chair next hers. It was Austin’s hand and it was shaking uncontrollably. As she gazed at it, fascinated, he thrust it deep into his pocket. She did not look at him. In a moment he rose and crossed the room. The husband of Mrs. William Winterton Perth asked for another _petit four_, confessing his fondness for chocolate eclairs,–and embarked upon demountable rims.
CHAPTER XXXVII
“_… His wife and children perceiving it, began to cry after him to return; but the man put his fingers in his ears and ran on, crying, ‘Life! Life Eternal!_'”
They had been in the Louvre, had spent an hour with Felix in that glowing embodiment of the pomp and majesty of human flesh known as the Rubens Medici-Room, and now, for the sheer pleasure of it, had decided to walk home. Mrs. Marshall-Smith, endowed with a figure which showed as yet no need for exercise, and having passed youth’s restless liking for it, had vetoed the plan as far as she went, and entering her waiting ear, had been borne smoothly off, an opulent Juno without her peacocks.
The three who were left, lingered for a moment in the quiet sunny square of the Louvre, looking up at the statue of Lafayette, around at the blossoming early shrubs. Sylvia was still under the spell of the riotous, full-blown splendor of the paintings she had seen. Wherever she looked, she saw again the rainbow brilliance of those glossy satins, that rippling flooding golden hair, those ample, heaving bosoms, those liquid gleaming eyes, the soft abundance of that white and ruddy flesh, with the patina of time like a golden haze over it. The spectacle had been magnificent and the scene they now entered was a worthy successor to it. They walked down through the garden of the Tuileries and emerged upon the Place de la Concorde at five o’clock of a perfect April afternoon, when the great square hummed and sang with the gleaming traffic of luxury. Countless automobiles, like glistening beetles, darted about, each one with its load of carefully dressed and coiffed women, looking out on the weaving glitter of the street with the proprietary, complacent stare of those who feel themselves in the midst of a civilization with which they are in perfect accord. Up the avenue, beyond, streamed an incessant parade of more costly ears, more carriages, shining, caparisoned horses, every outfit sumptuous to its last detail, every one different from all the others, and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them, till in the distance they dwindled to a black stream dominated by the upward sweep of the Arc de Triomphe, magnified to fabulous proportions by the filmy haze of the spring day. To their left flowed the Seine, blue and flashing. A little breeze stirred the new leaves on the innumerable trees.
Sylvia stopped for an instant to take in the marvel of this pageant, enacted every day of every season against that magnificent background. She made a gesture to call her companions’ attention to it–“Isn’t it in the key of Rubens–bloom, radiance, life expansive!”
“And Chabrier should set it to music,” said Morrison.
“What does it make you think of?” she asked. “It makes me think of a beautiful young Greek, in a purple chiton, with a wreath of roses in his hair.”
“It makes me think of a beautiful young woman, all fire and spirit, and fineness, who drinks life like a perfumed wine,” said Morrison, his eyes on hers. She felt a little shiver of frightened pleasure, and turned to Page to carry it off, “What does it make you think of?” she asked.
“It makes me think,” he answered her at once, his eyes on the haze caught like a dream in the tender green of the budding trees,–“it makes me think of a half-naked, sweating man, far underground in black night, striking at a rock with a pick.”
If he had burst into loud profanity, the effect could not have been more shocking. “_Oh!_” said Sylvia, vexed and put out. She began to walk forward. Morrison in his turn gave an exclamation which seemed the vent of long-stored exasperation, and said with heat: “Look here, Page, you’re getting to be a perfect monomaniac on the subject! What earthly good does it do your man with a pick to ruin a fine moment by lugging him in!”
They were all advancing up the avenue now, Sylvia between the two men. They talked at each other across her. She listened intently, with the feeling that Morrison was voicing for her the question she had been all her life wishing once for all to let fly at her parents’ standards: “What good _did_ it do anybody to go without things you might have? Conditions were too vast for one person to influence.”
“No earthly good,” said Page peaceably; “I didn’t say it did him any good. Miss Marshall asked me what all this made me think of, and I told her.”
“It is simply becoming an obsession with you!” urged Morrison. Sylvia remembered what Page had said about his irritation years ago when Austin had withdrawn from the collector’s field.
“Yes, it’s becoming an obsession with me,” agreed Page thoughtfully. He spoke as he always did, with the simplest manner of direct sincerity.
“You ought to make an effort against it, really, my dear fellow. It’s simply spoiling your life for you!”
“Worse than that, it’s making me bad company!” said Page whimsically. “I either ought to reform or get out.”
Morrison set his enemy squarely before him and proceeded to do battle. “I believe I know just what’s in your mind, Page: I’ve been watching it grow in you, ever since you gave up majolica.”
“I never claimed that was anything but the blindest of impulses!” protested Page mildly.
“But it wasn’t. I knew! It was a sign you had been infected by the spirit of the times and had ‘caught it’ so hard that it would be likely to make an end of you. It’s all right for the collective mind. That’s dense, obtuse; it resists enough to keep its balance. But it’s not all right for you. Now you just let me talk for a few minutes, will you? I’ve an accumulated lot to say! We are all of us living through the end of an epoch, just as much as the people of the old regime lived through the last of an epoch in the years before the French Revolution. I don’t believe it’s going to come with guillotines or any of those picturesque trimmings. We don’t do things that way any more. In my opinion it will come gradually, and finally arrive about two or three generations from now. And it oughtn’t to come any sooner! Sudden changes never save time. There’s always the reaction to be gotten over with, if they’re sudden. Gradual growths are what last. Now anybody who knows about the changes of society knows that there’s little enough any one person can do to hasten them or to put them off. They’re actuated by a law of their own, like the law which makes typhoid fever come to a crisis in seven days. Now then, if you admit that the process ought not to be hastened, and in the second place that you couldn’t hasten it if you tried, what earthly use _is_ there in bothering your head about it! There are lots of people, countless people, made expressly to do whatever is necessary, blunt chisels fit for nothing but shaping grindstones. _Let them do it!_ You’ll only get in their way if you try to interfere. It’s not your job. For the few people capable of it, there is nothing more necessary to do for the world than to show how splendid and orderly and harmonious a thing life can be. While the blunt chisels hack out the redemption of the overworked (and Heaven knows I don’t deny their existence), let those who can, preserve the almost-lost art of living, so that when the millennium comes (you see I don’t deny that this time it’s on the way!) it won’t find humanity solely made up of newly freed serfs who don’t know what use to make of their liberty. How is beauty to be preserved by those who know and love and serve her, and how can they guard beauty if they insist on going down to help clean out the sewers? Miss Marshall, don’t you see how I am right? Don’t you see how no one can do more for the common weal than just to live, as finely, as beautifully, as intelligently as possible? And people who are capable of this noblest service to the world only waste themselves and serve nobody if they try to do the work of dray-horses.”
Sylvia had found this wonderfully eloquent and convincing. She now broke in. “When I was a young girl in college, I used to have a pretentious, jejune sort of idea that what I wanted out of life was to find Athens and live in it–and your idea sounds like that. The best Athens, you know, not sensuous and selfish, but full of lovely and leisurely sensations and fine thoughts and great emotions.”
“It wasn’t pretentious and jejune at all!” said Morrison warmly, “but simply the most perfect metaphor of what must have been–of course, I can see it from here–the instinctive sane effort of a nature like yours. Let’s all try to live in Athens so that there will be some one there to welcome in humanity.”
Page volunteered his first contribution to the talk. “Oh, I wouldn’t mind a bit if I thought we were really doing what Morrison thinks is our excuse for living, creating fine and beautiful lives and keeping alive the tradition of beauty and fineness. But our lives aren’t beautiful, they’re only easeful. They’re not fine, they’re only well-upholstered. You’ve got to have fitly squared and substantial foundations before you can build enduring beauty. And all this,” he waved his hand around him at the resplendent, modern city, “this isn’t Athens; it’s–it’s Corinth, if you want to go on being classic. As near as I can make out from what Sylvia lets fall, the nearest approach to Athenian life that I ever heard of, was the life she left behind her, her parents’ life. That has all the elements of the best Athenian color, except physical ease. And ease is no Athenian quality! It’s Persian! Socrates was a stone-cutter, you know. And even in the real Athens, even that best Athens, the one in Plato’s mind–there was a whole class given over to doing the dirty work for the others. That never seemed to bother Plato–happy Plato! but–I’m sure I don’t pretend to say if it ultimately means more or less greatness for the human race–but somehow since Christianity, people find it harder and harder to get back to Plato’s serenity on that point. I’m not arguing the case against men like you, Morrison–except that there’s only one of you. You’ve always seemed to me more like Plato than anybody alive, and I’ve regarded you as the most enviable personality going. I’d emulate you in a minute–if I could; but if mine is a case of mania, it’s a genuine case. I’m sane on everything else, but when it comes to that–it’s being money that I don’t earn, but they, those men off there underground, do earn and are forced to give to me–when it comes to that, I’m as fixed in my opinion as the man who thought he was a hard-boiled egg. I don’t blame you for being out of patience with me. As you say I only spoil fine minutes by thinking of it, and as you charitably refrained from saying, I spoil other people’s fine moments by speaking of it.”
“What would you _have_ us do!” Morrison challenged him–“all turn in and clean sewers for a living? And wouldn’t it be a lovely world, if we did!”
Page did not answer for a moment. “I wonder,” he finally suggested mildly, “if it were all divided up, the dirty work, and each of us did our share–“
“Oh, impractical! impractical! Wholly a back-eddy in the forward-moving current. You can’t go back of a world-wide movement. Things are too complicated now for everybody to do his share of anything. It’s as reasonable, as to suggest that everybody do his share of watchmaking, or fancy juggling. Every man to his trade! And if the man who makes watches, or cleans sewers, or even mines coal–your especial sore spot–does his work well, and is suited to it in temperament, who knows that he does not find it a satisfaction as complete as mine in telling a bit of genuine Palissy ware from an imitation. You, for instance, you’d make a _pretty_ coal-miner, wouldn’t you? You’re about as suited to it as Miss Marshall here for being a college settlement worker!”
Sylvia broke out into an exclamation of wonder. “Oh, how you do put your finger on the spot! If you knew how I’ve struggled to justify myself for not going into ‘social work’ of some kind! Every girl nowadays who doesn’t marry at twenty, is slated for ‘social betterment’ whether she has the least capacity for it or not. Public opinion pushes us into it as mediaeval girls were shoved into convents, because it doesn’t know what else to do with us. It’s all right for Judith,–it’s fine for her. She’s made for it. I envy her. I always have. But me–I never could bear the idea of interfering in people’s lives to tell them what to do about their children and their husbands just because they were poor. It always seemed to me it was bad enough to be poor without having other people with a little more money messing around in your life. I’m different from that kind of people. If I’m sincere I can’t pretend I’m not different. And I’m not a bit sure I know what’s any better for them to do than what they’re doing!” She had spoken impetuously, hotly, addressing not the men beside her but a specter of her past life.
“How true that is–how unerring the instinct which feels it!” said Morrison appreciatively.
Page looked at Sylvia quickly, his clear eyes very tender. “Yes, yes; it’s her very own life that Sylvia needs to live,” he said in unexpected concurrence of opinion. Sylvia felt that the honors of the discussion so far were certainly with Felix. And Austin seemed oddly little concerned by this. He made no further effort to retrieve his cause, but fell into a silence which seemed rather preoccupied than defeated.
They were close to the Arc de Triomphe now. A brilliant sunset was firing a salvo of scarlet and gold behind it, and they stood for a moment to admire. “Oh, Paris! Paris!” murmured Morrison. “Paris in April! There’s only one thing better, and that we have before us–Paris in May!”
They turned in past the loge of the concierge, and mounted in the languidly moving elevator to the appartement. Felix went at once to the piano and began playing something Sylvia did not recognize, something brilliantly colored, vivid, resonant, sonorous, perhaps Chabrier, she thought, remembering his remark on the avenue. Without taking off her hat she stepped to her favorite post of observation, the balcony, and sat down in the twilight with a sigh of exquisitely complete satisfaction, facing the sunset, the great arch lifting his huge, harmonious bulk up out of the dim, encircling trees, the resplendent long stretch of the lighted boulevard. The music seemed to rise up from the scene like its natural aroma.
Austin Page came out after her and leaned silently on the railing, looking over the city. Morrison finished the Chabrier and began on something else before the two on the balcony spoke. Sylvia was asking no questions of fate or the future, accepting the present with wilful blindness to its impermanence.
Austin said: “I have been trying to say good-bye all afternoon. I am going back to America tomorrow.”
Sylvia was so startled and shocked that she could not believe her ears. Her heart beat hard. To an incoherent, stammered inquiry of hers, he answered, “It’s my Colorado property–always that. It spoils everything. I must go back, and make a decision that’s needed there. I’ve been trying to tell you. But I can’t. Every time I have tried, I have not dared. If I told you, and you should beckon me back, I should not be strong enough to go on. I could not leave you, Sylvia, if you lifted your hand. And that would be the end of the best of us both.” He had turned and faced her, his hands back of him, gripping the railing. The deep vibrations of his voice transported her to that never-forgotten moment at Versailles. He went on: “When it is–when the decision is made, I’ll write you. I’ll write you, and then–I shall wait to hear your answer!” From inside the room Felix poured a dashing spray of diamond-like trills upon them.
She murmured something, she did not know what; her breathing oppressed by her emotion. “Won’t you–shan’t we see you–here–?” She put her hand to her side, feeling an almost intolerable pain.
He moved near her, and, to bring himself to her level, knelt down on one knee, putting his elbows on the arm of her chair. The dusk had fallen so thickly that she had not seen his face before. She now saw that his lips were quivering, that he was shaking from head to foot. “It will be for you to say, Sylvia,” his voice was rough and harsh with feeling, “whether you see me again.” He took her hands in his and covered them with kisses–no grave tokens of reverence these, as on the day at Versailles, but human, hungry, yearning kisses that burned, that burned–
And then he was gone. Sylvia was there alone in the enchanted twilight, the Triumphal Arch before her, the swept and garnished and spangled city beneath her. She lifted her hand and saw that he had left on it not only kisses but tears. If he had been there then, she would have thrown herself into his arms.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
SYLVIA COMES TO THE WICKET-GATE
Three weeks passed before his letter came. The slow, thrilling crescendo of May had lifted the heart up to a devout certainty of June. The leaves were fully out, casting a light, new shadow on the sprinkled streets. Every woman was in a bright-colored, thin summer dress, and every young woman looked alluring. The young men wore their hats tilted to one side, swung jaunty canes as they walked, and peered hopefully under the brim of every flowered feminine headdress. The days were like golden horns of plenty, spilling out sunshine, wandering perfumed airs, and the heart-quickening aroma of the new season. The nights were cool and starry. Every one in Paris spent as much as possible of every hour out of doors. The pale-blue sky flecked with creamy clouds seemed the dome, and the city the many-colored pavement of some vast building, so grandly spacious that the sauntering, leisurely crowds thronging the thoroughfares seemed no crowds at all, but only denoted a delightful sociability.
All the spring vegetables were at their crispest, most melting perfection, and the cherries from Anjou were like miniature apples of Hesperus. Up and down the smaller streets went white-capped little old women, with baskets on their arms, covered with snowy linen, and they chanted musically on the first three notes of the scale, so that the sunny vault above them resounded to the cry, “De la creme, fromage a la creme!” The three Americans had enchanted expeditions to Chantilly, to Versailles again, called back from the past and the dead by the miracle of spring; to more distant formidable Coucy, grimly looking out over the smiling country at its foot, to Fontainebleau, even a two days’ dash into Touraine, to Blois, Amboise, Loches, jewels set in the green enamels of May … and all the time Sylvia’s attempt to take the present and to let the future bring what it would, was pitched perforce in a higher and higher key,–took a more violent effort to achieve.
She fell deeper than ever under Morrison’s spell, and yet the lack of Austin was like an ache to her. She had said to herself, “I will not let myself think of him until his letter comes,” and she woke up in the night suddenly, seeing the fire and tenderness and yearning of his eyes, and stretching out her arms to him before she was awake. And yet she had never tried so hard to divine every shade of Morrison’s fastidiousness and had never felt so supreme a satisfaction in knowing that she did. There were strange, brief moments in her life now, when out of the warring complexity in her heart there rose the simple longing of a little girl to go to her mother, to feel those strong, unfailing arms about her. She began to guess dimly, without thinking about it at all, that her mother knew some secret of life, of balance, that she did not. And yet if her mother were at hand, she knew she could never explain to her–how could she, when she did not know herself?–what she was living through. How long she had waited the moment when she _would_ know!
One day towards the end of May, Morrison had come in for lunch, a delicately chosen, deceptively simple meal for which Yoshida had outdone himself. There had been a savory mixture of sweetbreads and mushrooms in a smooth, rich, creamy sauce; green peas that had been on the vines at three o’clock that morning, and which still had the aroma of life in their delectable little balls; sparkling Saumur; butter with the fragrance of dew and clover in it; crisp, crusty rolls; artichokes in oil–such a meal as no money can buy anywhere but in Paris in the spring, such a simple, simple meal as takes a great deal of money to buy even in Paris.
“It is an art to eat like this,” said Morrison, more than half seriously, after he had taken the first mouthful of the golden souffle which ended the meal. “What a May we have had! I have been thinking so often of Talleyrand’s saying that no one who had not lived before the French Revolution, under the old regime, could know how sweet life could be; and I’ve been thinking that we may live to say that about the end of this regime. Such perfect, golden hours as it has for those who are able to seize them. It is a debt we own the Spirit of Things to be grateful and to appreciate our opportunity.”
“As far as the luncheon goes, it’s rather a joke, isn’t it,” said his hostess, “that it should be an Oriental cook who has so caught the true Gallic accent? I’ll tell Tojiko to tell Yoshido that his efforts weren’t lost on you. He adores cooking for you. No, you speak about it yourself. Here comes Tojiko with the mail.”
She reached for the _Herald_ with one hand, and with the other gave Sylvia a letter with the American postmark. “Oh, Tojiko,” said Morrison with the familiarity of an habitue of the house, “will you tell your brother for me that I never tasted anything like his …”
Mrs. Marshall-Smith broke in with an exclamation of extreme astonishment. “Oh–what _do_ you think–! Sylvia, did you know anything about this? Of all the crazy–why, what under the sun–? I always knew there was a vein of the fanatic–any man who won’t smoke–you may be sure there’s something unbalanced–!” She now turned the paper as she spoke and held it so that the headlines leaped out across the table:
MILLIONAIRE COAL OPERATOR TURNS VAST HOLDINGS OVER TO THE STATE
Son of Old Peter Page Converted to Socialism
“_What_!” cried Morrison. Even in the blankness of her stupefaction, Sylvia was aware of a rising note in his voice that was by no means dismay.
“Yes,” continued Mrs. Marshall-Smith, reading rapidly and disconnectedly from the paper, beginning an item and dropping it, as she saw it was not the one she was searching for, “‘Mr. Page is said to have contemplated some such step for a long …’–m-m-m, not that … ‘well-known collector of ceramics–Metropolitan Museum–member of the Racquet, the Yacht, the Century, the Yale–thirty-two–Mother Miss Allida Sommerville of Baltimore, formerly a great beauty’–_here_ it is,” she stopped skimming and read consecutively: “‘Mr. Page’s plan has been worked out in all detail with experts. A highly paid, self-perpetuating commission of labor experts, sociologists, and men of practical experience in coal-operating has been appointed to administer Mr. Page’s extremely extensive holdings. The profits form a fund which, under the stipulations of Mr. Page’s agreement with the State, is to be used to finance a program of advanced social activities; to furnish money for mothers’ pensions, even perhaps for fathers’ pensions in the case of families too numerous to be adequately cared for on workingmen’s wages; to change the public school system of the locality into open-air schools with spacious grounds for manual activities of all kinds; greatly to raise wages; to lengthen the period of schooling before children go into remunerative occupations …'” Mrs. Marshall-Smith looked up, said, “Oh, _you_ know, the kind of thing such people are always talking about,” and began to skip again, “‘–extensive plans for garden cities–public libraries–books of the business to be open to employes–educational future–no philanthropy–and so forth and so forth.'” She glanced hurriedly down the page, caught the beginning of another sentence, and read: “‘The news has created an immense sensation all over the country. It is prophesied that Mr. Page’s unexpected action will throw the coal business into great confusion. Other operators will find it extremely difficult to go on with the old conditions. Already it is rumored that the Chilton Coal and Coke Company …'”
“Well, I should think so indeed!” cried Morrison emphatically, breaking in. “With modern industrial conditions hung on a hair trigger as they are, it’s as though a boy had exploded a fire-cracker in the works of a watch. That means his whole fortune gone. Old Peter put everything into coal. Austin will not have a cent–nothing but those Vermont scrub forests of his. What a mad thing to do! But it’s been growing on him for a long time. I’ve seen–I’ve felt it!”
Sylvia gave a dazed, mechanical look at the letter she held and recognized the handwriting. She turned very white.
Aunt Victoria said instantly: “I see you have a letter to read, my dear, and I want Felix to play that D’Indy Interlude for me and explain it–Bauer is going to play it tonight for the Princess de Chevrille. We’ll bother you with our chatter. Don’t you want to take it to your room to read?”
Sylvia stood up, holding the unopened letter in her hand. She looked about her a little wildly and said: “Oh no, no! I think I’d rather be out of doors. I’ll go out on the balcony.”
“It’s raining,” said Mrs. Marshall-Smith.
“No, not yet,” said Morrison, making a great effort to speak in an ordinary tone. “It’s only going to.” He sat down at the piano. Sylvia passed him and went out to the balcony. She opened the letter and read it through very carefully. It was a long one and this took some time. She did not hear a note of the music which poured its plaintive, eerie cadences around her. When she had finished the letter she instantly started to read it again, with the sensation that she had not yet begun to understand it. She was now deeply flushed. She continually put back a floating strand of hair, which recurrently fell across her forehead and cheek.
After a time, Mrs. Marshall-Smith said from the open door: “Felix and I are going to Madeleine Perth’s. Would you rather stay here?” Sylvia nodded without looking up.
She sat motionless, looking at the letter long after she had finished it. An hour passed thus. Then she was aware that it was beginning to rain. The drops falling on the open letter dissolved the ink into blurred smears. She sprang up hastily and went into the salon, where she stood irresolute for a moment, and then, without calling Helene, went to her room and dressed for the street. She moved very quickly as though there were some need for extreme haste, and when she stepped into the street she fell at once automatically into the swinging step of the practised walker who sees long miles before him.
Half an hour later she was looking up at the facade of Notre Dame through the rain, and seeing there these words: “I shall be waiting at Austin Farm to hear if you are at all able to sympathize with me in what I have done. The memory of our last words together may help you to imagine with what anxiety I shall be waiting.”
She pushed open the greasy, shining leather door, passed into the interior, and stood for a moment in the incense-laden gloom of the nave. A mass was being said. The rapidly murmured Latin words came to her in a dim drone, in which she heard quite clearly, quite distinctly: “There is another kind of beauty I faintly glimpse–that isn’t just sweet smells and lovely sights and harmonious lines–it’s the beauty that can’t endure disharmony in conduct, the fine, true ear for the loveliness of life lived at its best–Sylvia, finest, truest Sylvia, it’s what you could, if you would–you more than any other woman in the world–if we were together to try–“
Sylvia sank to her knees on a prie-Dieu and hid her face in her hands, trying to shut out the words, and yet listening to them so intently that her breath was suspended…. “What Morrison said is true–for him, since he feels it to be true. No man can judge for another. But other things are true too, things that concern me. It’s true that an honest man cannot accept an ease founded, even remotely, on the misery of others. And my life has been just that. I don’t know what success I shall have with the life that’s beginning, but I know at least it will begin straight. There seems a chance for real shapeliness if the foundations are all honest–doesn’t there? Oh, Sylvia–oh, my dearest love, if I could think you would begin it with me, Sylvia! Sylvia!”
The girl sprang up and went hastily out of the church. The nun kneeling at the door, holding out the silent prayer for alms for the poor, looked up in her face as she passed and then after her with calm, understanding eyes. Kneeling there, day after day, she had seen many another young, troubled soul fleeing from its own thoughts.
Sylvia crossed the parvis of Notre Dame, glistening wet, and passed over the gray Seine, slate under the gray mist of the rain. Under her feet the impalpable dust of a city turned to gray slime which clung to her shoes. She walked on through a narrow, mean street of mediaeval aspect where rag-pickers, drearily oblivious of the rain, quarreled weakly over their filthy piles of trash. She looked at them in astonishment, in dismay, in horror. Since leaving La Chance, save for that one glimpse over the edge back in the Vermont mountains, she had been so consistently surrounded by the padded satin of possessions that she had forgotten how actual poverty looked. In fact, she had never had more than the briefest fleeting glances at it. This was so extravagant, so extreme, that it seemed impossible to her. And yet–and yet–She looked fleetingly into those pale, dingy, underfed, repulsive faces and wondered if coal-miners’ families looked like that.
But she said aloud at once, almost as though she had crooked an arm to shield herself: “But he _said_ he did not want me to answer at once! He _said_ he wanted me to take time–to take time–to take time …” She hastened her steps to this refrain, until she was almost running; and emerged upon the broad, well-kept expanse of the Boulevard St. Germain with a long-drawn breath of relief.
Ahead of her to the right, the Rue St. Jacques climbed the hill to the Pantheon. She took it because it was broad and clean and differed from the musty darkness from which she had come out; she fled up the steep grade with a swift, light step as though she were on a country walk. She might indeed have been upon some flat road near La Chance for all she saw of the buildings, the people around her.
How like Austin’s fine courage that was, his saying that he did not want her to decide in haste, but to take time to know what she was doing! What other man would not have stayed to urge her, to hurry her, to impose his will on hers, masterfully to use his personality to confuse her, to carry her off? For an instant, through all her wretched bewilderment, she thrilled to a high, impersonal appreciation of his saying: “If I had stayed with you, I should have tried to take you by force–but you are too fine for that, Sylvia! What you could be to the man you loved if you went to him freely–that is too splendid to risk losing. I want all of you–heart, soul, mind–or nothing!” Sylvia looked up through this clear white light to Austin’s yearning eyes, and back through the ages with a wondering pity at the dark figure of Jerry Fiske, emerging from his cave. She had come a long way since then.
And then all this, everything fine, everything generous, ebbed away from her with deadly swiftness, and in a cold disgust with herself she knew that she had been repeating over and over Morrison’s “Austin will not have a cent left … nothing but those Vermont scrub forests.” So that was the kind of a woman she was. Well, if that was the kind of woman she was, let her live her life accordingly. She was sick with indecision as she fled onward through the rain.
Few pedestrians were abroad in the rain, and those who were, sheltered themselves slant-wise with their umbrellas against the wind, and scudded with the storm. Sylvia had an umbrella, but she did not open it. She held her face up once, to feel the rain fall on it, and this reminded her of home, and long rainy walks with her father. She winced at this, and put him hastily out of her mind. And she had been unconsciously wishing to see her mother! At the very recollection of her mother she lengthened her stride. There was another thought to run away from!
She swung around the corner near the Pantheon and rapidly approached the door of the great Library of Ste. Genevieve. A thin, draggled, middle-aged woman-student, entering hastily, slipped on the wet stones and knocked from under his arm the leather portfolio of a thin, draggled, middle-aged man who was just coming out. The woman did not stop to help repair the damage she had done, but hastened desperately on into the shelter of the building. Sylvia’s eyes, absent as they were, were caught and held by the strange, blank look of the man, who stood motionless, his shabby hat knocked to one side of his thin, gray hair, his curiously filmed eyes fixed stupidly on the litter of papers scattered at his feet. The rain was beginning to convert them into sodden pulp, but he did not stir. The idea occurred to Sylvia that he might be ill, and she advanced to help him. As he saw her stoop to pick them up, he said in French, in a toneless voice, very indifferently: “Don’t give yourself the trouble. They are of no value. I carry them only to make the Library attendants think I am a bona-fide reader. I go there to sleep because I have no other roof.”
His French was entirely fluent, but the accent was American. Sylvia looked up at him surprised. He returned her gaze dully, and without another look at the papers, scuffled off through the rain, across the street towards the Pantheon. His boots were lamentable.
Sylvia had an instantly vanishing memory of a pool of quiet sunshine, of a ripely beautiful woman and a radiant young man. Before she knew she was speaking, an impulsive cry had burst from her: “Why, Professor Saunders! Professor Saunders! Don’t you know me? I am Sylvia Marshall!”
CHAPTER XXXIX
SYLVIA DRIFTS WITH THE MAJORITY
“No, they don’t let you sit down in here if you’re as shabby as I am,” said the man, continuing his slow, feeble, shuffling progress. “They know you’re only a vagrant, here to get out of the rain. They won’t even let you stand still long.”
Sylvia had not been inside the Pantheon before, had never been inside a building with so great a dome. They stood under it now. She sent her glance up to its vast, dim, noble heights and brought it down to the saturnine, unsavory wreck at her side. She was regretting the impulse which had made her call out to him. What could she say to him now they were together? What word, what breath could be gentle enough, light enough not to be poison to that open sore?
On his part he seemed entirely unconcerned about the impression he made on her. His eyes, his sick, filmed eyes, looked at her with no shrinking, with no bravado, with an entire indifference which gave, through all the desolation of his appearance, the strangest, careless dignity to the man. He did not care what she thought of him. He did not care what any one thought of him. He gave the impression of a man whose accounts are all reckoned and the balance struck, long ago.
“So this is Sylvia,” he said, with the slightest appearance of interest, glancing at her casually. “I always said you would make a beautiful woman. But since I knew Victoria, I’ve seen that you must be quite what she was at your age.” It might have been a voice speaking from beyond the grave, so listless, so dragging was its rhythm. “How do you happen to be in Paris?” he asked. “Are your parents still alive?”
“Oh _yes_!” said Sylvia, half startled by the preposterousness of the idea that they might not be. “They’re very well too. I had such a good letter from Mother the other day. Do you remember Professor Kennedy? He has just given up his position to be professor emeritus. I suppose now he’ll write that book on the idiocy of the human race he’s been planning so long. And old Mr. Reinhardt, he’s still the same, they say … wonderful, isn’t it, at his age?” She was running on, not knowing what to say, and chattering rather foolishly in her embarrassment. “Judith is a trained nurse; isn’t that just the right thing for her? I’m visiting Aunt Victoria here for a while. Lawrence is a Freshman at….”
He broke in, his hollow voice resounding in the immense, vault-like spaces around them. “You’d better go home,” he said. “I’d leave tonight, if I were you.” She looked at him startled, half-scared, thinking that she had been right to fancy him out of his mind. She saw with relief a burly attendant in a blue uniform lounging near a group of statuary. She could call to him, if it became necessary.
“You’d better go away from her at once,” went on the man, advancing aimlessly from one bay of the frescoes to another.
Sylvia knew now of whom he was speaking, and as he continued talking with a slow, dreary monotony, her mind raced back over the years, picking up a scrap here, a half-forgotten phrase there, an intercepted look between her father and mother, a recollection of her own, a half-finished sentence of Arnold’s …
“She can’t be fatal for you in the same way she has been for the others, of course,” the man was saying. “What she’ll do for you is to turn you into a woman like herself. I remember now, I have thought many times, that you _were_ like her … of the same clay. But you have something else too, you have something that she’ll take away from you if you stay. You can’t keep her from doing it. No one can get the better of her. She doesn’t fight. But she always takes life. She has taken mine. She must have taken her bogie-husband’s, she took young Gilbert’s, she took Gilbert’s wife’s, she took Arnold’s in another way…. God! think of leaving a young, growing, weak soul in the care of a woman like Victoria! She took that poet’s, I forget his name; I suppose by this time Felix Morrison is …”
At this name, a terrible contraction of the heart told Sylvia that she was listening to what he said. “Felix Morrison!” she cried in stern, angry protest. “I don’t know what you’re talking about–but if you think that Aunt Victoria–if you think Felix Morrison–” She was inarticulate in her indignation. “He was married last autumn to a beautiful girl–and Aunt Victoria–what an idea!–_no_ one was more pleased than she–why–you are _crazy_!” She flung out at him the word, which two moments before she would not have been so cruel as to think.
It gave him no discomfort. “Oh no, I’m not,” he said with a spectral laugh, which had in it, to Sylvia’s dismay, the very essence of sanity. She did not know why she now shrank away from him, far more frightened than before. “I’m about everything else you might mention, but I’m not crazy. And you take my word for it and get out while you still can … _if_ you still can?” He faintly indicated an inquiry, looking at her sideways, his dirty hand stroking the dishonoring gray stubble of his unshaven face. “As for Morrison’s wife … let her get out too. Gilbert tried marrying, tried it in all unconsciousness. It’s only when they try to get away from her that they know she’s in the marrow of their bones. She lets them try. She doesn’t even care. She knows they’ll come back. Gilbert did. And his wife … well, I’m sorry for Morrison’s wife.”
“She’s dead,” said Sylvia abruptly.
He took this in with a nod of the head. “So much the better for her. How did it happen that _you_ didn’t fall for Morrison’s …” he looked at her sharply at a change in her face she could not control. “Oh, you did,” he commented slackly. “Well, you’d better start home for La Chance tonight,” he said again.
They were circling around and around the shadowy interior, making no pretense of looking at the frescoed walls, to examine which had been their ostensible purpose in entering. Sylvia was indeed aware of great pictured spaces, crowded dimly with thronging figures, men, horses, women–they reached no more than the outer retina of her eye. She remembered fleetingly that they had something to do with the story of Ste. Genevieve. She wanted intensely to escape from this phantom whom she herself had called up from the void to stalk at her side. But she felt she ought not to let pass, even coming from such a source, such utterly frenzied imaginings against one to whom she owed loyalty. She spoke coldly, with extreme distaste for the subject: “You’re entirely wrong about Aunt Victoria. She’s not in the least that kind of a woman.”
He shook his head slowly. “No, no; you misunderstand me. Your Aunt Victoria is quite irreproachable, she always has been, she always will be. She is always in the right. She always will be. She did nothing to me but hire me to teach her stepson, and when my habits became too bad, discharge me, as any one would have done. She did nothing to Arnold except to leave him to the best schools and the best tutors money could buy. What more could any one have done? She had not the slightest idea that Horace Gilbert would try to poison his wife, had not the slightest connection with their quarrel. The young poet,–Adams was his name, now I remember–did not consult her before he took to cocaine. Morphine is my own specialty. Victoria of course deplored it as much as any one could. No, I’m not for a minute intimating that Victoria is a Messalina. We’d all be better off if she were. It’s only our grossness that finds fault with her. Your aunt is one of the most respectable women who ever lived, as ‘chaste as unsunned snow–the very ice of chastity is in her!’ Indeed, I’ve often wondered if the redoubtable Ephraim Smith himself, for all that he succeeded in marrying her, fared any better than the rest of us. Victoria would be quite capable of cheating him out of his pay. She parches, yes, she dries up the blood–but it’s not by her passion, not even by ours. Honest passion never kills. It’s the Sahara sands of her egotism into which we’ve all emptied our veins.”
Sylvia was frozen to the spot by her outraged indignation that any one should dare speak to her thus. She found herself facing a fresco of a tall, austere figure in an enveloping white garment, an elderly woman with a thin, worn, noble face, who laid one fine old hand on a stone parapet and with divine compassion and tenderness looked out over a sleeping city. The man followed the direction of her eyes. “It’s Puvis de Chavannes’ Ste. Genevieve as an old woman, guarding and praying for the city. Very good, isn’t it? I especially admire the suggestion of the plain bare cell she has stepped out from. I often come here to look at it when I’ve nothing to eat.” He seemed as flaccidly willing to speak on this as on any other topic; to find it no more interesting than the subject of his former speech.
Sylvia was overcome with horror of him. She walked rapidly away, towards the door, hoping he would not follow her. He did not. When she glanced back fearfully over her shoulder, she saw him still standing there, looking up at the gaunt gray figure of beneficent old age. His dreadful broken felt hat was in his hand, the water dripped from his frayed trousers over the rotting leather of his shoes. As she looked, he began to cough, loudly, terribly, so that the echoing reaches of the great nave resounded to the sound. Sylvia ran back to him and thrust her purse into his hand. At first he could not speak, for coughing, but in a moment he found breath to ask, “Is it Victoria’s money?”
She did not answer.
He held it for a moment, and then opening his hand let it drop. As she turned away Sylvia heard it fall clinking on the stone floor. At the door she turned for one last look, and saw him weakly stooping to pick it up again. She fairly burst out of the door.
It was almost dusk when she was on the street again, looking down the steep incline to the Luxembourg Gardens. In the rainy twilight the fierce tension of the Rodin “Thinker” in front of the Pantheon loomed huge and tragic. She gave it a glance of startled sympathy. She had never understood the statue before. Now she was a prey to those same ravaging throes. There was for the moment no escaping them. She felt none of her former wild impulse to run away. What she had been running away from had overtaken her. She faced it now, looked at it squarely, gave it her ear for the first time; the grinding, dissonant note under the rich harmony of the life she had known for all these past months, the obscure vaults underlying the shining temple in which she had been living.
What beauty could there be which was founded on such an action as Felix’ marriage to Molly–Molly, whose passionate directness had known the only way out of the impasse into which Felix should never have let her go?… An echo from what she had heard in the mass at Notre Dame rang in her ears, and now the sound was louder–Austin’s voice, Austin’s words: “A beauty that can’t endure disharmony in conduct, the fine true ear for the deeper values, the foundations–” It was Austin, asking himself what beauty could be in any life founded, even remotely as his was, on any one’s misery?
For a long time she stood there, silent, motionless, her hands clenched at her sides, looking straight before her in the rain. Above her on his pedestal, the great, bronze, naked, tortured man ground his teeth as he glared out from under the inexorable limitations of his ape-like forehead, and strove wildly against the barriers of his flesh….
Wildly and vainly, against inexorable limitations! Sylvia was aware that an insolent young man, with moist protuberant eyes, had come up where she stood there, alone, motionless on the public street. He put his arm in hers, clasped her hand in a fat, soft palm, and, “_Allons, ma belle!_” he said with a revolting gayety.
Sylvia pulled away from him, cried out fiercely in English, “Don’t you dare to touch me!” and darted away.
He made no attempt at pursuit, acknowledging his mistake with an easy shrug and turning off to roam, a dim, predatory figure, along the dusky street. He had startled and frightened the girl so that she was trembling when she ventured to slow down to a walk under the glaring lights of the Boulevard St. Michel. She was also shivering with wet and cold, and without knowing it, she was extremely hungry. As she fled along the boulevard in the direction of her own quarter of the city, her eye caught the lighted clock at the kiosk near Cluny. She was astonished to see that it was after seven o’clock. How long could she have stood there, under the shadow of that terrific Thinker, consumed quite as much as he by the pain of trying to rise above mere nature? An hour–more than an hour, she must have been there. The Pantheon must have closed during that time, and the dreadful, sick man must have passed close by her. Where was he now? What makeshift shelter harbored that cough, those dirty, skeleton hands, those awful eyes which had outlived endurance and come to know peace before death….
She shivered and tried to shrink away from her wet, clinging clothing. She had never, in all her life before, been wet and cold and hungry and frightened, she had never known from what she had been protected. And now the absence of money meant that she must walk miles in the rain before she could reach safety and food. For three cents she could ride. But she had not three cents. How idiotic she had been not to keep a few sous from her purse. What a sickening thing it had been to see him stoop to pick it up after he had tried to have the pride not to touch it. That was what morphine had done for him. And he would buy more morphine with that money, that was the reason he had not been able to let it lie … the man who had been to her little girlhood the radiant embodiment of strength and fineness!
Her teeth were chattering, her feet soaked and cold. She tried to walk faster to warm her blood, and discovered that she was exhausted, tired to the marrow of her bones. Her feet dragged on the pavement, her arms hung heavily by her side, but she dared not stop a moment lest some other man with abhorrent eyes should approach her.
She set her teeth and walked; walked across the Seine without a glance at its misted lights blinking through the rain, walked on past the prison of Marie Antoinette, without a thought of that other harmless woman who had loved bright and lovely things while others suffered: walked on upon the bridge across the Seine again. This bewildered her, making her think that she was so dazed she had doubled on her tracks. She saw, a long way off, a solitary hooded sergent de ville, and dragged herself across an endless expanse of wet asphalt to ask him her way. But just before she reached him, she remembered suddenly that of course she was on the island and was obliged to cross the Seine again before reaching the right bank. She returned weary and disheartened to her path, crossed the bridge, and then endlessly, endlessly, set one heavy foot before the other under the glare of innumerable electric lights staring down on her and on the dismal, wet, and deserted streets. The clocks she passed told her that it was nearly eight o’clock. Then it was past eight. What must they be thinking of her on the Rue de Presbourg? She tried again to hurry, but could force her aching muscles to no more than the plod, plod, plod of her dogged advance over those interminable miles of pavement. There was little of her then that was not cold, weary, wet flesh, suffering all the discomforts that an animal can know. She counted her steps for a long time, and became so stupidly absorbed in this that she made a wrong turning and was blocks out of her way before she noticed her mistake. This mishap reduced her almost to tears, and it was when she was choking them weakly back and setting herself again to the cruel long vista of the Champs-Elysees that an automobile passed her at top speed with a man’s face pressed palely to the panes. Almost at once the car stopped in answer to a shouted command; it whirled about and bore down on her. Felix Morrison sprang out and ran to her with outstretched arms, his rich voice ringing through the desolation of the rain and the night–“Sylvia! Sylvia! Are you safe?”
He almost carried her back to the car, lifted her in. There were wraps there, great soft, furry, velvet wraps which he cast about her, murmuring broken ejaculations of emotion, of pity, of relief–“Oh, your hands, how cold! Sylvia, how _could_ you? Here, drink this! I’ve been insane,–absolutely out of my mind! Let me take off your hat–Oh, your poor feet–I was on my way to–I was afraid you might have–Oh, Sylvia, Sylvia, to have you safe!” She tried to bring to mind something she had intended to remember; she even repeated the phrase over to herself, “It was an ugly, ugly thing to have married Molly,” but she knew only that he was tenderness and sheltering care and warmth and food and safety. She drew long quivering breaths like a child coming out of a sobbing fit.
Then before there was time for more thought, the car had whirled them back to the door, where Aunt Victoria, outwardly calm, but very pale, stood between the concierge and his wife, looking out into the rainy deserted street.
At the touch of those warm embracing arms, at that radiant presence, at the sound of that relieved, welcoming voice, the nightmare of the Pantheon faded away to blackness….
Half an hour later, she sat, fresh from a hot bath, breathing out delicately a reminiscence of recent violet water and perfumed powder; fresh, fine under-linen next her glowing skin; shining and refreshed, in a gown of chiffon and satin; eating her first mouthful of Yoshido’s ambrosial soup.
“Why, I’m so sorry,” she was saying. “I went out for a walk, and then went further than I meant to. I’ve been over on the left bank part of the time, in Notre Dame and the Pantheon. And then when I started to come home it took longer than I thought. It’s so apt to, you know.”
“Why in the world, my dear, did you _walk_ home?” cried Aunt Victoria, still brooding over her in pitying sympathy.
“I’d–I’d lost my purse. I didn’t have any money.”
“But you don’t pay for a cab till you come to the end of your journey! You could have stepped into a taxi and borrowed the money of the concierge here.”
Sylvia was immensely disconcerted by her rustic naivete in not thinking of this obvious device. “Oh, of course! How could I have been so–but I was tired when I came to start home–I was very tired–too tired to think clearly!”
This brought them all back to the recollection of what had set her off on her walk. There was for a time rather a strained silence; but they were all very hungry–dinner was two hours late–and the discussion of Yoshido’s roast duckling was anything but favorable for the consideration of painful topics. They had champagne to celebrate her safe escape from the adventure. To the sensation of perfect ease induced by the well-chosen dinner this added a little tingling through all Sylvia’s nerves, a pleasant, light, bright titillation.
All might have gone well if, after the dinner, Felix had not stepped, as was his wont, to the piano. Sylvia had been, up to that moment, almost wholly young animal, given over to bodily ecstasy, of which not the least was the agreeable warmth on her silk-clad ankle as she held her slippered foot to the fire.
But at the first chords something else in her, slowly, with extreme pain, awoke to activity. All her life music had spoken a language to which she could not shut her ears, and now–her face clouded, she shifted her position, she held up a little painted screen to shield her face from the fire, she finally rose and walked restlessly about the room. Every grave and haunting cadence from the piano brought to her mind, flickering and quick, like fire, a darting question, and every one she stamped out midway, with an effort of the will.
The intimacy between Felix and Aunt Victoria, it was strange she had never before thought–of course not–what a hideous idea! That book, back in Lydford, with Horace Gilbert’s name on the fly-leaf, and Aunt Victoria’s cool, casual voice as she explained, “Oh, just a young architect who used to–” Oh, the man in the Pantheon was simply brutalized by drugs; he did not know what he was saying. His cool, spectral laugh of sanity sounded faintly in her ears again.
And then, out of a mounting foam of arpeggios, there bloomed for her a new idea, solid enough, broad enough, high enough, for a refuge against all these wolfish fangs. She sat down to think it out, hot on the trail of an answer, the longed-for answer.
It had just occurred to her that there was no possible logical connection between any of those skulking phantoms and the golden lovely things they tried to defile. Even if some people of wealth and ease and leisure were not as careful about moral values as about colors, and aesthetic harmonies–that meant nothing. The connection was purely fortuitous. How silly she had been not to see that. Grant, for purposes of argument, that Aunt Victoria was self-centered and had lived her life with too little regard for its effect on other people,–grant even that Felix had, under an almost overpowering temptation, not kept in a matter of conduct the same rigid nicety of fastidiousness which characterized his judgment of marbles–what of it? That did not mean that one could only be fine and true in conduct by giving up all lovely things and wearing hair-shirts. What an outgrown, mediaeval idea! How could she have been for a moment under its domination! It was just that old Puritanism, Spartanism of her childhood, which was continually reaching up its bony hand from the grave where she had interred it.
The only danger came, she saw it now, read it plainly and clear-headedly in the lives of the two people with her, the only danger came from a lack of proportion. It certainly did seem to be possible to allow the amenities and aesthetic pleasures to become so important that moral fineness must stand aside till they were safe. But anybody who had enough intelligence could keep his head, even if the temptation was alluring. And simply because there was that possible danger, why not enjoy delightful things as long as they did not run counter to moral fineness! How absurd to think there was any reason why they should; quite the contrary, as a thousand philosophers attested. They would not in her case, at least! Of course, if a decision had to be taken between the two, she would never hesitate–never! As she phrased this conviction to herself, she turned a ring on her white slim finger and had a throb of pleasure in the color of the gem. What harmless, impersonal pleasures they were! How little they hurt any one! And as to this business of morbidly probing into healthy flesh, of insisting on going back of everything, farther than any one could possibly go, and scrutinizing the origin of every dollar that came into your hand … why, that way lay madness! As soon try to investigate all the past occupants of a seat in a railway before using it for a journey. Modern life was not organized that way. It was too complicated.
Her mind rushed on excitedly, catching up more certainty, more and more reinforcements to her argument as it advanced. There was, therefore, nothing inherent in the manner of life she had known these last months to account for what seemed ugly underneath. There was no reason why some one more keenly on his guard could not live as they did and escape sounding that dissonant note!
The music stopped. Morrison turned on the stool and seeing her bent head and moody stare at the fire, sent an imploring glance for help to Mrs. Marshall-Smith.
Just let her have the wealth and leisure and let her show how worthily she could use it! There would be an achievement! Sylvia came around to another phase of her new idea, there would be something worth doing, to show that one could be as fine and true in a palace as in a hut,–even as in a Vermont farmhouse! At this, suddenly all thought left her. Austin Page stood before her, fixing on her his clear and passionate and tender eyes. At that dear and well-remembered gaze, her lip began to quiver like a child’s, and her eyes filled.
Mrs. Marshall-Smith stirred herself with the effect of a splendid ship going into action with all flags flying. “Sylvia dear,” she said, “this rain tonight makes me think of a new plan. It will very likely rain for a week or more now. Paris is abominable in the rain. What do you say to a change? Madeleine Perth was telling me this afternoon that the White Star people are running a few ships from Portsmouth by way of Cherbourg around by Gibraltar, through the Mediterranean to Naples. That’s one trip your rolling-stone of an aunt has never taken, and I’d rather like to add it to my collection. We could be in Naples in four days from Cherbourg and spend a month in Italy, going north as the heat arrived. Felix–why don’t you come along? You’ve been wanting to see the new low reliefs in the Terme, in Rome?”
Sylvia’s heart, like all young hearts, was dazzled almost to blinking by the radiance shed from the magic word Italy. She turned, looking very much taken aback and bewildered, but with light in her eyes, color in her face.
Morrison burst out: “Oh, a dream realized! Something to live on all one’s days, the pines of the Borghese–the cypresses of the Villa Medici–roses cascading over the walls in Rome, the view across the Campagna from the terraces at Rocca di Papa–“
Sylvia thought rapidly to herself: “Austin _said_ he did not want me to answer at once. He _said_ he wanted me to take time–to take time! I can decide better, make more sense out of everything, if I–after I have thought more, have taken more time. No, I am not turning my back on him. Only I must have more time to think–“
Aloud she said, after a moment’s silence, “Oh, nothing could be lovelier!”
She lay in her warm, clean white bed that night, sleeping the sound sleep of the healthy young animal which has been wet and cold and hungry, and is now dry and warmed and fed.
Outside, across the city, on his bronze pedestal, the tortured Thinker, loyal to his destiny, still strove terribly against the limitations of his ape-like forehead.
BOOK IV;
_THE STRAIT PATH_
CHAPTER XL
A CALL FROM HOME
It was quite dark when they arrived in the harbor at Naples; and they were too late to go through the necessary formalities of harbor entering. In company with several other in-and outward-bound steamers, the _Carnatic_ lay to for the night. Some one pointed out a big liner which would sail for New York the next morning, lying like a huge, gaily lighted island, the blare of her band floating over the still water.
Sylvia slept little that night, missing the rolling swing of the ship, and feeling breathless in the stifling immobility of the cabin. She tossed about restlessly, dozing off at intervals and waking with a start to get up on her knees and look out through the port-hole at the lights of Naples blazing steadily in their semicircle. She tried to think several times, about her relations to Felix, to Austin–but nothing came to her mind except a series of scenes in which they had figured, scenes quite disconnected, which brought no enlightenment to her.
As she lay awake thus, staring at the ceiling, feeling in the intense silence and blackness that the fluttering of her eyelids was almost audible, her heart beating irregularly, now slow, now fast, it occurred to her that she was beginning to know something of the intensity of real life–real grown-up life. She was astonished to enjoy it so little.
She fell at last, suddenly, fathoms deep into youthful slumber, and at once passed out from tormented darkness into some strange, sunny, wind-swept place on a height. And she was all one anguish of longing for Austin. And he came swiftly to her and took her in his arms and kissed her on the lips. And it was as it had been when she was a child and heard music, she was carried away by a great swelling tide of joy … But dusk began to fall again; Austin faded; through the darkness something called and called to her, imperatively. With great pain she struggled up through endless stages of half-consciousness, until she was herself again, Sylvia Marshall, heavy-eyed, sitting up in her berth and saying aloud, “Yes, what is it?” in answer to a knocking on the door.
The steward’s voice answered, announcing that the first boat for shore would leave in an hour. Sylvia sprang out of bed, the dream already nothing more than confused brightness in her mind. By the time she was dressed, it had altogether gone, and she only knew that she had had a restless night. She went out on the deck, longing for the tonic of pure air. The morning was misty–it had rained during the night–and clouds hung heavy and low over the city. Out from this gray smother the city gleamed like a veiled opal. Neither Felix nor her aunt was to be seen. When she went down to breakfast, after a brisk tramp back and forth across the deck, she was rosy and dewy, her triumphant youth showing no sign of her vigils. She was saying to herself: “Now I’ve come, it’s too idiotic not to enjoy it. I _shall_ let myself go!”
Helene attended to the ladies’ packing and to the labeling and care of the baggage. Empty-handed, care-free, feeling like a traveling princess, Sylvia climbed down from the great steamer into a dirty, small harbor-boat. Aunt Victoria sat down at once on the folding camp-chair which Helene always carried for her. Sylvia and Felix stood together at the blunt prow, watching the spectacle before them. The clouds were lifting from the city and from Vesuvius, and from Sylvia’s mind. Her spirits rose as the boat went forward into the strange, foreign, glowing scene.
The oily water shimmered in smooth heavings as the clumsy boat advanced upon it. The white houses on the hills gleamed out from their palms. As the boat came closer to the wharf, the travelers could see the crowds of foreign-looking people, with swarthy faces and cheap, ungraceful clothes, looking out at the boat with alert, speculative, unwelcoming eyes. The noise of the city streets, strange to their ears after the days of sea silence, rose clattering, like a part of the brilliance, the sparkle. The sun broke through the clouds, poured a flood of glory on the refulgent city, and shone hotly on the pools of dirty water caught in the sunken spots of the uneven stone pavement.
Aunt Victoria made her way up the gang-plank to the landing dock, achieving dignity even there. Felix sprang after her, to hand her her chair, and Helene and Sylvia followed. Mrs. Marshall-Smith sat down at once, opening her dark-purple parasol, the tense silk of which was changed by the hot Southern sun into an iridescent bubble. “We will wait here till the steward gets our trunks out,” she announced.” It will be amusing to watch the people.” The four made an oasis of aristocracy in the seething, shouting, frowzy, gaudy, Southern crowd, running about with the scrambling, undignified haste of ants, sweating, gesticulating, their faces contorted with care over their poor belongings. Sylvia was acutely conscious of her significance in the scene. She was also fully aware that Felix missed none of the contrast she made with the other women. She felt at once enhanced and protected by the ignobly dressed crowd about her. Felix was right–in America there could be no distinction, there was no background for it.
The scene about them was theatrically magnificent. In the distance Vesuvius towered, cloud-veiled and threatening, the harbor shone and sparkled in the sun, the vivid, outreaching arms of Naples clasped the jewel-like water. From it all Sylvia extracted the most perfect distillation of traveler’s joy. She felt the well-to-do tourist’s care-free detachment from the fundamentals of life, the tourist’s sense that everything exists for the purpose of being a sight for him to see. She knew, and knew with delight, the wanderer’s lightened, emancipated sense of being at a distance from obligations, that cheerful sense of an escape from the emprisoning solidarity of humanity which furnishes the zest of life for the tourist and the tramp, enabling the one light-heartedly to offend proprieties and the other casually to commit murder. She was embarked upon a moral vacation. She was out of the Bastile of right and wrong. She had a vision of what freedom from entangling responsibilities is secured by traveling. She understood her aunt’s classing it as among the positive goods of life.
A man in a shabby blue uniform, with a bundle of letters in his hand, walked past them towards the boat.
“Oh, the mail,” said Mrs. Marshall-Smith. “There may be some for us.” She beckoned the man to her, and said, “Marshall-Smith? Marshall? Morrison?”
The man sorted over his pile. “Cable for Miss Marshall,” he said, presenting it to the younger lady with a bold, familiar look of admiration. “Letter for F. Morrison: two letters for Mrs. Marshall-Smith.” Sylvia opened her envelope, spread out the folded sheet of paper, and read what was scrawled on it, with no realization of the meaning. She knew only that the paper, Felix, her aunt, the crowd, vanished in thick blackness, through which, much later, with a great roaring in her ears, she read, as though by jagged flashes of lightning: “Mother very ill. Come home at once. Judith.”
It seemed to her an incalculably long time between her first glance at the words and her understanding of them, but when she emerged from the blackness and void, into the flaunting sunlight, the roaring still in her ears, the paper still in her hands, the scrawled words still venomous upon it, she saw that not a moment could have passed, for Felix and her aunt were unfolding letters of their own, their eyes beginning to run quickly over the pages.
Sylvia stood quite still, feeling immeasurably and bitterly alone. She said to herself: “Mother is very sick. I must go home at once. Judith.” But she did not know what she said. She felt only an impulse to run wildly away from something that gave her intolerable pain.
Mrs. Marshall-Smith turned over a page of her letter, smiling to herself, and glanced up at her niece. Her smile was smitten from her lips. Sylvia had a fantastic vision of her own aspect from the gaping face of horror with which her aunt for an instant reflected it. She had never before seen Aunt Victoria with an unprepared and discomposed countenance. It was another feature of the nightmare.
For suddenly everything resolved itself into a bad dream,–her aunt crying out, Helene screaming and running to her, Felix snatching the telegram from her and reading it aloud–it seemed to Sylvia that she had heard nothing for years but those words, “Mother very sick. Come home at once. Judith.” She heard them over and over after his voice was silent. Through their constant echoing roar in her ears she heard but dimly the babel of talk that arose–Aunt Victoria saying that she could not of course leave at once because no passage had been engaged, Helene foolishly offering smelling-salts, Felix darting off to get a carriage to take them to the hotel where she could be out of the crowd and they could lay their plans–“Oh, my poor dear!–but you may have more reassuring news tomorrow, you know,” said Mrs. Marshall-Smith soothingly.
The girl faced her aunt outraged. She thought she cried out angrily, “tomorrow!” but she did not break her silence. She was so torn by the storm within her that she had no breath for recriminations. She turned and ran rapidly some distance away to the edge of the wharf, where some small rowboats hung bobbing, their owners sprawled on the seats, smoking cigarettes and chattering. Sylvia addressed the one nearest her in a strong, imperious voice. “I want you to take me out to that steamer,” she said, pointing out to the liner in the harbor.
The man looked up at her blankly, his laughing, impertinent brown face sobered at once by the sight of her own. He made a reply in Italian, raising his shoulders. Some ill-dressed, loafing stragglers on the wharf drew near Sylvia with an indolent curiosity. She turned to them and asked, “Do any of you speak English?” although it was manifestly inconceivable that any of those typical Neapolitans should. One of them stepped forward, running his hand through greasy black curls. “I kin, lady,” he said with a fluent, vulgar New York accent. “What ye want?”
“Tell that man,” said Sylvia, her lips moving stiffly, “to take me out to the ship that is to leave for America this morning–and now–this minute, I may be late now!”
After a short impassioned colloquy, the loafer turned to her and reported: “He says if he took you out, you couldn’t git on board. Them big ships ain’t got no way for folks in little boats to git on. And he’d ask you thirty lire, anyhow. That’s a fierce price. Say, if you’ll wait a minute, I can get you a man that’ll do it for–” Mrs. Marshall-Smith and Helene had followed, and now broke through the line of ill-smelling loungers. Mrs. Marshall-Smith took hold of her niece’s arm firmly, and began to draw her away with a dignified gesture. “You don’t know what you are doing, child,” she said with a peremptory accent of authority. “You are beside yourself. Come with me at once. This is no–“
Sylvia did not resist her. She ignored her. In fact, she did not understand a word that her aunt said. She shook off the older woman’s hand with one thrust of her powerful young arm, and gathering her skirts about her, leaped down into the boat. She took out her purse and showed the man a fifty-lire bill. “Row fast! Fast!” she motioned to him, sitting down in the stern and fixing her eyes on the huge bulk of the liner, black upon the brilliance of the sunlit water. She heard her name called from the wharf and turned her face backward, as the light craft began to move jerkily away.
Felix had come up and now stood between Mrs. Marshall-Smith and her maid, both of whom were passionately appealing to him! He looked over their heads, saw the girl already a boat-length from the wharf, and gave a gesture of utter consternation. He ran headlong to the edge of the dock and again called her name loudly, “Sylvia! _Sylvia!_” There was no mistaking the quality of that cry. It was the voice of a man who sees the woman he loves departing from him, and who wildly, imperiously calls her back to him. But she did not return. The boat was still so close that she could look deeply into his eyes. Through all her tumult of horror, there struck cold to Sylvia’s heart the knowledge that they were the eyes of a stranger. The blow that had pierced her had struck into a quivering center of life, so deep within her, that only something as deep as its terrible suffering could seem real. The man who stood there, so impotently calling to her, belonged to another order of things–things which a moment ago had been important to her, and which now no longer existed. He had become for her as remote, as immaterial as the gaudy picturesqueness of the scene in which he stood. She gave him a long strange look, and made a strange gesture, a gesture of irrevocable leave-taking. She turned her face again to the sea, and did not look back.
They approached the liner, and Sylvia saw some dark heads looking over the railing at her. Her boatman rowed around the stern to the other side, where the slanting stairs used in boarding the harbor-boats still hung over the side. The landing was far above their heads. Sylvia stood up and cried loudly to the dull faces, staring down at her from the steerage deck. “Send somebody down on the stairs to speak to me.” There was a stir; a man in a blue uniform came and looked over the edge, and went away. After a moment, an officer in white ran down the stairs to the hanging landing with the swift, sure footing of a seaman. Sylvia stood up again, turning her white face up to him, her eyes blazing in the shadow of her hat. “I’ve just heard that my mother is very sick, and I must get back to America at once. If you will let down the rope ladder, I can climb up. I must go! I have plenty of money. I _must_!”
The officer stared, shook his head, and ran back up the stairs, disappearing into the black hole in the ship’s side. The dark, heavy faces continued to hang over the railing, staring fixedly down at the boat with a steady, incurious gaze. Sylvia’s boatman balanced his oar-handles on his knees, rolled a cigarette and lighted it. The boat swayed up and down on the shimmering, heaving roll of the water, although the ponderous ship beside it loomed motionless as a rock. The sun beat down on Sylvia’s head and up in her face from the molten water till she felt sick, but when another officer in white, an elderly man with an impassive, bearded face, came down the stairs, she rose up, instantly forgetful of everything but her demand. She called out her message again, straining her voice until it broke, poised so impatiently in the little boat, swinging under her feet, that she seemed almost about to spring up towards the two men leaning over to catch her words. When she finished, the older man nodded, the younger one ran back up the stairs, and returned with a rope ladder.
Sylvia’s boatman stirred himself with an ugly face of misgiving. He clutched at her arm, and made close before her face the hungry, Mediterranean gesture of fingering money. She took out her purse, gave him the fifty-lire note, and catching at the ladder as it was flung down, disregarding the shouted commands of the men above her to “wait!” she swung herself upon it, climbing strongly and surely in spite of her hampering skirts.
The two men helped her up, alarmed and vexed at the risk she had taken. They said something about great crowds on the boat, and that only in the second cabin was there a possibility for accommodations. If she answered them, she did not know what she said. She followed the younger man down a long corridor, at first dark and smelling of hemp, later white, bright with electric light, smelling strongly of fresh paint, stagnant air, and machine-oil. They emerged in a round hallway at the foot of a staircase. The officer went to a window for a conference with the official behind it, and returned to Sylvia to say that there was no room, not even a single berth vacant. Some shabby woman-passengers with untidy hair and crumpled clothes drew near, looking at her with curiosity. Sylvia appealed to them, crying out again, “My mother is very sick and I must go back to America at once. Can’t any of you–can’t you–?” she stopped, catching at the banisters. Her knees were giving way under her. A woman with a flabby pale face and disordered gray hair sprang towards her and took her in her arms with a divine charity. “You can have half my bed!” she cried, drawing Sylvia’s head down on her shoulder. “Poor girl! Poor girl! I lost my only son last year!”
Her accent, her look, the tones of her voice, some emanation of deep humanity from her whole person, reached Sylvia’s inner self, the first message that had penetrated to that core of her being since the deadly, echoing news of the telegram. Upon her icy tension poured a flood of dissolving warmth. Her hideous isolation was an illusion. This plain old woman, whom she had never seen before, was her sister, her blood-kin,–they were both human beings. She gave a cry and flung her arms about the other’s neck, clinging to her like a person falling from a great height, the tears at last streaming down her face.
CHAPTER XLI
HOME AGAIN
The trip home passed like a long shuddering bad dream in which one waits eternally, bound hand and foot, for a blow which does not fall. Somehow, before the first day was over, an unoccupied berth was found for Sylvia, in a tiny corner usually taken by one of the ship’s servants. Sylvia accepted this dully. She was but half alive, all her vital forces suspended until the journey should be over. The throbbing of the engines came to seem like the beating of her own heart, and she lay tensely in her berth for hours at a time, feeling that it was partly her energy which was driving the ship through the waters. She only thought of accomplishing the journey, covering the miles which lay before her. From what lay at the end she shrank back, returning again to her hypnotic absorption in the throbbing of the engines. The old woman who had offered to share her berth had disappeared at the first rough water and had been invisible all the trip. Sylvia did not think of her again. That was a recollection which with all its sacred significance was to come back later to Sylvia’s maturer mind.
The ship reached New York late in the afternoon, and docked that night. Sylvia stood alone, in her soiled wrinkled suit, shapeless from constant wear, her empty hands clutching at the railing, and was the first passenger to dart down the second-class gang-plank. She ran to see if there were letters or a telegram for her.
“Yes, there is a telegram for you,” said the steward, holding out a sealed envelope to her. “It came on with the pilot and ought to have been given you before.”
She took the envelope, but was unable to open it. The arc lights flared and winked above her in the high roof of the wharf; the crowds of keen-faced, hard-eyed men and women in costly, neat-fitting clothing were as oblivious of her and as ferociously intent on their own affairs as the shabby, noisy crowd she had left in Naples, brushing by her as though she were a part of the wharf as they bent over their trunks anxiously, and locked them up with determination. It seemed to Sylvia that she could never break the spell of fear which bound her fast. Minute after minute dragged by, and she still stood, very white, very sick.
She was aware that some one stood in front of her, looking into her face, and she recognized one of the ship’s officials whom she had noticed from a distance on the ship, an under-officer, somehow connected with the engines, who had sat at table with the second-class passengers. He was a burly, red-faced man, with huge strong hands and a bald head.
He looked at her now for a moment with an intent kindness, and taking her arm led her a step to a packing-case on which he made her sit down. At the break in her immobility, a faintness came over Sylvia. The man bent over her and began to fan her with his cap. A strong smell of stale and cheap tobacco reached Sylvia from all of his obese person, but his vulgar, ugly face expressed a profoundly self-forgetful concern. “There, feelin’ better?” he asked, his eyes anxiously on hers. The man looked at the envelope comprehendingly: “Oh–bad news–” he murmured. Sylvia opened her hand and showed him that it had not been opened. “I haven’t looked at it yet,” she said pitifully.
The man made an inarticulate murmur of pity–put out his thick red fingers, took the message gently from her hand, and opened it. As he read she searched his face with an impassioned scrutiny.
When he raised his eyes from the paper, she saw in them, in that grossly fleshy countenance, such infinite pity that even her swift intuition of its meaning was not so swift as to reach her heart first. The blow did not reach her naked and unprotected in the solitude of her egotism, as it had at Naples. Confusedly, half-resentfully, but irresistibly she knew that she did not–could not–stand alone, was not the first thus to be struck down. This knowledge brought the tonic summons to courage. She held out her hand unflinchingly, and stood up as she read the message, “Mother died this morning at dawn.” The telegram was dated three days before. She was now two days from home.
She looked up at the man before her and twice tried to speak before she could command her voice. Then she said quite steadily: “I live in the West. Can you tell me anything about trains to Chicago?”
“I’m going with ye, to th’ train,” he said, taking her arm and moving forward. Two hours later his vulgar, ugly, compassionate face was the last she saw as the train moved out of the station. He did not seem a stranger to Sylvia. She saw that he was more than middle-aged, he must have lost _his_ mother, there must have been many deaths in his past. He seemed more familiar to her than her dearest friends had seemed before; but from now on she was to feel closer to every human being than before to her most loved. A great breach had been made in the wall of her life–the wall which had hidden her fellows from her. She saw them face the enigma as uncomprehendingly, as helplessly as she, and she felt the instinct of terror to huddle close to others, even though they feel–_because_ they feel–a terror as unrelieved. It was not that she loved her fellow-beings more from this hour, rather that she felt, to the root of her being, her inevitable fellowship with them.
The journey home was almost as wholly a period of suspended animation for Sylvia as the days on the ocean had been. She had read the telegram at last; now she knew what had happened, but she did not yet know what it meant. She felt that she would not know what it meant until she reached home. How could her mother be dead? What did it mean to have her mother dead?
She said the grim words over and over, handling them with heartsick recklessness as a desperate man might handle the black, ugly objects with smoking fuses which he knows carry death. But for Sylvia no explosion came. No ravaging perception of the meaning of the words reached her strained inner ear. She said them over and over, the sound of them was horrifying to her, but in her heart she did not believe them. Her mother, _her_ mother could not die!
There was no one, of course, at the La Chance station to meet her, and she walked out through the crowd and took the street-car without having seen a familiar face. It was five o’clock in the afternoon then, and six when she walked up the dusty country road and turned in through the gate in the hedge. There was home–intimately a part of her in every detail of its unforgotten appearance. The pines stood up strong in their immortal verdure, the thick golden hush of the summer afternoon lay like an enchantment about the low brown house. And something horrible, unspeakably horrible had happened there. Under the forgotten dust and grime of her long railway journey, she was deadly pale as she stepped up on the porch. Judith came to the door, saw her sister, opened her arms with a noble gesture, and clasped Sylvia to her in a strong and close embrace. Not a word was spoken. The two clung to each other silently, Sylvia weeping incessantly, holding fast to the dear human body in her arms, feeling herself dissolved in a very anguish of love and pain. Her wet cheek was pressed against Judith’s lips, the tears rained down in a torrent. All the rich, untapped strength of her invincible youth was in that healthful flood of tears.
There were none such in the eyes of Professor Marshall as he came down the stairs to greet his daughter. Sylvia was immeasurably shocked by his aspect. He did not look like her father. She sought in vain in that gray countenance for any trace of her father’s expression. He came forward with a slow, dragging step, and kissed his daughter, taking her hand–his, she noticed, felt like a sick man’s, parched, the skin like a dry husk. He spoke, in a voice which had no resonance, the first words that had been uttered: “You must be very tired, Sylvia. You would better go and lie down. Your sister will go with you.” He himself turned away and walked slowly towards the open door. Sylvia noticed that he shuffled his feet as he walked.
Judith drew Sylvia away up the stairs to her own slant-ceilinged room, and the two sat down on the bed, side by side, with clasped hands. Judith now told briefly the outline of what had happened. Sylvia listened, straining her swollen eyes to see her sister’s face, wiping away the tears which ran incessantly down her pale, grimy cheeks, repressing her sobs to listen, although they broke out in one burst after another. Her mother had gone down very suddenly and they had cabled at once–then she grew better–she had been unspeakably brave–fighting the disease by sheer will-power–she had conquered it–she was gaining–they were sorry they had cabled Sylvia–she had not known she was going to die–none of them had dreamed she was going to die–suddenly as the worst of her disease had spent itself and the lungs were beginning to clear–suddenly her heart had given way, and before the nurse could call her husband and children to her, she was gone. They had been there under the same roof, and had not been with her at the last. The last time they had seen her, she was alive and smiling at them–such a brave, wan shadow of her usual smile–for a few moments they went about their affairs, full of hope–and when they entered the sick-room again–
Sylvia could bear no more, screaming out, motioning Judith imperiously to stop;–she began to understand what had happened to her; the words she had repeated so dully were like thunder in her ears. Her mother was dead.
Judith took her sister again in her arms, holding her close, as though she were the older. Sylvia was weeping again, the furious, healing, inexhaustible tears of youth. To both the sisters it seemed that they were passing an hour of supreme bitterness; but their strong young hearts, clinging with unconscious tenacity to their right to joy, were at that moment painfully opening and expanding beyond the narrow bounds of childhood. Henceforth they were to be great enough to harbor joy–a greater joy–and sorrow, side by side.
Moreover, as though their action-loving mother were still watching over them, they found themselves confronted at once with an inexorable demand for their strength and courage.
Judith detached herself, and said in a firm voice: “Sylvia, you mustn’t cry any more. We must think what to do.”
As Sylvia looked at her blankly, she went on: “Somehow Lawrence must be taken away for a while–until Father’s–either you or I must go with him and stay, and the other one be here with Father until he’s–he’s more like himself.”
Sylvia, fresh from the desolation of solitude in sorrow, cried out: “Oh, Judith, how can you! Now’s the time for us all to stay together! Why should we–?”
Judith went to the door and closed it before answering, a precaution so extraordinary in that house of frank openness that Sylvia was struck into silence by it. Standing by the door, Judith said in a low tone, “You didn’t notice–anything–about Father?”
“Oh yes, he looks ill. He is so pale–he frightened me!”
Judith looked down at the floor and was silent a moment. Sylvia’s heart began to beat fast with a new foreboding. “Why, what _is_ the matter with–” she began.
Judith covered her face with her hands. “I don’t know what to _do_!” she said despairingly.
No phrase coming from Judith could have struck a more piercing alarm into her sister’s heart. She ran to Judith, pulled her hands down, and looked into her face anxiously. “What do you mean, Judy–what do you mean?”
“Why–it’s five days now since Mother died, three days since the funeral–and Father has hardly eaten a mouthful–and I don’t think he’s slept at all. I know he hasn’t taken his clothes off. And–and–” she drew Sylvia again to the bed, and sat down beside her, “he says such things … the night after Mother died Lawrence had cried so I was afraid he would be sick, and I got him to bed and gave him some hot milk,”–the thought flashed from one to the other almost palpably, “That is what Mother would have done”–“and he went to sleep–he was perfectly worn out. I went downstairs to find Father. It was after midnight. He was walking around the house into one room after another and out on the porch and even out in the garden, as fast as he could walk. He looked so–” She shuddered. “I went up to him and said, ‘Father, Father, what are you doing?’ He never stopped walking an instant, but he said, as though I was a total stranger and we were in a railway station or somewhere like that, ‘I am looking for my wife. I expect to come across her any moment, but I can’t seem to remember the exact place I was to meet her. She must be somewhere about, and I suppose–‘ and then, Sylvia, before I could help it, he opened the door to Mother’s room quick–and the men were there, and the coffin–” She stopped short, pressing her hand tightly over her mouth to stop its quivering. Sylvia gazed at her in horrified silence.
After a pause, Judith went on: “He turned around and ran as fast as he could up the stairs to his study and locked the door. He locked me out–the night after Mother died. I called and called to him–he didn’t answer. I was afraid to call very loud for fear of waking Lawrence. I’ve had to think of Lawrence too.” She stopped again to draw a long breath. She stopped and suddenly reached out imploring hands to hold fast to Sylvia. “I’m so _glad_ you have come!” she murmured.
This from Judith ran like a galvanic shock through Sylvia’s sorrow-sodden heart. She sat up, aroused as she had never been before to a stern impulse to resist her emotion, to fight it down. She clasped Judith’s hand hard, and felt the tears dry in her eyes. Judith went on: “If it hadn’t been for Lawrence–he’s sick as it is. I’ve kept him in his room–twice when he’s been asleep I’ve managed to get Father to eat something and lie down–there seem to be times when he’s so worn out that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. But it comes back to him. One night I had just persuaded him to lie down, when he sat up again with that dreadful face and said very loud: ‘Where is my wife? Where is Barbara?’ That was on the night after the funeral. And the next day he came to me, out in the garden, and said,–he never seems to know who I am: ‘I don’t mind the separation from my wife, you understand–it’s not that–I’m not a child, I can endure that–but I _must_ know where she is. I _must_ know where she is!’ He said it over and over, until his voice got so loud he seemed to hear it himself and looked around–and then he went back into the house and began walking all around, opening and shutting all the doors. What I’m afraid of is his meeting Lawrence and saying something like that. Lawrence would go crazy. I thought, as soon as you came, you could take him away to the Helman farm–the Helmans have been so good–and Mrs. Helman offered to take Lawrence–only he oughtn’t to be alone–he needs one of us–“
Judith was quiet now, and though very pale, spoke with her usual firmness. Sylvia too felt herself iron under the pressure of her responsibilities. She said: “Yes, I see. All right–I’ll go,” and the two went together into Lawrence’s room. He was lying on the bed, his face in the pillows. At the sound of their steps he turned over and showed a pitiful white face. He got up and moved uncertainly towards Sylvia, sinking into her arms and burying his face on her shoulder.
But a little later when their plan was told him, he turned to Judith with a cry: “No, _you_ go with me, Judy! I want _you_! You ‘know’–about it.”
Over his head the sisters looked at each other with questioning eyes; and Sylvia nodded her consent. Lawrence had always belonged to Judith.
CHAPTER XLII
“_Strange that we creatures of the petty ways, Poor prisoners behind these fleshly bars, Can sometimes think us thoughts with God ablaze, Touching the “fringes of the outer stars_.””
And so they went away, Lawrence very white, stooping with the weight of his suitcase, his young eyes, blurred and red, turned upon Judith with an infinite confidence in her strength. Judith herself was pale, but her eyes were dry and her lips firm in her grave, steadfast face, so like her mother’s, except for the absence of the glint of humor. Sylvia kissed her good-bye, feeling almost a little fear of her resolute sister; but as she watched them go down the path, and noted the appealing drooping of the boy towards Judith, Sylvia was swept with a great wave of love and admiration–and courage.
She turned to face the difficult days and nights before her and forced herself to speak cheerfully to her father, who sat in a chair on the porch, watching the departing travelers and not seeing them. “How splendid Judith is!” she cried, and went on with a break in the voice she tried to control: “She will take Mother’s place for us all!”
Her father frowned slightly, as though she had interrupted him in some effort where concentration was necessary, but otherwise gave no sign that he heard her.
Sylvia watched him anxiously through the window. Presently she saw him relax from his position of strained attention with a great sigh, almost a groan, and lean back in his chair, covering his eyes with his hands. When he took them down, his face had the aged, ravaged expression of exhaustion which had so startled her on her arrival. Now she felt none of her frightened revulsion, but only an aching pity which sent her out to him in a rush, her arms outstretched, crying to him brokenly that he still had his children who loved him more than anything in the world.
For the first time in her life, her father repelled her, shrinking away from her with a brusque, involuntary recoil that shocked her, thrusting her arms roughly to one side, and rising up hastily to retreat into the house. He said in a bitter, recriminating tone, “You don’t know what you are talking about,” and left her standing there, the tears frozen in her eyes. He went heavily upstairs to his study on the top floor and locked the door. Sylvia heard the key turn. It shut her into an intolerable solitude. She had not thought before that anything could seem worse than the desolation of her mother’s absence.
She felt a deathlike sinking of her heart. She was afraid of her father, who no longer seemed her father, created to protect and cherish her, but some maniac stranger. She felt an impulse like that of a terrified child to run away, far away to some one who should stand before her and bear the brunt. She started up from her chair with panic haste, but the familiar room, saturated with recollections of her mother’s gallant spirit, stood about her like a wall, shutting her in to the battle with her heart. Who was there to summon whom she could endure as a spectator of her father’s condition? Her mother’s empty chair stood opposite her, against the wall. She looked at it fixedly; and drawing a long breath sat down quietly.
This act of courage brought a reward in the shape of a relaxation of the clutch on her throat and about her heart. Her mother’s wise materialism came to her mind now and she made a heartsick resolve that she would lead as physically normal a life as possible, working out of doors, forcing herself to eat, and that, above all things, she would henceforth deny herself the weakening luxury of tears. And yet but an hour later, as she bent over her mother’s flower-beds blazing in the sun, she found the tears again streaming from her eyes.
She tried to wipe them away, but they continued to rain down on her cheeks. Her tongue knew their saltness. She was profoundly alarmed and cowed by this irresistible weakness, and stood helplessly at bay among the languid roses. The sensation of her own utter weakness, prostrate before her dire need for strength, was as bitter as the taste of her tears.
She stood there, among the sun-warmed flowers, looking like a symbolic figure of youth triumphant … and she felt herself to be in a black and windowless prison, where the very earth under her feet was treacherous, where everything betrayed her.
Then, out of her need, her very great need, out of the wide and empty spaces of her inculcated unbelief, something rose up and overwhelmed her. The force stronger than herself which she had longed to feel, blew upon her like a wind out of eternity.
She found herself on her knees, her face hidden in her hands, sending out a passionate cry which transcended words. The child of the twentieth century, who had been taught not to pray, was praying.
She did not know how long she knelt there before the world emerged from the white glory which had whirled down upon it, and hidden it from her. But when she came to herself, her eyes were dry, and the weakening impulse to tears had gone. She stretched out her hands before her, and they did not tremble. The force stronger than herself was now in her own heart. From her mother’s garden there rose a strong, fragrant exhalation, as sweet as honey.
* * * * *
For more than an hour Sylvia worked steadily among the flowers, consciously wrought upon by the healing emanations from the crushed, spicy leaves, the warm earth, and the hot, pure breath of the summer wind on her face.
Once she had a passing fancy that her mother stood near her … smiling.
CHAPTER XLIII
“_Call now; is there any that will answer thee?_”–JOB.
When she went back to the silent, echoing house, she felt calmer than at any time since she had read the telegram in Naples. She did not stop to wash her earth-stained hands, but went directly up the stairs to the locked door at the top. She did not knock this time. She stood outside and said authoritatively in a clear, strong voice, the sound of which surprised her, “Father dear, please open the door and let me in.”
There was a pause, and then a shuffle of feet. The door opened and Professor Marshall appeared, his face very white under the thick stubble of his gray, unshaven beard, his shoulders bowed, his head hanging. Sylvia went to his side, took his hand firmly in hers, and said quietly: “Father, you must eat something. You haven’t taken a bit of food in two days. And then you must lie down and rest,” She poured all of her new strength into these quietly issued commands, and permitted herself no moment’s doubt of his obedience to them. He lifted his head, looked at her, and allowed her to lead him down the stairs and again into the dining-room. Here he sat, quite spent, staring before him until Sylvia returned from the kitchen with a plate of cold meat and some bread. She sat down beside him, putting out again consciously all her strength, and set the knife and fork in his nerveless hands. In the gentle monologue with which she accompanied his meal she did not mention her mother, or anything but slight, casual matters about the house and garden. She found herself speaking in a hushed tone, as though not to awake a sleeping person. Although she sat quite quietly, her hands loosely folded on the table, her heart was thrilling and burning to a high resolve. “Now it is my turn to help my father.”
After he had eaten a few mouthfuls and laid down the knife and fork, she did not insist further, but rose to lead him to the couch in the living-room. She dared not risk his own room, the bed on which her mother had died.
“Now you must lie down and rest, Father,” she said, loosening his clothes and unlacing his shoes as though he had been a sick child. He let her do what she would, and as she pushed him gently back, he yielded and lay down at full length. Sylvia sat down beside him, feeling her strength ebbing. Her father lay on his back, his eyes wide open. On the ceiling above him a circular flicker of light danced and shimmered, reflected from a glass of water on the table. His eyes fastened upon this, at first unwinkingly, with a fixed intensity, and later with dropped lids and half-upturned eyeballs. He was quite quiet, and finally seemed asleep, although the line of white between his eyelids made Sylvia shudder.
With the disappearance of the instant need for self-control and firmness, she felt an immense fatigue. It had cost her dearly, this victory, slight as it was. She drooped in her chair, exhausted and undone. She looked down at the ash-gray, haggard face on the pillow, trying to find in those ravaged features her splendidly life-loving father. It was so quiet that she could hear the big clock in the dining-room ticking loudly, and half-consciously she began to count the swings of the pendulum: One–two–three–four–five–six– seven–eight–nine–ten–eleven–twelve–thirteen–fourteen–
She awoke to darkness and the sound of her mother’s name loudly screamed. She started up, not remembering where she was, astonished to find herself sitting in a chair. As she stood bewildered in the dark, the clock in the dining-room struck two. At once from a little distance, outside the window apparently, she heard the same wild cry ringing in her ears–“_Bar-ba-ra!_” All the blood in her body congealed and the hair on her head seemed to stir itself, in the instant before she recognized her father’s voice.
The great impulse of devotion which had entered her heart in the garden still governed her. Now she was not afraid. She did not think of running away. She only knew that she must find her father quickly and take care of him. Outside on the porch, the glimmering light from the stars showed her his figure, standing by one of the pillars, leaning forward, one hand to his ear. As she came out of the door, he dropped his hand, threw back his head, and again sent out an agonizing cry–“_Bar-ba-ra!_ Where are you?” It was not the broken wail of despair; it was the strong, searching cry of a lost child who thinks trustingly that if he but screams loudly enough his mother must hear him and come–and yet who is horribly frightened because she does not answer. But this was a man in his full strength who called! It seemed the sound must reach beyond the stars. Sylvia felt her very bones ringing with it. She went along the porch to her father, and laid her hand on his arm. Through his sleeve she could feel how tense and knotted were the muscles. “Oh, Father, _don’t!_” she said in a low tone. He shook her off roughly, but did not turn his head or look at her. Sylvia hesitated, not daring to leave him and not daring to try to draw him away; and again was shaken by that terrible cry.
The intensity of his listening attitude seemed to hush into breathlessness the very night about him, as it did Sylvia. There was not a sound from the trees. They stood motionless, as though carved in wood; not a bird fluttered a wing; not a night-insect shrilled; the brook, dried by the summer heat to a thread, crept by noiselessly. As once more the frantic cry resounded, it seemed to pierce this opaque silence like a palpable missile, and to wing its way without hindrance up to the stars. Not the faintest murmur came in answer. The silence shut down again, stifling. Sylvia and her father stood as though in the vacuum of a great bell-glass which shut them away from the rustling, breathing, living world. Sylvia said again, imploringly, “Oh, _Father_!” He looked at her angrily, sprang from the porch, and walked rapidly towards the road, stumbling and tripping over the laces of his shoes, which Sylvia had loosened when she had persuaded him to