MUCH ADO ...
The rest of October was a period never clear in Sylvia's head.
Everything that happened was confusing and almost everything was
painful; and a great deal happened. She had thought at the time that
nothing would ever blur in her mind the shock of finding Aunt Victoria
opposed to what seemed to her the first obvious necessity: writing
to Judith about Arnold. She had been trying for a long time now with
desperate sincerity to take the world as she found it, to see
people as they were with no fanatic intolerance, to realize her own
inexperience of life, to be broad, to take in without too much of a
wrench another point of view; but to Aunt Victoria's idea, held quite
simply and naturally by that lady, that Judith be kept in ignorance
of Arnold's habits until after marriage, Sylvia's mind closed as
automatically, as hermetically as an oyster-shell snaps shut. She
could not discuss it, she could not even attend with hearing ears to
Mrs. Marshall-Smith's very reasonable presentation of her case; the
long tradition as to the justifiability of such ignorance on a bride's
part; the impossibility that any woman should ever know all of any
man's character before marriage; the strong presumption that marriage
with a woman he adored would cure habits contracted only through
the inevitable aimlessness of too much wealth; the fact that, once
married, a woman like Judith would accept, and for the most part deal
competently with, facts which would frighten her in her raw girlish
state of ignorance and crudeness. Sylvia did not even hear these
arguments and many more like them, dignified with the sanction of
generations of women trying their best to deal with life. She had
never thought of the question before. It was the sort of thing from
which she had always averted her moral eyes with extreme distaste; but
now that it was forced on her, her reaction to it was instantaneous.
From the depths of her there rose up fresh in its original vigor,
never having been dulled by a single enforced compliance with a
convention running counter to a principle, the most irresistible
instinct against concealment. She did not argue; she could not. She
could only say with a breathless certainty against which there was no
holding out: "Judith must know! Judith must know!"
Mrs. Marshall-Smith, alarmed by the prospect of a passage-at-arms,
decreed quietly that they should both sleep on the question and take
it up the next morning. Sylvia had not slept. She had lain in her
bed, wide-eyed; a series of pictures passing before her eyes with the
unnatural vividness of hallucinations. These pictures were not only of
Arnold, of Arnold again, of Arnold and Judith. There were all sorts of
odd bits of memories--a conversation overheard years before, between
her father and Lawrence, when Lawrence was a little, little boy. He
had asked--it was like Lawrence's eerie ways--apropos of nothing at
all, "What sort of a man was Aunt Victoria's husband?"
His father had said, "A rich man, very rich." This prompt appearance
of readiness to answer had silenced the child for a moment: and then
(Sylvia could see his thin little hands patting down the sand-cake he
was making) he had persisted, "What kind of a rich man?" His father
had said, "Well, he was bald--quite bald--Lawrence, come run a race
with me to the woodshed." Sylvia now, ten years later, wondered why
her father had evaded. What kind of a man _had_ Arnold's father been?
But chiefly she braced herself for the struggle with Aunt Victoria in
the morning. It came to her in fleeting glimpses that Aunt Victoria
would be only human if she resented with some heat this entire
disregard of her wishes; that the discussion might very well end in
a quarrel, and that a quarrel would mean the end of Lydford with all
that Lydford meant now and potentially. But this perception was
swept out of sight, like everything else, in the singleness of her
conviction: "Judith must know! Judith must know!"
There was, however, no struggle with Aunt Victoria in the morning.
Mrs. Marshall-Smith, encountering the same passionate outcry,
recognized an irresistible force when she encountered it; recognized
it, in fact, soon enough to avoid the long-drawn-out acrimony of
discussion into which a less intelligent woman would inevitably have
plunged; recognized it almost, but not quite, in time to shut off from
Sylvia's later meditations certain startling vistas down which she
had now only fleeting glimpses. "Very well, my dear," said Mrs.
Marshall-Smith, her cherished clarity always unclouded by small
resentments,--"very well, we will trust in your judgment rather than
my own. I don't pretend to understand present-day girls, though I
manage to be very fond of one of them. Judith is your sister. You will
do, of course, what you think is right. It means, of course, Judith
being what she is, that she will instantly cast him off; and Arnold
being what he is, that means that he will drink himself into delirium
tremens in six months. His father ..." She stopped short, closing with
some haste the door to a vista, and poured herself another cup of
coffee. They were having breakfast in her room, both in négligée
and lacy caps, two singularly handsome representatives of differing
generations. Mrs. Marshall-Smith looked calm, Sylvia extremely
agitated. She had been awake at the early hour of deadly pale dawn
when a swift, long-barreled car had drawn up under the porte-cochère
and Arnold had been taken away under the guard of a short, broad,
brawny man with disproportionately long arms. She was not able to
swallow a mouthful of breakfast.
During the night, she had not looked an inch beyond her blind passion
of insistence. Now that Aunt Victoria yielded with so disconcerting
a suddenness, she faced with a pang what lay beyond. "Oh, Judith
wouldn't cast him off! She loves him so! She'll give him a chance. You
don't know Judith. She doesn't care about many things, but she gives
herself up absolutely to those that do matter to her. She adores
Arnold! It fairly frightened me to see how she was burning up when
he was near. She'll insist on his reforming, of course--she ought
to--but--"
"Suppose he doesn't reform to suit her," suggested Mrs.
Marshall-Smith, stirring her coffee. "He's been reformed at intervals
ever since he was fifteen. He never could stay through a whole term
in any decent boys' school." Here was a vista, ruthlessly opened.
Sylvia's eyes looked down it and shuddered. "Poor Arnold!" she said
under her breath, pushing away her untasted cup.
"I'm dull enough to find you take an odd way to show your sympathy for
him," murmured Mrs. Marshall-Smith, with none of the acidity the words
themselves seemed to indicate. She seemed indeed genuinely perplexed.
"It's not been exactly a hilarious element in _my_ life either. But
I've always tried to hold on to Arnold. I thought it my duty. And now,
since Felix Morrison has found this excellent specialist for me, it's
much easier. I telegraph to him and he comes at once and takes Arnold
back to his sanitarium, till he's himself again." For the first time
in weeks Morrison's name brought up between them no insistently
present, persistently ignored shadow. The deeper shadow now blotted
him out.
"But Aunt Victoria, it's for Judith to decide. _She_'ll do the right
thing."
"Sometimes people are thrown by circumstances into a situation where
they wouldn't have dreamed of putting themselves--and yet they rise to
it and conquer it," philosophized Aunt Victoria. "Life takes hold of
us with strong hands and makes us greater than we thought. Judith will
_mean_ to do the right thing. If she were married, she'd _have_ to do
it! It seems to me a great responsibility you take, Sylvia--you may,
with the best of intentions in the world, be ruining the happiness of
two lives."
Sylvia got up, her eyes red with unshed tears. It was not the first
time that morning. "It's all too horrible," she murmured. "But I
haven't any right to conceal it from Judith."
Her eyes were still red when, an hour later, she stepped into the room
again and said, "I've mailed it."
Her aunt, still in lavender silk négligée, so far progressed towards
the day's toilet as to have her hair carefully dressed, looked up
from the _Revue Bleue_, and nodded. Her expression was one of quiet
self-possession.
Sylvia came closer to her and sat down on a straight-backed chair. She
was dressed for the street, and hatted, as though she herself had
gone out to mail the letter. "And now, Tantine," she said, with the
resolute air of one broaching a difficult subject, "I think I ought to
be planning to go home very soon." It was a momentous speech, and a
momentous pause followed it. It had occurred to Sylvia, still shaken
with the struggle over the question of secrecy, that she could,
in decency, only offer to take herself away, after so violently
antagonizing her hostess. She realized with what crude intolerance she
had attacked the other woman's position, how absolutely with claw and
talon she had demolished it. She smarted with the sense that she
had seemed oblivious of an "obligation." She detested the sense of
obligation. And having become aware of a debt due her dignity, she had
paid it hastily, on the impulse of the moment. But as the words still
echoed in the air, she was struck to see how absolutely her immediate
future, all her future, perhaps, depended on the outcome of that
conversation she herself had begun. She looked fixedly at her aunt,
trying to prepare herself for anything. But she was not prepared for
what Mrs. Marshall-Smith did.
She swept the magazine from her lap to the floor and held out her arms
to Sylvia. "I had hoped--I had hoped you were happy--with me," she
said, and in her voice was that change of quality, that tremor of
sincerity which Sylvia had always found profoundly moving. The girl
was overcome with astonishment and remorse--and immense relief. She
ran to her. "Oh, I am! I am! I was only thinking--I've gone against
your judgment." Her nerves, stretched with the sleepless night and the
strain of writing the dreadful letter to Judith, gave way. She broke
into sobs. She put her arms tightly around her aunt's beautiful neck
and laid her head on her shoulder, weeping, her heart swelling, her
mind in a whirling mass of disconnected impressions. Arnold--Judith
... how strange it was that Aunt Victoria really cared for her--did
she really care for Aunt Victoria or only admire her?--did she really
care for anybody, since she was agreeing to stay longer away from
her father and mother?--how good it would be not to have to give up
Hélène's services--what a heartless, materialistic girl she was--she
cared for nothing but luxury and money--she would be going abroad now
to Paris--Austin Page--he had kissed her hand ... and yet she felt
that he saw through her, saw through her mean little devices and
stratagems--how astonishing that he should be so very, very rich--it
seemed that a very, very rich man ought to be different from other
men--his powers were so unnaturally great--girls could not feel
naturally about him ... And all the while that these varying
reflections passed at lightning speed through her mind, her nervous
sobs were continuing.
Aunt Victoria taking them, naturally enough, as signs of continued
remorse, lifted her out of this supposed slough of despond with
affectionate peremptoriness. "Don't feel so badly about it, darling.
We won't have any more talk for the present about differing judgments,
or of going away, or of anything uncomfortable"; and in this way,
with nothing clearly understood, on a foundation indeed of
misunderstanding, the decision was made, in the haphazard fashion
which characterizes most human decisions.
The rest of the month was no more consecutive or logical. Into the
midst of the going-away confusion of a household about to remove
itself half around the world, into a house distracted with packing,
cheerless with linen-covers, desolate with rolled-up rugs and cold
lunches and half-packed trunks, came, in a matter-of-fact manner
characteristic of its writer, Judith's answer to Sylvia's letter.
Sylvia opened it, shrinking and fearful of what she would read. She
had, in the days since hers had been sent, imagined Judith's answer in
every possible form; but never in any form remotely resembling what
Judith wrote. The letter stated in Judith's concise style that of
course she agreed with Sylvia that there should be no secrets between
betrothed lovers, nor, in this case, were there any. Arnold had told
her, the evening before she left Lydford, that he had inherited an
alcoholic tendency from his father. She had been in communication
with a great specialist in Wisconsin about the case. She knew of the
sanitarium to which Arnold had been taken and did not like it. The
medical treatment there was not serious. She hoped soon to have
him transferred to the care of Dr. Rivedal. If Arnold's general
constitution were still sound, there was every probability of a cure.
Doctors knew so much more about that sort of thing than they used
to. Had Sylvia heard that Madame La Rue was not a bit well, that old
trouble with her heart, only worse? They'd been obliged to hire a
maid--how in the world were the La Rues going to exist on American
cooking? Cousin Parnelia said she could cure Madame with some
Sanopractic nonsense, a new fad that Cousin Parnelia had taken up
lately. Professor Kennedy had been elected vice-president of the
American Mathematical Association, and it was funny to see him try to
pretend that he wasn't pleased. Mother's garden this autumn was ...
"_Well_!" ejaculated Sylvia, stopping short. Mrs. Marshall-Smith had
stopped to listen in the midst of the exhausting toil of telling
Hélène which dresses to pack and which to leave hanging in the Lydford
house. She now resumed her labors unflaggingly, waving away to
the closet a mauve satin, and beckoning into a trunk a favorite
black-and-white chiffon. To Sylvia she said, "Now I know exactly how a
balloon feels when it is pricked."
Sylvia agreed ruefully. "I might have known Judith would manage to
make me feel flat if I got wrought up about it. She hates a fuss made
over anything, and she can always take you down if you make one."
She remembered with a singular feeling of discomfiture the throbbing
phrases of her letter, written under the high pressure of the quarrel
with Aunt Victoria. She could almost see the expression of austere
distaste in the stern young beauty of Judith's face. Judith was always
making her appear foolish!
"We were both of us," commented Mrs. Marshall-Smith dryly, "somewhat
mistaken about the degree of seriousness with which Judith would take
the information."
Sylvia forgot her vexation and sprang loyally to Judith's defense.
"Why, of course she takes it like a trained nurse, like a
doctor--feels it a purely medical affair--as I suppose it is. We might
have known she'd feel that way. But as to how she really feels inside,
personally, you can't tell anything by her letter! You probably
couldn't tell anything by her manner if she were here. You never can.
She may be simply wild about a thing inside, but you'd never guess."
Mrs. Marshall-Smith ventured to express some skepticism as to the
existence of volcanic feelings always so sedulously concealed. "After
all, can you be so very sure that she is ever 'simply wild' if she
never shows anything?"
"Oh, you're _sure_, all right, if you've lived with her--you feel it.
And then, after about so long a time of keeping it down, she breaks
loose and _does_ something awful, that I'd never have the nerve to do,
and tears into flinders anything she doesn't think is right. Why, when
we were little girls and went to the public schools together, two of
our little playmates, who turned out to have a little negro blood,
we ..." Sylvia stopped, suddenly warned by some instinct that Aunt
Victoria would not be a sympathetic listener to that unforgotten
episode of her childhood, that episode which had seemed to have no
consequences, no sequel, but which ever since that day had insensibly
affected the course of her growth, like a great rock fallen into the
Current of her life.
Mrs. Marshall-Smith, deliberating with bated breath between broadcloth
and blue panama, did not notice the pause. She did, however, add a
final comment on the matter, some moments later, when she observed,
"How any girl in her senses can go on studying, when she's engaged to
a man who needs her as much as Arnold needs Judith!" To which Sylvia
answered irrelevantly with a thought which had just struck her
thrillingly, "But how perfectly fine of Arnold to tell her himself!"
"She must have hypnotized him," said Mrs. Marshall-Smith with
conviction, "but then I don't pretend to understand the ways of young
people nowadays." She was now forty-five, in the full bloom of a
rarely preserved beauty, and could afford to make remarks about the
younger generation. "At any rate," she went on, "it is a comfort to
know that Judith has set her hand to the wheel. I have not in years
crossed the ocean with so much peace of mind about Arnold as I shall
have this time," said his stepmother. "No, leave that blue voile,
Hélène, the collar never fitted."
"Oh, he doesn't spend the winters in Paris with you?" asked Sylvia.
"He's been staying here in Lydford of late--crazy as it sounds. He was
simply so bored that he couldn't think of anything else to do. He has,
besides, an absurd theory that he enjoys it more in winter than in
summer. He says the natives are to be seen then. He's been here from
his childhood. He knows a good many of them, I suppose. Now, Hélène,
let's see the gloves and hats."
It came over Sylvia with a passing sense of great strangeness that she
had been in this spot for four months and, with the exception of the
men at the fire, she had not met, had not spoken to, had not even
consciously seen a single inhabitant of the place.
And in the end, she went away in precisely the same state of
ignorance. On the day they drove to the station she did, indeed, give
one fleeting glimpse over the edge of her narrow prison-house of
self-centered interest. Surrounded by a great many strapped and
buckled pieces of baggage, with Hélène, fascinatingly ugly in her
serf's uniform, holding the black leather bag containing Aunt
Victoria's jewels, they passed along the street for the last time,
under the great elms already almost wintry with their bare boughs.
Now that it was too late, Sylvia felt a momentary curiosity about the
unseen humanity which had been so near her all the summer. She looked
out curiously at the shabby vehicles (it seemed to her that there
were more of them than in the height of the season), at the
straight-standing, plainly dressed, briskly walking women and children
(there seemed to be a new air of life and animation about the street
now that most of the summer cottages were empty), and at the lounging,
indifferent, powerfully built men. She wondered, for a moment, what
they were like, with what fortitude their eager human hearts bore the
annual display of splendor they might never share. They looked, in
that last glimpse, somehow quite strong, as though they would care
less than she would in their places. Perhaps they were only hostile,
not envious.
"I dare say," said Aunt Victoria, glancing out at a buck-board, very
muddy as to wheels, crowded with children, "that it's very forlorn for
the natives to have the life all go out of the village when the summer
people leave. They must feel desolate enough!"
Sylvia wondered.
The last thing she saw as the train left the valley was the upland
pass between Windward and Hemlock mountains. It brought up to her the
taste of black birch, the formidably clean smell of yellow soap, and
the rush of summer wind past her ears.