The Bent Twig Part 22

She ran to the piano as to a refuge, meaning to drown out these maddening speculations, which were by this time tinctured with insanity; but the first chords she struck jarred on her ear like a discordant scream. She turned away and stood looking at the floor with a darkening face, one hand at her temple.

Her mother, darning stockings by the window, suddenly laid down her work and said: "Sylvia, how would you like to walk with me over to the Martins' to see if they have any eggs? Our hens have absolutely gone back on us."

Sylvia did not welcome this idea at all, feeling as overwhelming an aversion to companionship as to solitude, but she could think of no excuse, and in an ungracious silence put on her wraps and joined her mother, ready on the porch, the basket in her mittened hand.

Mrs. Marshall's pace was always swift, and on that crisp, cold, sunny day, with the wind sweeping free over the great open s.p.a.ces of the plain about them, she walked even more rapidly than usual. Not a word was spoken. Sylvia, quite as tall as her mother now, and as vigorous, stepped beside her, not noticing their pace, nor the tingling of the swift blood in her feet and hands. Her fresh young face was set in desolate bitterness.

The Martins' house was about six miles from the Marshalls'. It was reached, the eggs procured, and the return begun. Still not a word had been exchanged between the two women. Mrs. Marshall would have been easily capable, under the most ordinary circ.u.mstances, of this long self-contained silence, but it had worked upon Sylvia like a sojourn in the dim recesses of a church. She felt moved, stirred, shaken. But it was not until the brief winter sun was beginning to set red across the open reaches of field and meadow that her poisoned heart overflowed. "Oh, Mother--!" she exclaimed in an unhappy tone, and said no more. She knew no words to phrase what was in her mind.

"Yes, dear," said her mother gently. She looked at her daughter anxiously, expectantly, with a pa.s.sion of yearning in her eyes, but she said no more than those two words.

There was a silence. Sylvia was struggling for expression. They continued to walk swiftly through the cold, ruddy, sunset air, the hard-frozen road ringing beneath their rapid advance. Sylvia clasped her hands together hard in her m.u.f.f. She felt that something in her heart was dying, was suffocating for lack of air, and yet that it would die if she brought it to light. She could find no words at all to ask for help, agonizing in a shy reticence impossible for an adult to conceive. Finally, beginning at random, very hurriedly, looking away, she brought out, faltering, "Mother, _is_ it true that all men are--that when a girl marries she must expect to--aren't there _any_ men who--" She stopped, burying her burning face in her m.u.f.f.

Her words, her tone, the quaver of desperate sincerity in her accent, brought her mother up short. She stopped abruptly and faced the girl.

"Sylvia, look at me!" she said in a commanding voice which rang loud in the frosty silences about them. Sylvia started and looked into her mother's face. It was moved so darkly and so deeply from its usual serene composure that she would have recoiled in fear, had she not been seized upon and held motionless by the other's compelling eyes.

"Sylvia," said her mother, in a strong, clear voice, acutely contrasted to Sylvia's m.u.f.fled tones, "Sylvia, it's a lie that men are nothing but sensual! There's nothing in marriage that a good girl honestly in love with a good man need fear."

"But--but--" began Sylvia, startled out of her shyness.

Her mother cut her short. "Anything that's felt by decent men in love is felt just as truly, though maybe not always so strongly, by women in love. And if a woman doesn't feel that answer in her heart to what he feels--why, he's no mate for her. Anything's better for her than going on. And, Sylvia, you mustn't get the wrong idea. Sensual feeling isn't bad in itself. It's in the world because we have bodies as well as minds--it's like the root of a plant. But it oughtn't to be a very big part of the plant. And it must be the root of the woman's feeling as well as the man's, or everything's all wrong."

"But how can you _tell_!" burst out Sylvia.

"You can tell by the way you feel, if you don't lie to yourself, or let things like money or social position count. If an honest girl shrinks from a man instinctively, there's something not right--sensuality is too big a part of what the man feels for her--and look here, Sylvia, that's not always the man's fault. Women don't realize as they ought how base it is to try to attract men by their bodies," she made her position clear with relentless precision, "when they wear very low-necked dresses, for instance--" At this chance thrust, a wave of scarlet burst up suddenly over Sylvia's face, but she could not withdraw her eyes from her mother's searching, honest gaze, which, even more than her words, spoke to the girl's soul. The strong, grave voice went on unhesitatingly. For once in her life Mrs. Marshall was speaking out. She was like one who welcomes the opportunity to make a confession of faith. "There's no healthy life possible without some sensual feeling between the husband and wife, but there's nothing in the world more awful than married life when it's the only common ground."

Sylvia gazed with wide eyes at the older woman's face, ardent, compelling, inspired, feeling too deeply, to realize it wholly, the vital and momentous character of the moment. She seemed to see nothing, to be aware of nothing but her mother's heroic eyes of truth; but the whole scene was printed on her mind for all her life--the hard, brown road they stood on, the grayed old rail-fence back of Mrs.

Marshall, a field of brown stubble, a distant grove of beech-trees, and beyond and around them the immense sweeping circle of the horizon.

The very breath of the pure, scentless winter air was to come back to her nostrils in after years.

"Sylvia," her mother went on, "it is one of the responsibilities of men and women to help each other to meet on a high plane and not on a low one. And on the whole--health's the rule of the world--on the whole, that's the way the larger number of husbands and wives, imperfect as they are, do live together. Family life wouldn't be possible a day if they didn't."

Like a strong and beneficent magician, she built up again and illuminated Sylvia's black and shattered world. "Your father is just as pure a man as I am a woman, and I would be ashamed to look any child of mine in the face if he were not. You know no men who are not decent--except two--and those you did not meet in your parents' home."

For the first time she moved from her commanding att.i.tude of prophetic dignity. She came closer to Sylvia, but although she looked at her with a sudden sweetness which affected Sylvia like a caress, she but made one more impersonal statement: "Sylvia dear, don't let anything make you believe that there are not as many decent men in the world as women, and they're just as decent. Life isn't worth living unless you know that--and it's true." Apparently she had said all she had to say, for she now kissed Sylvia gently and began again to walk forward.

The sun had completely set, and the piled-up clouds on the horizon flamed and blazed. Sylvia stood still, looking at them fixedly. The great shining glory seemed reflected from her heart, and cast its light upon a regenerated world--a world which she seemed to see for the first time. Strange, in that moment of intensely personal life, how her memory was suddenly flooded with impersonal impressions of childhood, little regarded at the time and long since forgotten, but now recurring to her with the authentic and uncontrovertible brilliance which only firsthand experiences in life can bring with them--all those families of her public-school mates, the plain, ugly homes in and out of which she had come and gone, with eyes apparently oblivious of all but childish interests, but really recording life-facts which now in her hour of need stretched under her feet like a solid pathway across an oozing marsh. All those men and women whom she had seen in a thousand unpremeditated acts, those tired-faced, kind-eyed, unlettered fathers and mothers were not breathing poisoned air, were not harboring in their simple lives a ghastly devouring wild-beast. She recalled with a great indrawn breath all the farmer-neighbors, parents working together for the children, the people she knew so well from long observation of their lives, whose mediocre, struggling existence had filled her with scornful pity, but whom now she recalled with a great grat.i.tude for the explicitness of the revelations made by their untutored plainness. For all she could ever know, the Drapers and the Fiskes and the others of their world might be anything, under the discreet reticence of their sophistication; but they did not make up all the world. She knew, from having breathed it herself, the wind of health which blew about those other lives, bare and open to the view, as less artless lives were not. There was some other answer to the riddle, beside Mrs. Draper's.

Sylvia was only eighteen years old and had the childish immaturity of her age, but her life had been so ordered that she was not, even at eighteen, entirely in the helpless position of a child who must depend on the word of others. She had acc.u.mulated, unknown to herself, quite apart from polished pebbles of book-information, a small treasury of living seeds of real knowledge of life, taken in at first-hand, knowledge of which no one could deprive her. The realization of this was a steadying ballast which righted the wildly rolling keel under her feet. She held up her head bravely against the first onslaught of the storm. She set her hand to the rudder!

Perceiving that her mother had pa.s.sed on ahead of her she sprang forward in a run. She ran like a schoolboy, like a deer, like a man from whose limbs heavy shackles have been struck off. She felt so suddenly lightened of a great heaviness that she could have clapped her hands over her head and bounded into the air. She was, after all, but eighteen years old, and three years before had been a child.

She came up to her mother with a rush, radiating life. Mrs. Marshall looked at the glowing face and her own eyes, dry till then, filled with the tears so rare in her self-controlled life. She put out her hand, took Sylvia's, and they sped along through the quick-gathering dusk, hand-in-hand like sisters.

Judith and Lawrence had reached home before them, and the low brown house gleamed a cheerful welcome to them from shining windows. For the first time in her life, Sylvia did not take for granted her home, with all that it meant. For an instant it looked strangely sweet to her.

She had a pa.s.sing glimpse, soon afterwards lost in other impressions, of how in after years she would look back on the roof which had sheltered and guarded her youth.

She lay awake that night a long time, staring up into the cold blackness, her mind very active and restless in the intense stillness about her. She thought confusedly but intensely of many things--the months behind her, of Jerry, of Mrs. Draper, of her yellow dress, of her mother--of herself. In the lucidity of those silent hours of wakefulness she experienced for a time the piercing, regenerating thrust of self-knowledge. For a moment the full-beating pulses of her youth slackened, and between their throbs there penetrated to her perplexed young heart the rarest of human emotions, a sincere humility. If she had not burned the yellow dress at Mercerton, she would have arisen and burned it that night....

During the rest of the Christmas vacation she avoided being alone. She and Judith and Lawrence skated a great deal, and Sylvia learned at last to cut the grapevine pattern on the ice. She also mastered the first movement of the Sonata Pathetique, so that old Reinhardt was almost satisfied.

The day after the University opened for the winter term the Huberts announced the engagement of their daughter Eleanor to Jermain Fiske, Jr., the brilliant son of that distinguished warrior and statesman, Colonel Jermain Fiske. Sylvia read this announcement in the Society Column of the La Chance _Morning Herald_, with an enigmatic expression on her face, and betaking herself to the skating-pond, cut grapevines with greater a.s.siduity than ever, and with a degree of taciturnity surprising in a person usually so talkative. That she had taken the first step away from the devouring egotism of childhood was proved by the fact that at least part of the time, this vigorous young creature, swooping about the icy pond like a swallow, was thinking pityingly of Eleanor Hubert's sweet face.

CHAPTER XXI

SOME YEARS DURING WHICH NOTHING HAPPENS

Judith had said to the family, taking no especial pains that her sister should not hear her, "Well, folks, now that Sylvia's got through with that horrid Fiske fellow, I do hope we'll all have some peace!" a remark which proved to be a prophecy. They all, including Sylvia herself, knew the tranquillity of an extended period of peace.

It began abruptly, like opening a door into a new room. Sylvia had dreaded the beginning of the winter term and the inevitable sight of Jerry, the enforced crossings of their paths. But Jerry never returned to his cla.s.ses at all. The common talk was to the effect that the Colonel had "worked his pull" to have Jerry admitted to the bar without further preliminaries. After some weeks of relief, it occurred to Sylvia that perhaps Jerry had dreaded meeting her as much as she had seeing him. For whatever reason, the campus saw young Fiske no more, except on the day in May when he pa.s.sed swiftly across it on his way to the Hubert house where Eleanor, very small and white-faced, waited for him under a crown of orange blossoms.

Sylvia did not go to the wedding, although an invitation had come, addressed economically and compendiously to "Professor and Mrs.

Marshall and family." It was a glorious spring day and in her Greek history course they had just reached the battle of Salamis, at the magnificent recital of which Sylvia's sympathetic imagination leaped up rejoicing, as all sympathetic imaginations have for all these many centuries. She was thrilling to a remembered bit of "The Persians" as she pa.s.sed by the Hubert house late that afternoon. She was chanting to herself, "The right wing, well marshaled, led on foremost in good order, and we heard a mighty shout--'Sons of the Greeks! On! Free your country!'" She did not notice that she trod swiftly across a trail of soiled rice in the Hubert driveway.

She was like a person recovered from a fever who finds mere health a condition of joy. She went back to her music, to her neglected books, with a singing heart. And in accordance with the curious ways of Providence, noted in the proverb relating the different fates of him who hath and him who hath not, there was at once added to her pleasure in the old elements of her life the very elements she had longed for unavailingly. Seeing her friendly and shining of face, friendliness went out to her. She had made many new acquaintances during her brief glittering flight and had innumerable more points of contact with the University life than before. She was invited to a quite sufficient number of hops and proms, had quite the normal number of masculine "callers," and was navely astonished and disillusioned to find that those factors in life were by no means as entirely desirable and amusing as her anguished yearning had fancied them. She joined one of the literary societies and took a leading part in their annual outdoor play. At the beginning of her Junior year, Judith entered as a Freshman and thereafter became a close companion. Sylvia devoured certain of her studies, history, and English, and Greek, with insatiable zest and cast aside certain others like political economy and physics, which bored her, mastering just enough of their elements to pa.s.s an examination and promptly forgetting them thereafter. She grew rapidly in intellectual agility and keenness, not at all in philosophical grasp, and emotionally remained as dormant as a potato in a cellar.

She continually looked forward with a bright, vague interest to "growing up," to the mastery of life which adolescents so trustfully a.s.sociate with the arrival of adult years. She spent three more years in college, taking a Master's degree after her B.A., and during those three years, through the many-colored, shifting, kaleidoscopic, disorganized life of an immensely populous inst.i.tution of learning, she fled with rapid feet, searching restlessly everywhere for that ent.i.ty, as yet non-existent, her own soul.

She had, in short, a thoroughly usual experience of modern American education, emerging at the end with a vast amount of information, with very little notion of what it was all about, with Phi Beta Kappa and a great wonder what she was to do with herself.

Up to that moment almost every step of her life had been ordered and systematized, that she might the more quickly and surely arrive at the goal of her diploma. Rushing forward with the acc.u.mulated impetus of years of training in swiftly speeding effort, she flashed by the goal ... and stopped short, finding herself in company with a majority of her feminine cla.s.smates in a blind alley. "_Now_ what?" they asked each other with sinking hearts. Judith looked over their heads with steady eyes which saw but one straight and narrow path in life, and pa.s.sed on by them into the hospital where she began her nurse's training. Sylvia began to teach music to a few children, to take on some of Reinhardt's work as he grew older. She practised a.s.siduously, advanced greatly in skill in music, read much, thought acutely, rebelliously and not deeply, helped Lawrence with his studies ... and watched the clock.

For there was no denying that the clock stood still. She was not going forward to any settled goal now, she was not going forward at all. She was as far from suspecting any ordered pattern in the facts of life as when she had been in college, surrounded by the conspiracy of silence about a pattern in facts which university professors so conscientiously keep up before their students. She was slowly revolving in an eddy. Sometimes she looked at the deep, glowing content of her father and mother with a fierce resentment. "How _can_ they!" she cried to herself. At other times she tried to chide herself for not being as contented herself, "... but it's their life they're living," she said moodily, "and I haven't any to live. I can't live on their happiness any more than the beefsteaks somebody else has eaten can keep me from starving to death."

The tradition of her life was that work and plenty of it would keep off all uneasiness, that it was a foolishness, not to say a downright crime, to feel uneasiness. So she practised many hours a day, and took a post-graduate course in early Latin. But the clock stood still.

One of the a.s.sistants in her father's department proposed to her.

She refused him automatically, with a wondering astonishment at his trembling hands and white lips. Decidedly the wheels of the clock would never begin to revolve.

And then it struck an hour, loudly. Aunt Victoria wrote inviting Sylvia to spend a few weeks with her during the summer at Lydford.

Sylvia read this letter aloud to her mother on the vine-covered porch where she had sat so many years before, and repeated "star-light, star-bright" until she had remembered Aunt Victoria. Mrs. Marshall watched her daughter's face as she read, and through the tones of the clear eager voice she heard the clock striking. It sounded to her remarkably like a tolling bell, but she gave no sign beyond a slight paling. She told herself instantly that the slowly ticking clock had counted her out several years of grace beyond what a mother may expect. When Sylvia finished and looked up, the dulled look of resignation swept from her face by the light of adventurous change, her mother achieved the final feat of nodding her head in prompt, cheerful a.s.sent.

But when Sylvia went away, light-hearted, fleeting forward to new scenes, there was in her mother's farewell kiss a solemnity which she could not hide. "Oh, Mother dear!" protested Sylvia, preferring as always to skim over the depths which her mother so dauntlessly plumbed. "Oh, Mother darling! How can you be so--when it's only for a few weeks!"

BOOK III

_IN CAPUA AT LAST_