SYLVIA MEETS WITH PITY
Under the scarlet glory of frost-touched maples, beside the river
strolled Sylvia, conscious of looking very well and being admired; but
contrary to the age-old belief about her sex and age, the sensation
of looking very well and being admired by no means filled the entire
field of her consciousness. In fact, the corner occupied by the
sensation was so small that occasional efforts on her part to escape
to it from the less agreeable contents of her mind were lamentable
failures. Aloud, in terms as felicitous as she could make them, she
was commenting on the beauty of the glass-smooth river, with the
sumptuously colored autumn trees casting down into it the imperial
gold and crimson of their reflections. Silently she was struggling to
master and dominate and suppress a confusion of contradictory mental
processes. At almost regular intervals, like a hollow stroke on a
brazen gong, her brain resounded to the reverberations of "The wedding
is on the twenty-first." And each time that she thrust that away,
there sprang up with a faint hissing note of doubt and suspicion, "Why
does Aunt Victoria want Arnold married?" A murmur, always drowned out
but incessantly recurring, ran: "What about Father and Mother?
What about their absurd, impossible, cruel, unreal, and
beautiful standards?" Contemptible little echoes from the silly
self-consciousness of the adolescence so recently left behind her ...
"I must think of something clever to say. I must try to seem different
and original and independent and yet must attract," mingled with an
occasional fine sincerity of appreciation and respect for the humanity
of the man beside her. Like a perfume borne in gusts came reaction to
the glorious color about her. Quickly recurring and quickly gone, a
sharp cymbal-clap of alarm ... "What shall I do if Austin Page now
... today ... or tomorrow ... tells me ...!" And grotesquely, the
companion cymbal on which this smote, gave forth an antiphonal alarm
of, "What shall I do if he does not!" While, unheard of her conscious
ear, but coloring everything with its fundamental note of sincerity,
rose solemnly from the depths of her heart the old cry of desperate
youth, "What am I to do with my life?"
No, the eminently successful brown corduroy, present though it was
to the mind of the handsome girl wearing it, was hardly the sure and
sufficient rock of refuge which tradition would have had it.
With an effort she turned her attention from this confused tumult in
her ears, and put out her hand, rather at random, for an introduction
to talk. "You spoke, back there in the pergola, of another kind of
beauty--I didn't know what you meant." He answered at once, with his
usual direct simplicity, which continued to have for Sylvia at
this period something suspiciously like the calmness of a reigning
sovereign who is above being embarrassed, who may speak, without
shamefacedness, of anything, even of moral values, that subject tabu
in sophisticated conversation. "Ah, just a notion of mine that perhaps
all this modern ferment of what's known as 'social conscience' or
'civic responsibility,' isn't a result of the sense of duty, but of
the old, old craving for beauty."
Sylvia looked at him, astonished. "Beauty?"
"Why yes, beauty isn't only a matter of line and color, is it? There's
the desire for harmony, for true proportions, for grace and suavity,
for nobility of movement. Perhaps the lack of those qualities is felt
in human lives as much as on canvases ... at least perhaps it may be
felt in the future."
"It's an interesting idea," murmured Sylvia, "but I don't quite see
what it means, concretely, as applied to our actual America."
He meditated, looking, as was his habit when walking, up at the trees
above them. "Well, let's see. I think I mean that perhaps our race,
not especially inspired in its instinct for color and external form,
may possibly be fumbling toward an art of living. Why wouldn't it be
an art to keep your life in drawing as well as a mural decoration?" He
broke off to say, laughing, "I bet you the technique would be quite
as difficult to acquire," and went on again, thoughtfully: "In this
modern maze of terrible closeness of inter-relation, to achieve a life
that's happy and useful and causes no undeserved suffering to
the untold numbers of other lives which touch it--isn't there an
undertaking which needs the passion for harmony and proportion? Isn't
there a beauty as a possible ideal of aspiration for a race that
probably never could achieve a Florentine or Japanese beauty of line?"
He cast this out casually, as an idea which had by chance been brought
up to the top by the current of the talk, and showed no indication to
pursue it further when Sylvia only nodded her head. It was one of the
moments when she heard nothing but the brazen clangor of "the wedding
is on the twenty-first," and until the savage constriction around her
heart had relaxed she had not breath to speak. But that passed again,
and the two sauntered onward, in the peaceable silence which was one
of the great new pleasures which Page was able to give her. It now
seemed like a part of the mellow ripeness of the day.
They had come to a bend in the slowly flowing river, where, instead
of torch-bright maples and poplars, rank upon rank of somber pines
marched away to the summit of a steeply ascending foothill. The river
was clouded dark with their melancholy reflections. On their edge,
overhanging the water, stood a single sumac, a standard-bearer with a
thousand little down-drooping flags of crimson.
"Oh," said Sylvia, smitten with admiration. She sat down on a rock
partly because she wanted to admire at her leisure, partly because she
was the kind of a girl who looks well sitting on a rock; and as she
was aware of this latter motive, she felt a qualm of self-scorn. What
a cheap vein of commonness was revealed in her--in every one--by the
temptation of a great fortune! Morrison had succumbed entirely. She
was nowadays continually detecting in herself motives which made her
sick.
Page stretched his great length on the dry leaves at her feet. Any
other man would have rolled a cigarette. It was one of his oddities
that he never smoked. Sylvia looked down at his thoughtful, clean face
and reflected wonderingly that he seemed the only person not warped
by money. Was it because he had it, or was it because he was a very
unusual person?
He was looking partly at the river, at the pines, at the flaming tree,
and partly at the human embodiment of the richness and color of autumn
before him. After a time Sylvia said: "There's Cassandra. She's the
only one who knows of the impending doom. She's trying to warn the
pines." It had taken her some moments to think of this.
Page accepted it with no sign that he considered it anything
remarkable, with the habit of a man for whom people produced their
best: "She's using some very fine language for her warning, but like
some other fine language it's a trifle misapplied. She forgets that
no doom hangs over the pines. _She's_ the fated one. They're safe
enough."
Sylvia clasped her hands about her knees and looked across the dark
water at the somber trees. "And yet they don't seem to be very
cheerful about it." It was her opinion that they were talking very
cleverly.
"Perhaps," suggested Page, rolling over to face the river--"perhaps
she's not prophesying doom at all, but blowing a trumpet-peal of
exultation over her own good fortune. The pines may be black with envy
of her."
Sylvia enjoyed this rather macabre fancy with all the zest of
healthful youth, secure in the conviction of its own immortality.
"Yes, yes, life's ever so much harder than death."
Page dissented with a grave irony from the romantic exaggeration
of this generalization. "I don't suppose the statistics as to the
relative difficulty of life and death are really very reliable."
Sylvia perceived that she was being, ever so delicately, laughed at,
and tried to turn her remark so that she could carry it off. "Oh, I
don't mean for those who die, but those who are left know something
about it, I imagine. My mother always said that the encounter with
death is the great turning-point in the lives of those who live on.
She said you might miss everything else irrevocable and vital--falling
in love, having children, accomplishing anything--but that sooner or
later you have to reckon with losing somebody dear to you." She spoke
with an academic interest in the question.
"I should think," meditated Page, taking the matter into serious
consideration, "that the vitalness of even that experience would
depend somewhat on the character undergoing it. I've known some
temperaments of a proved frivolity which seemed to have passed through
it without any great modifications. But then I know nothing about it
personally. I lost my father before I could remember him, and since
then I haven't happened to have any close encounter with such loss. My
mother, you know, is very much alive."
"Well, I haven't any personal experience with death in my immediate
circle either," said Sylvia. "But I wasn't brought up with the usual
cult of the awfulness of it. Father was always anxious that we
children should feel it something as natural as breathing--you are
dipped up from the great river of consciousness, and death only pours
you back. If you've been worth living, there are more elements of
fineness in humanity."
Page nodded. "Yes, that's what they all say nowadays. Personal
immortality is as out of fashion as big sleeves."
"Do you believe it?" asked Sylvia, seeing the talk take an intimate
turn, "or are you like me, and don't know at all what you do believe?"
If she had under this pseudo-philosophical question a veiled purpose
analogous to that of the less subtle charmer whose avowed expedient
is to get "a man to talk about himself" the manoeuver was eminently
successful.
"I've never had the least chance to think about it," he said, sitting
up, "because I've always been so damnably beset by the facts of
living. I know I am not the first of my race to feel convinced that
his own problems are the most complicated, but ..."
"_Yours!_" cried Sylvia, genuinely astonished.
"And one of the hardships of my position," he told her at once with
a playful bitterness, "is that everybody refuses to believe in the
seriousness of it. Because my father, after making a great many bad
guesses as to the possible value of mining stock in Nevada, happened
to make a series of good guesses about the value of mining stock in
Colorado, it is assumed that all questions are settled for me, that I
can joyously cultivate my garden, securely intrenched in the certainty
that this is the best possible of all possible worlds,"
"Oh yes--labor unions--socialism--I.W.W.," Sylvia murmured vaguely,
unable, in spite of her intelligence, to refrain from marking, by a
subsidence of interest, her instinctive feeling that those distant
questions could not in the nature of things be compared to present,
personal complications.
"No--no--!" he protested. "That's no go! I've tried for five years now
to shove it out of sight on some one of those shelves. I've learned
all the arguments on both sides. I can discuss on both sides of those
names as glibly as any other modern quibbler. I can prove the rights
of all those labels or I can prove the wrongs of them, according to
the way my dinner is digesting. What stays right there, what I never
can digest (if you'll pardon an inelegant simile that's just occurred
to me), a lump I never can either swallow entirely down or get up
out of my throat, is the fact that there are men, hundreds of men,
thousands of men, working with picks underground all day, every day,
all their lives, and that part of their labor goes to provide me with
the wherewithal to cultivate my taste, to pose as a patron of the
arts, to endow promising pianists--to go through all the motions
suitable to that position to which it has pleased Providence to call
me. It sticks in my crop that my only connection with the entire
business was to give myself the trouble to be born my father's son."
"But you _do_ work!" protested Sylvia. "You work on your farm here.
You run all sorts of lumbering operations in this region. The first
time I saw you, you certainly looked less like the traditional idea of
a predatory coal-operator." She laughed at the recollection.
"Oh yes, I work. When my undigested lump gets too painful I try to
work it off--but what I do bears the same relation to real sure-enough
work that playing tennis does to laying brick. But such as it is, it's
real satisfaction I get out of my minute Vermont holdings. They come
down to me from my farmer great-grandfather who held the land by
working it himself. There's no sore spot there. But speak of Colorado
or coal--and you see me jump with the same shooting twinge you feel
when the dentist's probe reaches a nerve. An intelligent conscience
is a luxury a man in my position can't afford to have." He began with
great accuracy to toss small stones at a log showing above the surface
of the water.
Sylvia, reverting to a chance remark, now said: "I never happened to
hear you speak of your mother before. Does she ever come to Lydford?"
He shook his head. "No, she vibrates between the Madison Avenue house
and the Newport one. She's very happy in those two places. She's Mr.
Sommerville's sister, you know. She's one of Morrison's devotees too.
She collects under his guidance."
"Collects?" asked Sylvia, a little vaguely.
"Oh, it doesn't matter much what--the instinct, the resultant
satisfaction are the same. As a child, it's stamps, or buttons,
or corks, later on--As a matter of fact, it's lace that my mother
collects. She specializes in Venetian lace--the older the better, of
course. The connection with coal-mines is obvious. But after all, her
own fortune, coming mostly from the Sommerville side, is derived from
oil. The difference is great!"
"Do you live with her?" asked Sylvia.
"My washing is said to be done in New York," he said seriously. "I
believe that settles the question of residence for a man."
"Oh, how quaint!" said Sylvia, laughing. Then with her trained
instinct for contriving a creditable exit before being driven to an
enforced one by flagging of masculine interest, she rose and looked at
her watch.
"Oh, don't go!" he implored her. "It's so beautiful here--we never
were so--who knows when we'll ever again be in so ..."
Sylvia divined with one of her cymbal-claps that he had meant,
perhaps, that very afternoon to--She felt a dissonant clashing of
triumph and misgiving. She thought she decided quite coolly, quite
dryly, that pursuit always lent luster to the object pursued; but in
reality she did not at all recognize the instinct which bade her say,
turning her watch around on her wrist: "It's quite late. I don't think
I'd better stay longer. Aunt Victoria likes dinner promptly." She
turned to go.
He took his small defeat with his usual imperturbable good nature, in
which Sylvia not infrequently thought she detected a flavor of the
unconscious self-assurance of the very rich and much-courted man.
He scrambled to his feet now promptly, and fell into step with her
quick-treading advance. "You're right, of course. There's no need to
be grasping. There's tomorrow--and the day after--and the day after
that--and if it rains we can wear rubbers and carry umbrellas."
"Oh, I don't carry an umbrella for a walk in the rain," she told him.
"It's one of our queer Marshall ways. We only own one umbrella for the
whole family at home, and that's to lend. I wear a rubber coat and put
on a sou'wester and _let_ it rain."
"You would!" he said in an unconscious imitation of Arnold's accent.
She laughed up at him. "Shall I confess why I do? Because my hair is
naturally curly."
"Confession has to be prompter than that to save souls," he answered.
"I knew it was, five weeks ago, when you splashed the water up on it
so recklessly there by the brook."
She was astonished by this revelation of depths behind that
well-remembered clear gaze of admiration, and dismayed by such
unnatural accuracy of observation.
"How cynical of you to make such a mental comment!"
He apologized. "It was automatic--unconscious. I've had a good deal of
opportunity to observe young ladies." And then, as though aware that
the ice was thin over an unpleasant subject, he shifted the talk.
"Upon my word, I wonder how Molly and Morrison _will_ manage?"
"Oh, Molly's wonderful. She'd manage anything," said Sylvia with
conviction.
"Morrison is rather wonderful himself," advanced Page. "And that's a
magnanimous concession for me to make when I'm now so deep in his
bad books. Do you know, by the way," he asked, looking with a quick
interrogation at the girl, "_why_ I'm so out of favor with him?"
Sylvia's eyes opened wide. She gazed at him, startled, fascinated.
Could "it" be coming so suddenly, in this casual, abrupt manner? "No,
I don't know," she managed to say; and braced herself.
"I don't blame him in the least. It was very vexing. I went back on
him--so to speak; dissolved an aesthetic partnership, in which he
furnished the brains, and my coal-mines the sinews of art. _I_ was one
of his devotees, you know. For some years after I got out of college I
collected under his guidance, as my mother does, as so many people do.
I even specialized. I don't like to boast, but I dare affirm that no
man knows more than I about sixteenth century mezza-majolica. It is
a branch of human knowledge which you must admit is singularly
appropriate for a dweller in the twentieth century. And of great value
to the world. My collection was one of Morrison's triumphs."
Sylvia felt foolish and discomfited. With an effort she showed a
proper interest in his remarks. "Was?" she asked. "What happened to
it?"
"I went back on it. In one of the first of those fits of moral
indigestion. One day, I'd been reading a report in one of the
newspapers on the status of the coal-miner, and the connection between
my bright-colored pots and platters, and my father's lucky guess,
became a little too dramatic for my taste. I gave the collection to
the Metropolitan, and I've never bought a piece since. Morrison was
immensely put out. He'd been to great trouble to find some fine
Fontana specimens for me. And then not to have me look at them--He
was right too. It was a silly, pettish thing to do. I didn't know any
better then. I don't know any better now."
It began to dawn on Sylvia that, under his air of whimsical
self-mockery he was talking to her seriously. She tried to adjust
herself to this, to be sympathetic, earnest; though she was still
smarting with the sense of having appeared to herself as undignified
and ridiculous.
"And besides that," he went on, looking away, down the dusty highroad
they were then crossing on their way back to the house--"besides that,
I went back on a great scheme of Morrison's for a National Academy of
Aesthetic Instruction, which I was to finance and he to organize. He
had gone into all the details. He had shown wonderful capacity. It's
really very magnanimous of him not to bear me more of a grudge. He
thought that giving it up was one of my half-baked ideas. And it was.
As far as anything I've accomplished since, I might as well have been
furthering the appreciation of Etruscan vases in the Middle West. But
then, I don't think he'll miss it now. If he still has a fancy for it,
he can do it with Molly's money. She has plenty. But I don't believe
he will. It has occurred to me lately (it's an idea that's been
growing on me about everybody) that Morrison, like most of us, has
been miscast. He doesn't really care a continental about the aesthetic
salvation of the country. It's only the contagion of the American
craze for connecting everything with social betterment, tagging
everything with that label, that ever made him think he did. He's far
too thoroughgoing an aesthete himself. What he was brought into
the world for, was to appreciate, as nobody else can, all sorts of
esoterically fine things. Now that he'll be able to gratify that
taste, he'll find his occupation in it. Why shouldn't he? It'd be a
hideously leveled world if everybody was, trying to be a reformer.
Besides, who'd be left to reform? I love to contemplate a genuine,
whole-souled appreciator like Morrison, without any qualms about the
way society is put together. And I envy him! I envy him as blackly as
your pines envied the sumac. He's got out of the wrong rôle into the
right one. I wish to the Lord I could!"
They were close to the house now, in the avenue of poplars, yellow as
gold above them in the quick-falling autumn twilight. Sylvia spoke
with a quick, spirited sincerity, her momentary pique forgotten, her
feeling rushing out generously to meet the man's simple openness. "Oh,
that's the problem for all of us! To know what rôle to play! If you
think it hard for you who have only to choose--how about the rest of
us who must--?" She broke off. "What's that? What's that?"
She had almost stumbled over a man's body, lying prone, half in the
driveway, half on the close-clipped grass on the side; a well-dressed
man, tall, thin, his limbs sprawled about broken-jointedly. He lay on
his back, his face glimmering white in the clear, dim dusk. Sylvia
recognized him with a cry. "Oh, it's Arnold! He's been struck by a
car! He's dead!"
She sprang forward, and stopped short, at gaze, frozen.
The man sat up, propping himself on his hands and looked at her, a
wavering smile on his lips. He began to speak, a thick, unmodulated
voice, as though his throat were stiff. "Comingtomeetyou," he
articulated very rapidly and quite unintelligibly, "an 'countered hill
in driveway ... no hill _in_ driveway, and climbed and climbed"--he
lost himself in repetition and brought up short to begin again,
"--labor so 'cessive had to rest--"
Sylvia turned a paper-white face on her companion. "What's the matter
with him?" she tried to say, but Page only saw her lips move. He made
no answer. That she would know in an instant what was the matter
flickered from her eyes, from her trembling white lips; that she did
know, even as she spoke, was apparent from the scorn and indignation
which like sheet-lightning leaped out on him. "Arnold! For _shame_!
Arnold! Think of Judith!"
At the name he frowned vaguely as though it suggested something
extremely distressing to him, though he evidently did not recognize
it. "Judish? Judish?" he repeated, drawing his brows together and
making a grimace of great pain. "What's Judish?"
And then, quite suddenly the pain and distress were wiped from his
face by sodden vacuity. He had hitched himself to one of the poplars,
and now leaned against this, his head bent on his shoulder at the
sickening angle of a man hanged, his eyes glassy, his mouth open,
a trickle of saliva flowing from one corner. He breathed hard and
loudly. There was nothing there but a lump of uncomely flesh.
Sylvia shrank back from the sight with such disgust that she felt her
flesh creep. She turned a hard, angry face on Page. "Oh, the beast!
The beast!" she cried, under her breath. She felt defiled. She hated
Arnold. She hated life.
Page said quietly: "You'll excuse my not going with you to the house?
I'll have my car and chauffeur here in a moment." He stepped away
quickly and Sylvia turned to flee into the house.
But something halted her flying feet. She hesitated, stopped, and
pressed her hands together hard. He could not be left alone there in
the driveway. A car might run over him in the dusk. She turned back.
She stood there, alone with the horror under the tree. She turned her
back on it, but she could see nothing but the abject, strengthless
body, the dreadful ignominy of the face. They filled the world.
And then quickly--everything came quickly to Sylvia--there stood
before her the little boy who had come to see them in La Chance so
long ago, the little honest-eyed boy who had so loved her mother and
Judith, who had loved Pauline the maid and suffered with her pain; and
then the bigger boy who out of his weakness had begged for a share
of her mother's strength and been refused; and then the man, still
honest-eyed, who, aimless, wavering, had cried out to her in misery
upon the emptiness of his life; and who later had wept those pure
tears of joy that he had found love. She had a moment of insight, of
vision, of terrible understanding. She did not know what was taking
place within her, something racking--spasmodic throes of sudden
growth, the emergence for the first time in all her life of the
capacity for pity ...
When, only a moment or two later, Page's car came swiftly down the
driveway, and he sprang out, he found Sylvia sitting by the drunkard,
the quiet tears streaming down her face. She had wiped his mouth with
her handkerchief, she held his limp hand in hers, his foolish staring
face was hidden on her shoulder....
The two men lifted him bodily, an ignoble, sagging weight, into the
car. She stood beside him and, without a word, stooped and gently
disposed his slackly hanging arms beside him.
Dark had quite fallen by this time. They were all silent, shadowy
forms. She felt that Page was at her side. He leaned to her. Her hand
was taken and kissed.