The Bent Twig Part 35

A gaunt roaming figure of ennui and restlessness, Arnold appeared at the door of the pergola and with a petulant movement tore a brilliant autumn leaf to pieces as he lingered for a moment, listening moodily to the talk within. He refused with a grimace the chair to which Sylvia motioned him. "Lord, no! Hear 'em go it!" he said quite audibly and turned away to lounge back towards the house. Sylvia had had time to notice, somewhat absently, that he looked ill, as though he had a headache.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith glanced after him with misgiving, and, under cover of a brilliantly resounding pa.s.sage at arms between Morrison and Page, murmured anxiously to Sylvia, "I wish Judith would give up her nonsense and _marry_ Arnold!"

"Oh, they've only been engaged a couple of months," said Sylvia.

"What's the hurry! She'll get her diploma in January. It'd be a pity to have her miss!"

Arnold's stepmother broke in rather impatiently, "If I were a girl engaged to Arnold, I'd _marry_ him!"

"--the trouble with all you connoisseurs, Morrison, is that you're barking up the wrong tree. You take for granted, from your own tastes, when people begin to buy jade Buddhas and Zuloaga bull-fighters that they're wanting to surround themselves with beauty. Not much! It's the consciousness of money they want to surround themselves with!"

Morrison conceded part of this. "Oh, I grant you, there's a disheartening deal of imitation in this matter. But America's new to aesthetics. Don't despise beginnings because they're small!"

"A nettle leaf is small. But that's not the reason why it won't ever grow into an oak. Look here! A sheaf of winter gra.s.ses, rightly arranged in clear gla.s.s, has as much of the essence of beauty as a bronze vase of the Ming dynasty. I ask you just one question, How many people do you know who are capable of--"

The art-critic broke in: "Oh come! You're setting up an impossibly high standard of aesthetic feeling."

"I'm not presuming to do any such thing as setting up a standard!

I'm just insisting that people who can't extract joy from the shadow pattern of a leafy branch on a gray wall, are liars if they claim to enjoy a fine j.a.panese print. What they enjoy in the print is the sense that they've paid a lot for it. In my opinion, there's no use trying to advance a step towards any sound aesthetic feeling till _some_ step is taken away from the idea of cost as the criterion of value about anything." He drew a long breath and went on, rather more rapidly than was his usual habit of speech: "I've a real conviction on that point.

It's come to me of late years that one reason we haven't any national art is because we have too much magnificence. All our capacity for admiration is used up on the splendor of palace-like railway stations and hotels. Our national tympanum is so deafened by that blare of sumptuousness that we have no ears for the still, small voice of beauty. And perhaps," he paused, looking down absently at a crumb he rolled between his thumb and finger on the table, "it's possible that the time is ripening for a wider appreciation of another kind of beauty ... that has little to do even with such miracles as the shadow of a branch on a wall."

Morrison showed no interest in this vaguely phrased hypothesis, and returned to an earlier contention: "You underestimate," he said, "the amount of education and taste and time it takes to arrange that simple-looking vase of gra.s.ses, to appreciate your leaf-shadows."

"All I'm saying is that your campaign of aesthetic education hasn't made the matter vital enough to people, to any people, not even to people who call themselves vastly aesthetic, so that they _give_ time and effort and self-schooling to the acquisition of beauty. They not only want their money to do their dirty work for them, they try to make it do their fine living for them too, with a minimum of effort on their part. They want to _buy_ beauty, outright, with cash, and have it stay put, where they can get their fingers on it at any time, without bothering about it in the meantime. That's the way a Turk likes his women--same impulse exactly,"

"I've known a few Caucasians too ...," Mrs. Marshall-Smith contributed a barbed point of malice to the talk.

Page laughed, appreciating her hit. "Oh, I mean Turk as a generic term." Sylvia, circling warily about the contestants, looking for a chance to make her presence felt, without impairing the masculine gusto with which they were monopolizing the center of the stage, tossed in a suggestion, "Was it Hawthorne's--it's a queer fancy like Hawthorne's--the idea of the miser, don't you remember, whose joy was to roll naked in his gold pieces?"

Page s.n.a.t.c.hed up with a delighted laugh the metaphor she had laid in his hand. "Capital! Precisely! There's the thing in a nutsh.e.l.l. We twentieth century Midases have got beyond the simple taste of that founder of the family for the s.h.i.+ning yellow qualities of money, but we love to wallow in it none the less. We like to put our feet on it, in the shape of rugs valued according to their cost, we like to eat it in insipid, out-of-season fruit and vegetables."

"Doesn't it occur to you," broke in Morrison, "that you may be attacking something that's a mere phase, an incident of transition?"

"Is anything ever anything else!" Page broke in to say.

Morrison continued, with a slight frown at the interruption, "America is simply emerging from the frontier condition of bareness, and it is only natural that one, or perhaps two generations must be sacrificed in order to attain a smooth mastery of an existence charged and enriched with possession." He gave the effect of quoting a paragraph from one of his lectures.

"Isn't the end of that 'transition,'" inquired Page, "usually simply that after one or two generations people grow dulled to everything _but_ possession and fancy themselves worthily occupied when they spend their lives regulating and caring for their possessions. I hate," he cried with sudden intensity, "I hate the very sound of the word!"

"Does you great credit, I'm sure," said Morrison, with a faint irony, a hidden acrimony, p.r.i.c.king, for an instant, an ugly ear through his genial manner.

Ever since the day of the fire, since Page had become a more and more frequent visitor in Lydford and had seen more and more of Sylvia, she had derived a certain amount of decidedly bad-tasting amus.e.m.e.nt from the fact of Morrison's animosity to the other man. But this was going too far. She said instantly, "Do you know, I've just thought what it is you all remind me of--I mean Lydford, and the beautiful clothes, and n.o.body bothering about anything but tea and ideas and knowing the right people. I knew it made me think of something else, and now I know--it's a Henry James novel!"

Page took up her lead instantly, and said gravely, putting himself beside her as another outsider: "Well, of course, that's their ideal.

That's what they _try_ to be like--at least to talk like James people.

But it's not always easy. The vocabulary is so limited."

"Limited!" cried Mrs. Marshall-Smith. "There are more words in a Henry James novel than in any dictionary!"

"Oh yes, _words_ enough!" admitted Page, "but all about the same sort of thing. It reminds me of the seminarists in Rome, who have to use Latin for everything. They can manage predestination and vicarious atonement like a shot, but when it comes to ordering somebody to call them for the six-twenty train to Naples they're lost. Now, you can talk about your bric-a-brac in Henry-Jamesese, you can take away your neighbor's reputation by subtle suggestion, you can appreciate a fine deed of self-abnegation, if it's not too definite! I suppose a man could even make an attenuated sort of love in the lingo, but I'll be hanged if I see how anybody could order a loaf of bread,"

"One might do without bread, possibly?" suggested Morrison, pressing the tips of his beautiful fingers together.

"By Jove," cried Page, in hearty a.s.sent, "I've a notion that lots of times they do!"

This was getting nowhere. Mrs. Marshall-Smith put her hand to the helm, and addressed herself to Morrison with a plain reminder of the reason for the grotesqueness of his irritability. "Where's _Molly_ keeping herself nowadays?" she inquired. "She hasn't come over with you, to tea, for ever so long. The pergola isn't itself without her sunny head."

"Molly is a grain of sand in a hurricane, nowadays," said Morrison seriously. "It seems that the exigencies of divine convention decree that a girl who is soon to be married belongs neither to herself, to her family, to her fiance--oh, least of all to her fiance--but heart and soul and body to a devouring horde of dressmakers and tailors and milliners and hairdressers and corsetieres and petticoat specialists and jewelers and hosiery experts and--"

They were all laughing at the interminable defile of words proceeding with a Spanish gravity, and Mrs. Marshall-Smith broke in, "I don't hear anything about house-furnishers."

"No," said Morrison, "the house-furnisher's name is F. Morrison, and he has no show until after the wedding."

"What _are_ your plans?" asked Mrs. Marshall-Smith.

"Nothing very definite except the great Date. That's fixed for the twenty-first."

"Oh, so soon ... less than three weeks from now!"

Morrison affected to feel a note of disapproval in her voice, and said with his faint smile, "You can hardly blame me for not wis.h.i.+ng to delay."

"Oh, no _blame!_" she denied his inference. "After all it's over a month since the engagement was announced, and who knows how much longer before that you and Molly knew about it. No. I'm not one who believes in long engagements. The shorter the better."

Sylvia saw an opportunity to emerge with an appearance of ease from a silence that might seem ungracious. It was an enforced manoeuver with which the past weeks had made her wearily familiar. "Aunt Victoria's. .h.i.tting at Arnold and Judith over your head," she said to Morrison.

"It's delicious, the way Tantine shows herself, for all her veneer of modernity, entirely nineteen century in her impatience of Judith's work. Now that there's a chance to escape from it into the blessed haven of idle matrimony, she can't see why Judith doesn't give up her lifetime dream and marry Arnold tomorrow."

Somewhat to her surprise, her attempt at playfulness had no notable success. The intent of her remarks received from her aunt and Morrison the merest formal recognition of a hasty, dim smile, and with one accord they looked at once in another direction. "And after the wedding?" Mrs. Marshall-Smith inquired--"or is that a secret?"

"Oh no, when one belongs to Molly's exalted cla.s.s or is about to be elevated into it, nothing is secret. I'm quite sure that the society editor of the _Herald_ knows far better than I the names of the hotels in Jamaica we're to frequent."

"Oh! Jamaica! How ... how ... original!" Mrs. Marshall-Smith cast about her rather desperately for a commendatory adjective.

"Yes, quite so, isn't it?" agreed Morrison. "It's Molly's idea. She _is_ original, you know. It's one of her greatest charms. She didn't want to go to Europe because there is so much to see there, to do. She said she wanted a honeymoon and not a personally conducted trip."

They all laughed again, and Sylvia said: "How _like_ Molly! How clever! n.o.body does her thinking for her!"

"The roads in Jamaica are excellent for motoring, too, I hear," added Morrison. "That's another reason, of course."

Page gave a great laugh. "Well, as Molly's cousin, let me warn you!

Molly driving a car in Jamaica will be like Pavlova doing a bacchante on the point of a needle! You'll have to keep a close watch on her to see that she doesn't absentmindedly dash across the island and jump off the bank right on into the ocean."

"Where does F. Morrison, house-furnis.h.i.+ng-expert, come in?" asked Mrs.

Marshall-Smith.

"After the wedding, after Jamaica," said Morrison. "We're to come back to New York and for a few months impose on the good nature of Molly's grandfather's household, while we struggle with workmen _et al_.

The Montgomery house on Fifth Avenue, that's shut up for so many years,--ever since the death of Molly's parents,--is the one we've settled on. It's very large, you know. It has possibilities. I have a plan for remodeling it and enlarging it with a large inner court, gla.s.s-roofed--something slightly Saracenic about the arches--and what is now a suite of old-fas.h.i.+oned parlors on the north side is to be made into a long gallery. There'll be an excellent light for paintings. I've secured from Duveen a promise for some tapestries I've admired for a long time--Beauvais, not very old, Louis XVII--but excellent in color. Those for the staircase ..."

He spoke with no more animation than was his custom, with no more relish than was seemly; his carefully chosen words succeeded each other in their usual exquisite precision, no complacency showed above the surface; his att.i.tude was, as always, composed of precisely the right proportion of dignity and ease; but as he talked, some untarnished instinct in Sylvia shrank away in momentary distaste, the first she had ever felt for him.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith evidently did not at all share this feeling. "Oh, what a house that will be!" she cried, lost in forecasting admiration.