The Bent Twig Part 27

"I know exactly why. It's connected with one of the old gentleman's eccentricities. He's afraid of you on account of his precious nephew."

"I didn't know he _had_ a nephew." Sylvia was immensely astonished.

"Well, he has, and he bows down and wors.h.i.+ps him, as he does his granddaughter. You see how he adores Molly. It's nice of the old fellow, the cult he has for his descendants, but occasionally inconvenient for innocent bystanders. He thinks everybody wants to make off with his young folks. You and I are fellow-suspects. Haven't you felt him wish he could strike me dead, when Molly makes tea for me, or turns over music as I play?" He laughed a little, a gentle, kind, indulgent laugh. "_Molly!_" he said, as if his point were more than elucidated by the mere mention of her name.

Sylvia intimated with a laugh that her point was clearer yet in that she had no name to mention. "But I never saw his nephew. I never even heard of him until this minute."

"No, and very probably never will see him. He's very seldom here. And if you did see him, you wouldn't like him--he's an eccentric of the worst brand," said Morrison tranquilly. "But monomanias need no foundation in fact--" He broke off abruptly to say: "Is this all another proof of your diabolical cleverness? I started in to hear something about yourself, and here I find myself talking about everything else in the world."

"I'm not clever," said Sylvia, hoping to be contradicted.

"Well, you're a great deal too nice to be _consciously_ so," admitted Morrison. "See here," he went on, "it's evident that you're more than a match for me at this game. Suppose we strike a bargain. You introduce yourself to me and I'll do the same by you. Isn't it quite the most fantastic of all the bizarreries of human intercourse that an 'introduction' to a fellow-being consists in being informed of his name,--quite the most unimportant, fortuitous thing about him?"

Sylvia considered. "What do you want to know?" she asked finally.

"Well, I'd _like_ to know everything," said the man gaily. "My curiosity has been aroused to an almost unappeasable pitch. But of course I'll take any information you feel like doling out. In the first place, _how_, coming from such a ..." He checked himself and changed the form of his question: "I overheard you speaking to Victoria's maid, and I've been lying awake nights ever since, wondering how it happened that you speak French with so pure an accent."

"Oh, that's simple! Professor and Madame La Rue are old friends of the family and I've spent a lot of time with them. And then, of course, French is another mother-language for Father. He and Aunt Victoria were brought up in Paris, you know."

Morrison sighed. "Isn't it strange how all the miracles evaporate into mere chemical reactions when you once investigate! All the white-clad, ghostly spirits turn out to be clothes on the line. I suppose there's some equally natural explanation about your way on the piano--the clear, limpid phrasing of that Bach the other day, and then the color of the Bizet afterwards. It's astonis.h.i.+ng to hear anybody of your crude youth playing Bach at all--and then to hear it played right--and afterwards to hear a modern given _his_ right note...."

Sylvia was perfectly aware that she was being flattered, and she was immensely enjoying it. She became more animated, and the peculiar sparkle of her face more spirited. "Oh, that's old Reinhardt, my music teacher. He would take all the skin off my knuckles if I played a Bach gigue the least bit like that Arlesienne Minuet. He doesn't approve of Bizet very much, anyhow. He's a tremendous cla.s.sicist."

"Isn't it," inquired Morrison, phrasing his question carefully, "isn't it, with no disrespect to La Chance intended, isn't it rather unusually good fortune for a smallish Western city to own a real musician?"

"Well, La Chance bears up bravely under its good fortune," said Sylvia dryly. "Old Mr. Reinhardt isn't exactly a prime favorite there. He's a terribly beery old man, and he wipes his nose on his sleeve. Our house was the only respectable one in town that he could go into. But then, our house isn't so very respectable. It has its advantages, not being so very respectable, though it 'most killed me as a young girl to feel us so. But I certainly have a choice gallery of queer folks in my acquaintance, and I have the queerest hodge-podge of sc.r.a.ps of things learned from them. I know a little Swedish from Miss Lindstrom. She's a Swedish old maid who does uplift work among the negroes--isn't that a weird combination? You just ought to hear what she makes of negro dialect! And I know all the socialist arguments from hearing a socialist editor get them off every Sunday afternoon. And I even know how to manage planchette and write mediumistically--save the mark!--from Cousin Parnelia, a crazy old cousin of Mother's who hangs round the house more or less."

"I begin to gather," surmised Morrison, "that you must have a remarkable father and mother. What are _they_ like?"

"Well," said Sylvia thoughtfully, "Mother's the bravest thing you ever saw. She's not afraid of _anything_! I don't mean cows, or the house-afire, or mice, or such foolishness. I mean life and death, and sickness and poverty and fear...."

Morrison nodded his head understandingly, a fine light of appreciation in his eyes, "Not to be afraid of fear--that's splendid."

Sylvia went on to particularize. "When any of us are sick--it's my little brother Lawrence who is mostly--Judith and I are always well--Father just goes all to pieces, he gets so frightened. But Mother stiffens her back and _makes_ everything in the house go on just as usual, very quiet, very calm. She holds everything together _tight_. She says it's sneaking and cowardly if you're going to accept life at all, not to accept _all_ of it--the sour with the sweet--and not whimper."

"Very fine,--very fine! Possibly a very small bit ... grim?" commented Morrison, with a rising inflection.

"Oh, perhaps, a little!" agreed Sylvia, as if it did not matter; "but I can't give you any idea of Mother. She's--she's just _great_! And yet I couldn't live like her, without wanting to smash everything up.

She's somebody that Seneca would have liked."

"And your father?" queried Morrison.

"Oh, he's great too--dear Father--but so different! He and Mother between them have just about all the varieties of human nature that are worth while! Father's red-headed (though it's mostly gray now), and quick, and bl.u.s.tering, and awfully clever, and just adored by his students, and talks every minute, and apparently does all the deciding, and yet ... he couldn't draw the breath of life without Mother; and when it comes right down to _doing_ anything, what he always does is what he knows will come up to her standard."

Morrison raised delightedly amused hands to heaven. "The Recording Angel domiciled in the house!" he cried. "It had never occurred to me before how appallingly discerning the eye of the modern offspring must be. Go on, go on!"

Elated by the sensation of appearing clever, Sylvia continued with a fresh flow of eloquence. "And there never was such a highly moral bringing-up as we children have had. It's no fault of my family's if I've turned out a grasping materialist! I was brought up"--she flamed out suddenly as at some long-h.o.a.rded grievance--"I was brought up in a moral hot-house, and I haven't yet recovered from the shock of being transplanted into real earth in the real world."

Morrison paid instant tribute to her aroused and serious feeling by a grave look of attention. "Won't you explain?" he asked. "I'm so dull I don't follow you. But I haven't been so interested in years."

"Why, I mean," said Sylvia, trying hard to reduce to articulateness a complicated conception, "I mean that Father and Mother just deliberately represented values to me as different from what they really are, with real folks! And now I find that _I'm_ real folks! I can't help it. You are as you _are_, you know. They kept representing to me always that the _best_ pleasures are the ones that are the most important to folks--music, I mean, and Milton's poetry, and a fine novel--and, in Mother's case, a fine sunset, or a perfect rose, or things growing in the garden."

No old a.s.sociate of Morrison's would have recognized the man's face, shocked as it was by surprise and interest out of his usual habit of conscious, acute, self-possessed observation. The angler had inadvertently stepped off a ledge into deep water, and a very swift current was tugging at him. He leaned forward, his eyes as eager with curiosity as a boy's. "Do I understand you to say that you repudiate those 'best pleasures'?"

"Of course you don't understand anything of the sort," said Sylvia very earnestly. "They've soaked me so in music that I'm a regular bond-slave to it. And a perfect rose is a.s.sociated with so many lovely recollections of Mother's wonderful silent joy in it, that I could weep for pleasure. What I'm talking about--what I'm trying to tell you, is the shock it was to me, when I got out of that artificially unworldly atmosphere of home--for there's no use talking, it _is_ artificial!--to find that _those_ pleasures aren't the ones that are considered important and essential. How did I find things in the real world? Why, I find that people don't give a thought to those 'best pleasures' until they have a lot of other things first. Everything _I_'d been trained to value and treasure was negligible, not worth bothering about. But money--position--not having to work--elegance--_those_ are _vital_--prime! Real people can't enjoy hearing a concert if they know they've got to wash up a lot of dishes afterwards. Hiring a girl to do that work is the _first_ thing to do!

There isn't another woman in the world, except my mother, who'd take any pleasure in a perfect rose if she thought her sleeves were so old-fas.h.i.+oned that people would stare at her. Folks _talk_ about liking to look at a fine sunset, but what they give their blood and bones for, is a fine house on the best street in town!"

"Well, but you're not 'people' in that vulgar sense!" protested Morrison. He spoke now without the slightest _arriere-pensee_ of flattering her, and Sylvia in her sudden burst for self-expression was unconscious of him, save as an opponent in an argument.

"You just _say_ that, in that superior way," she flashed at him, "because _you_ don't have to bother your head about such matters, because you don't have to a.s.sociate with people who are fighting for those essentials. For they _are_ what everybody except Father and Mother--_every_ body feels to be the essentials--a pretty house, handsome clothes, servants to do the unpleasant things, social life--oh, plenty of money sums it all up, 'vulgar' as it sounds. And I don't believe you are different. I don't believe anybody you know is really a bit different! Let Aunt Victoria, let old Mr. Sommerville, lose their money, and you'd see how unimportant Debussy and Masaccio would be to them, compared to having to black their own shoes!"

"Well, upon my word!" exclaimed Morrison. "Are you at eighteen presuming to a greater knowledge of life than I at forty?"

"I'm not eighteen, I'm twenty-three," said Sylvia. "The difference is enormous. And if I don't know more about plain unvarnished human nature than you, I miss my guess! _You_ haven't gone through five years at a State University, rubbing shoulders with folks who haven't enough sophistication to pretend to be different from what they are. _You_ haven't taught music for three years in the middle-cla.s.s families of a small Western city!" She broke off to laugh an apologetic depreciation of her own heat. "You'd think I was addressing a meeting," she said in her usual tone. "I got rather carried away because this is the first time I ever really spoke out about it. There are so few who could understand. If I ever tried to explain it to Father and Mother, I'd be sure to find them so deep in a discussion of the relation between Socrates and Christ that they couldn't pay any attention! Professor Kennedy could understand--but he's such a fanatic on the other side."

Morrison looked a quick suspicion. "Who is Professor Kennedy?" he inquired; and was frankly relieved when Sylvia explained: "He's the head of the Mathematics Department, about seventy years old, and the crossest, cantankerousest old misanthrope you ever saw. And thinks himself immensely clever for being so! He just loathes people--the way they really are--and he dotes on Mother and Judith because they're not like anybody else. And he hates me because they couldn't all hypnotize me into looking through their eyes. He thinks it low of me to realize that if you're going to live at all, you've got to live _with people_, and you can't just calmly brush their values on one side. He said once that any sane person in this world was like a civilized man with plenty of gold coin, cast away on a desert island with a tribe of savages who only valued beads and calico, and b.u.t.tons and junk. And I said (I knew perfectly well he was. .h.i.tting at me) that if he was really cast away and couldn't get to another island, I thought the civilized man would be an idiot to starve to death, when he could buy food of the savages by selling them junk. And I thought he just wasted his breath by swearing at the savages for not knowing about the value of gold. There I was. .h.i.tting at _him!_ He's spoiled his digestion, hating the way people are made. And Professor Kennedy said something nasty and neat (he's awfully clever) about that being rather a low occupation for a civilized being--taking advantage of the idiocies of savages--he meant me, of course--and he's right, it _is_ a mean business; I hate it. And that's why I've always wanted to get on another island--not an uninhabited island, like the one Father and Mother have--but one where--well, _this_ is one!" she waved her hand about the lovely room, "this _is_ just one! Where everything's beautiful--costly too--but not just costly; where all the horrid, necessary consequences of things are taken care of without one's bothering--where flowers are taken out of the vases when they wilt and fresh ones put in; and dishes get themselves washed invisibly, inaudibly--and litter just vanishes without our lifting a hand. Of course the people who live so always, can rejoice with a clear mind in sunsets and bright talk. That's what I meant the other day--the day Judith came--when I said I'd arrived in Capua at last; when old Mr.

Sommerville thought me so materialistic and cynical. If _he_ did that, on just that phrase--what must _you_ think, after all this _confession intime d'un enfant du siecle?_" She stopped with a graceful pretense of dreading his judgment, although she knew that she had been talking well, and read nothing but admiration in his very expressive face.

"But all this means, you extraordinary young person, that you're not in the least an _enfant du siecle!_" he cried. "It means that you're dropped down in this groaning, heavy-spirited twentieth century, troubled about many things, from the exact year that was the golden climax of the Renaissance; that you're a perfect specimen of the high-hearted, glorious ..." he qualified on a second thought, "unless your astonis.h.i.+ng capacity to a.n.a.lyze it all, comes from the nineteenth century?"

"No, that comes from Father," explained Sylvia, laughing. "Isn't it funny, using the tool Father taught me to handle, against his ideas!

He's just great on a.n.a.lysis. As soon as we were old enough to think at all, he was always practising us on a.n.a.lysis--especially of what made us want things, or not like them. It's one of his sayings--he's always getting it off to his University cla.s.ses--that if you have once really called an emotion or an ambition by its right name, you have it by the tail, so to speak--that if you know, for instance, that it's your vanity and not your love that's wounded by something, you'll stop caring. But I never noticed that it really worked if you cared _hard_ enough. Diagnosing a disease doesn't help you any, if you keep right on being sick with it."

"My dear! My dear!" cried the man, leaning towards her again, and looking--dazzled--into the beauty and intelligence of her eyes, "the idea that you are afflicted with any disease could only occur to the morbid mind of the bluest-nosed Puritan who ever cut down a May-pole!

You're wonderfully, you're terrifyingly, you are superbly sound and vigorous!"

Breaking in upon this speech, there came the quick, smooth purr of an automobile with all its parts functioning perfectly, a streak of dark gray past the shutters, the sigh of an engine stopped suddenly--Molly Sommerville sprang from behind the steering wheel and ran into the house. She was exquisitely flushed and eager when she came in, but when she saw the two alone in the great, cool, dusky room, filled to its remotest corners with the ineffable aroma of long, intimate, and interrupted talk, she was brought up short. She faltered for an instant and then continued to advance, her eyes on Sylvia. "It's so hot," she said, at random, "and I thought I'd run over for tea--"

"Oh, of course," said Sylvia, jumping up in haste, "it's late! I'd forgotten it was time for tea! Blame _me!_ Since I've been here, Aunt Victoria has left it to me--where shall I say to have it set?"

"The pergola's lovely," suggested Molly. She took her close motor-hat from the pure gold of her hair with a rather listless air.

"All right--the pergola!" agreed Sylvia, perhaps a little too anxiously. In spite of herself, she gave, and she knew she was giving, the effect of needing somehow to make something up to Molly....

CHAPTER XXV

NOTHING IN THE LEAST MODERN

Sylvia was sitting in the garden, an unread book on her knees, dreaming among red and yellow and orange gladioli. She looked with a fixed, bright, beatific stare at the flame-colored flowers and did not see them. She saw only Felix Morrison, she heard only his voice, she was br.i.m.m.i.n.g with the sense of him. In a few moments she would go into the house and find him in the darkened living-room, as he had been every afternoon for the last fortnight, ostensibly come in to lounge away the afternoon over a book, really waiting for her to join him. And when she came in, he would look up at her, that wonderful penetrating deep look of his ... and she would welcome him with her eyes.

And then they would talk! Judith and Arnold would be playing tennis, oblivious of the heat, and Aunt Victoria would be annihilating the tedious center of the day by sleep. n.o.body would interrupt them for hours. How they would talk! How they had talked! As she thought of it the golden fortnight hummed and sang about Sylvia's ears like a Liszt Liebes-Traum.

They had talked of everything in the world, and it all meant but one thing, that they had discovered each other, a discovery visibly as wonderful for Morrison as for the girl. They had discovered each other, and they had been intelligent enough to know at once what it meant. They knew! And in a moment she would go into the house to him.

She half closed her eyes as before a too-great brilliance....