ANOTHER BRAND OF MODERN TALK
"Where's Judith?" said Arnold for sole greeting, as he saw Morrison at
the piano and Sylvia sitting near it, cool and clear in a lacy white
dress. Morrison lifted long fingers from the keys and said gravely,
"She came through a moment ago, saying, '_Where's_ Arnold?' and went
out through that door." His fingers dropped and Chopin's voice once
more rose plaintively.
The sound of Arnold's precipitate rush across the room and out of the
door was followed by a tinkle of laughter from Sylvia. Morrison looked
around at her over his shoulder, with a flashing smile of mutual
understanding, but he finished the prelude before he spoke. Then,
without turning around, as he pulled out another sheet from the music
heaped on the piano, he remarked: "If that French philosopher was
right when he said no disease is as contagious as love-making, we may
expect soon to find the very chairs and tables in this house clasped
in each other's arms. Old as I am, I feel it going to my head, like a
bed of full-blooming valerian."
Sylvia made no answer. She felt herself flushing, and could not trust
her voice to be casual. He continued for a moment to thumb over the
music aimlessly, as though waiting for her to speak.
The beautiful room, darkened against the midsummer heat, shimmered
dimly in a transparent half-light, the vivid life of its bright
chintz, its occasional brass, its clean, daring spots of crimson and
purple flowers, subdued into a fabulous, half-seen richness. There was
not a sound. The splendid heat of the early August afternoon flamed,
and paused, and held its breath.
Into this silence, like a bird murmuring a drowsy note over a still
pool, there floated the beginning of _Am Meer_. Sylvia sat, passive
to her finger-tips, a vase filled to the brim with melody. She stared
with unseeing eyes at the back of the man at the piano. She was not
thinking of him, she was not aware that she was conscious of him at
all; but hours afterward wherever she looked, she saw for an instant
again in miniature the slender, vigorous, swaying figure; the thick
brown hair, streaked with white and curling slightly at the ends; the
brooding head....
When the last note was still, the man stood up and moved away from the
piano. He dropped into an arm-chair near Sylvia, and leaning his
fine, ugly head back against the brilliant chintz, he looked at her
meditatively. His great bodily suavity gave his every action a curious
significance and grace. Sylvia, still under the spell of his singing,
did not stir, returning his look out of wide, dreaming eyes.
When he spoke, his voice blended with the silence almost as
harmoniously as the music.... "Do you know what I wish you would
do, Miss Sylvia Marshall? I wish you would tell me something about
yourself. Now that I'm no longer forbidden to look at you, or think
about you...."
"Forbidden?" asked Sylvia, very much astonished.
"There!" he said, wilfully mistaking her meaning, and smiling faintly,
"I am such an old gentleman that I'm perfectly negligible to a young
lady. She doesn't even notice or not whether I look at her, and think
about her."
A few years before this Sylvia would have burst out impetuously, "Oh
yes, I have! I've wondered awfully what made you so indifferent," but
now she kept this reflection to herself and merely said, "What in the
world did you fancy was 'forbidding' you?"
"Honor!" said Morrison, with a note of mock solemnity. "_Honor!_
Victoria was so evidently snatching at you as a last hope for Arnold.
She gave me to understand that everybody else but Arnold was to be
strictly non-existent. But now that Arnold has found a character
beautifully and archaically simple to match his own primitive needs, I
don't see why I shouldn't enjoy a little civilized talk with you. In
any case, it was absurd to think of _you_ for Arnold. It merely shows
how driven poor Victoria was!"
Sylvia tried to speak lightly, although she was penetrated with
pleasure at this explanation of his holding aloof. "Oh, _I_ like
Arnold very much. I always have. There's something ... something sort
of _touching_ about Arnold, don't you think? Though I must say that
I've heard enough about the difference between training quail dogs
and partridge dogs to last me the rest of my life. But that's rather
touching too, his not knowing what to do with himself but fiddle
around with his guns and tennis-racquets. They're all he has to keep
him from being bored to death, and they don't go nearly far enough.
Some day he will just drop dead from ennui, poor Arnold! Wouldn't he
have enjoyed being a civil engineer, and laying out railroads in wild
country! He'd have been a good one too! The same amount of energy
he puts into his polo playing would make him fight his way through
darkest Thibet." She meditated over this hypothesis for a moment and
then added with a nod of her head, "Oh yes, I like Arnold ever so much
... one kind of 'liking.'"
"Of course you like him," assented the older man, who had been
watching her as she talked, and whose manner now, as he took up the
word himself, resembled that of an exquisitely adroit angler, casting
out the lightest, the most feathery, the most perfectly controlled of
dry-flies. "You're too intelligent not to like everybody who's not
base--and Arnold's not base. And he 'likes' you. If you had cared to
waste one of your red-brown tresses on him, you could have drawn him
by a single hair. But then, everybody 'likes' you."
"Old Mr. Sommerville doesn't!" said Sylvia, on an impulse.
Morrison looked at her admiringly, and put the tips of his fingers
together with exquisite precision. "So you add second sight to your
other accomplishments! How in the world could a girl of your age have
the experience and intuition to feel that? Old Sommerville passes for
a great admirer of yours. You won't, I hope, go so uncannily far in
your omniscience as to pretend to know _why_ he doesn't like you?"
"No, I won't," said Sylvia, "because I haven't the very faintest idea.
Have you?"
"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 worships 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 astonishing 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 Arlésienne Minuet. He doesn't approve of
Bizet very much, anyhow. He's a tremendous classicist."
"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 scraps of things
learned from them. I know a little Swedish from Miss Lindström. 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 blustering, 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-hoarded 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 associate 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 associated 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-fashioned 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 _arrière-pensée_ 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 associate 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-class
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 buttons and junk. And
I said (I knew perfectly well he was hitting 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 hitting 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 siècle?_" 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 siècle!_" 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 astonishing capacity to analyze 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 analysis. As soon as we were old enough to think at
all, he was always practising us on analysis--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 classes--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....