The Bent Twig Part 42

CHAPTER x.x.xVII

"_... 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 pa.s.sed 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 peac.o.c.ks.

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, s.h.i.+ning, 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 flas.h.i.+ng. 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 s.h.i.+ver 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 wis.h.i.+ng 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 acc.u.mulated 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 tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs. 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 n.o.blest service to the world only waste themselves and serve n.o.body 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 cla.s.sic.

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 cla.s.s 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 das.h.i.+ng 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.