ARNOLD CONTINUES TO DODGE THE RENAISSANCE
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 passage 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 grasses, rightly
arranged in clear glass, 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 Japanese 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 grasses, 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 snatched up with a delighted laugh the metaphor she had laid in
his hand. "Capital! Precisely! There's the thing in a nutshell. We
twentieth century Midases have got beyond the simple taste of that
founder of the family for the shining 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, pricking, 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 amusement 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 nobody 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-à-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 assent, "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 fiancé--oh, least of all to her fiancé--but heart
and soul and body to a devouring horde of dressmakers and tailors and
milliners and hairdressers and corsetières 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 wishing 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
hitting 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 class 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! Nobody 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-furnishing-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,
glass-roofed--something slightly Saracenic about the arches--and what
is now a suite of old-fashioned 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 attitude 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.
"_You!_ with a free hand! A second house of Jacques Coeur!" Sylvia
stood up, rather abruptly. "I think I'll go for a walk beside the
river," she said, reaching for her parasol.
"May I tag along?" said Page, strolling off beside her with the ease
of familiarity.
Sylvia turned to wave a careless farewell to the two thus left
somewhat unceremoniously in the pergola. She was in brown corduroy
with suede leather sailor collar and broad belt, a costume which
brought out vividly the pure, clear coloring of her face. "Good-bye,"
she called to them with a pointedly casual accent, nodding her
gleaming head.
"She's a _very_ pretty girl, isn't she?" commented Mrs.
Marshall-Smith. Morrison, looking after the retreating figures, agreed
with her briefly. "Yes, very. Extraordinarily perfect specimen of her
type." His tone was dry.
Mrs. Marshall-Smith looked with annoyance across the stretch of lawn
to the house. "I think I would better go to see where Arnold is," she
said. Her tone seemed to signify more to the man than her colorless
words. He frowned and said, "Oh, is Arnold ...?"
She gave a fatigued gesture. "No--not yet--but for the last two or
three days ..."
He began impatiently, "Why can't you get him off this time before he...."
"An excellent idea," she broke in, with some impatience of her own.
"But slightly difficult of execution."