SYLVIA TELLS THE TRUTH
They left Mrs. Marshall-Smith with a book, seated on a little
yellow-painted iron chair, the fifteen-centime kind, at the top of the
great flight of steps leading down to the wide green expanse of the
Tapis Vert. She was alternately reading Huysmans' highly imaginative
ideas on Gothic cathedrals, and letting her eyes stray up and down the
long façade of the great Louis. Her powers of aesthetic assimilation
seemed to be proof against this extraordinary mixture of impressions.
She had insisted that she would be entirely happy there in the sun,
for an hour at least, especially if she were left in solitude with her
book. On which intimation Sylvia and Page had strolled off to do some
exploring. It was a situation which a month of similar arrangements
had made very familiar to them.
"No, I don't know Versailles very well," he said in answer to her
question, "but I believe the gardens back of the Grand and Petit
Trianon are more interesting than these near the Château itself.
The conscientiousness with which they're kept up is not quite so
formidable."
So they walked down the side of the Grand Canal, admiring the rather
pensive beauty of the late November woods, and talking, as was the
proper thing, about the great Louis and his court, and how they both
detested his style of gilded, carved wall ornamentation, although his
chairs weren't as bad as some others. They turned off at the cross-arm
of the Canal towards the Great Trianon; they talked, again dutifully
in the spirit of the place, about Madame de Maintenon. They differed
on this subject just enough to enjoy discussing it. Page averred that
the whole affair had always passed his comprehension, "--what that
ease-loving, vain, indulgent, trivial-minded grandson of Henri Quatre
could ever have seen for all those years in that stiff, prim, cold old
school-ma'am--"
But Sylvia shook her head. "I know how he felt. He _had_ to have her,
once he'd found her. She was the only person in all his world he could
depend on."
"Why not depend on himself?" Page asked.
"Oh, he couldn't! He couldn't! She had character and he hadn't."
"What do you mean by character?" he challenged her.
"It's what I haven't!" she said.
He attempted a chivalrous exculpation. "Oh, if you mean by character
such hard, insensitive lack of imagination as Madame de Maintenon's--"
"No, not that," said Sylvia. "_You_ know what I mean by character as
well as I."
By the time they were back of the Little Trianon, this beginning had
led them naturally enough away from the frivolities of historical
conversation to serious considerations, namely themselves. The start
had been a reminiscence of Sylvia's, induced by the slow fall of
golden leaves from the last of the birches into the still water of the
lake in the midst of Marie Antoinette's hamlet. They stopped on an
outrageously rustic bridge, constructed quite in the artificially
rural style of the place, and, leaning on the railing, watched in a
fascinated silence the quiet, eddying descent of the leaves. There was
not a breath of wind. The leaves detached themselves from the tree
with no wrench. They loosened their hold gradually, gradually, and
finally out of sheer fullness of maturity floated down to their graves
with a dreamy content.
"I never happened to see that effect before," said Page. "I supposed
leaves were detached only by wind. It's astonishingly peaceful, isn't
it?"
"I saw it once before," said Sylvia, her eyes fixed on the noiseless
arabesques traced by the leaves in their fall--"at home in La Chance.
I'll never forget it." She spoke in a low tone as though not to break
the charmed silence about them, and, upon his asking her for the
incident, she went on, almost in a murmur: "It isn't a story you could
possibly understand. You've never been poor. But I'll tell you if you
like. I've talked to you such a lot about home and the queer people we
know--did I ever mention Cousin Parnelia? She's a distant cousin of my
mother's, a queer woman who lost her husband and three children in a
train-wreck years ago, and has been a little bit crazy ever since. She
has always worn, for instance, exactly the same kind of clothes, hat
and everything, that she had on, the day the news was brought to her.
The Spiritualists got hold of her then, and she's been one herself for
ever so long--table-rapping--planchette-writing--all the horrid rest
of it, and she makes a little money by being a "medium" for ignorant
people. But she hardly earns enough that way to keep her from
starving, and Mother has for ever so long helped her out.
"Well, there was a chance to buy a tiny house and lot for her--two
hundred and twenty dollars. It was just a two-roomed cottage, but it
would be a roof over her head at least. She is getting old and ought
to have something to fall back on. Mother called us all together and
said this would be a way to help provide for Cousin Parnelia's
old age. Father never could bear her (he's so hard on ignorant,
superstitious people), but he always does what Mother thinks best,
so he said he'd give up the new typewriter he'd been hoping to buy.
Mother gave up her chicken money she'd been putting by for some new
rose-bushes, and she loves her roses too! Judith gave what she'd
earned picking raspberries, and I--oh, how I hated to do it! but I was
ashamed not to--I gave what I'd saved up for my autumn suit. Lawrence
just stuck it out that he hated Cousin Parnelia and he wouldn't give a
bit. But he was so little that he only had thirty cents or something
like that in a tin bank, so it didn't matter. When we put it all
together it wasn't nearly enough of course, and we took the rest out
of our own little family savings-bank rainy-day savings and bought the
tiny house and lot. Father wanted to 'surprise' Cousin Parnelia with
the deed. He wanted to lay it under some flowers in a basket, or slip
it into her pocket, or send it to her with some eggs or something. But
Mother--it was so like her!--the first time Cousin Parnelia happened
to come to the house, Mother picked up the deed from her desk and said
offhand, 'Oh, Parnelia, we bought the little Garens house for you,'
and handed her the paper, and went to talking about cutworms or
Bordeaux mixture."
Page smiled, appreciative of the picture. "I see her. I see your
mother--Vermont to the core."
"Well, it was only about two weeks after that, I was practising and
Mother was rubbing down a table she was fixing over. Nobody else
happened to be at home. Cousin Parnelia came in, her old battered
black straw hat on one ear as usual. She was all stirred up and
pleased about a new 'method' of using planchette. You know what
planchette is, don't you? The little heart-shaped piece of wood
spiritualists use, with a pencil fast to it, to take down their silly
'messages,' Some spiritualistic fake was visiting town conducting
séances and he claimed he'd discovered some sort of method for
inducing greater receptivity--or something like that. I don't know
anything about spiritualism but little tags I've picked up from
hearing Cousin Parnelia talk. Anyway, he was 'teaching' other mediums
for a big price. And it came out that Cousin Parnelia had mortgaged
the house for more than it was worth, and had used the money to take
those 'lessons.' I couldn't believe it for a minute. When I really
understood what she'd done, I was so angry I felt like smashing
both fists down on the piano keys and howling! I thought of my blue
corduroy I'd given up--I was only fourteen and just crazy about
clothes. Mother was sitting on the floor, scraping away at the
table-leg. She got up, laid down her sandpaper, and asked Cousin
Parnelia if she'd excuse us for a few minutes. Then she took me by
the hand, as though I was a little girl. I felt like one too, I felt
almost frightened by Mother's face, and we both marched out of the
house. She didn't say a word. She took me down to our swimming-hole
in the river. There is a big maple-tree leaning over that. It was a
perfectly breathless autumn day like this, and the tree was shedding
its leaves like that birch, just gently, slowly, steadily letting them
go down into the still water. We sat down on the bank and watched
them. The air was full of them, yet all so quiet, without any hurry.
The water was red with them, they floated down on our shoulders, on
our heads, in our laps--not a sound--so peaceful--so calm--so perfect.
It was like the andante of the Kreutzer.
"I knew what Mother wanted, to get over being angry with Cousin
Parnelia. And she was. I could see it in her face, like somebody in
church. I felt it myself--all over, like an E string that's been
pulled too high, slipping down into tune when you turn the peg. But
I didn't _want_ to feel it. I _wanted_ to hate Cousin Parnelia. I
thought it was awfully hard in Mother not to want us to have even the
satisfaction of hating Cousin Parnelia! I tried to go on doing it.
I remember I cried a little. But Mother never said a word--just
sat there in that quiet autumn sunshine, watching the leaves
falling--falling--and I had to do as she did. And by and by I felt,
just as she did, that Cousin Parnelia was only a very small part of
something very big.
"When we went in, Mother's face was just as it always was, and we got
Cousin Parnelia a cup of tea and gave her part of a boiled ham to
take home and a dozen eggs and a loaf of graham bread, just as though
nothing had happened."
She stopped speaking. There was no sound at all but the delicate,
forlorn whisper of the leaves.
"That is a very fine story!" said Page finally. He spoke with a
measured, emphatic, almost solemn accent.
"Yes, it's a very fine story," murmured Sylvia a little wistfully.
"It's finer as a story than it was as real life. It was years before I
could look at blue corduroy without feeling stirred up. I really cared
more about my clothes than I did about that stupid, ignorant old
woman. If it's only a cheerful giver the Lord loves, He didn't feel
much affection for me."
They began to retrace their steps. "You gave up the blue corduroy,"
he commented as they walked on, "and you didn't scold your silly old
kinswoman."
"That's only because Mother hypnotized me. _She_ has character. I did
it as Louis signed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, because
Madame de Maintenon thought he ought to."
"But she couldn't hypnotize your brother Lawrence, althought he was so
much younger. He didn't give up his thirty-seven cents. I think you're
bragging without cause if you claim any engaging and picturesque
absence of character."
"Oh, Lawrence--he's different! He's extraordinary! Sometimes I think
he is a genius. And it's Judith who hypnotizes him. _She_ supplies his
character."
They emerged into an opening and walked in silence for some moments
towards the Grand Trianon.
"You're lucky, very lucky," commented Page, "to have such an ample
supply of character in the family. I'm an only child. There's nobody
to give me the necessary hypodermic supply of it at the crucial
moments." He went on, turning his head to look at the Great Trianon,
very mellow in the sunshine. "It's my belief, however, that at the
crucial moments you have plenty of it of your own."
"That's a safe guess!" said Sylvia ironically, "since there never have
_been_ any crucial moments in a life so uninterestingly eventless as
mine. I wonder what I _would_ do," she mused. "My own conviction is
that--suppose I'd lived in the days of the Reformation--in the days of
Christ--in the early Abolition days--" She had an instant certainty:
"Oh, I have been entirely on the side of whatever was smooth, and
elegant, and had amenity--I'd have hated the righteous side!"
Page did not look very deeply moved by this revelation of depravity.
Indeed, he smiled rather amusedly at her, and changed the subject.
"You said a moment ago that I couldn't understand, because I'd always
had money. Isn't it a bit paradoxical to say that the people who
haven't a thing are the only ones who know anything about it?"
"But you couldn't realize what _losing_ the money meant to us. You
can't know what the absence of money can do to a life."
"I can know," said Page, "what the presence of it cannot do for
a life." His accent implied rather sadly that the omissions were
considerable.
"Oh, of course, of course," Sylvia agreed. "There's any amount it
can't do. After you have it, you must get the other things too."
He brought his eyes down to her from a roving quest among the tops
of the trees. "It seems to me you want a great deal," he said
quizzically.
"Yes, I do," she admitted. "But I don't see that you have any call
to object to my wanting it. You don't have to wish for everything at
once. You have it already."
He received this into one of his thoughtful silences, but presently it
brought him to a standstill. They were within sight of the Grand Canal
again, looking down from the terrace of the Trianon. He leaned against
the marble balustrade and thrust his hands deep into his pockets. His
clear eyes were clouded. He looked profoundly grave. "I am thirty-two
years old," he said, "and never for a moment of that time have I
made any sense out of my position in life. If you call that 'having
everything'--"
It occurred to Sylvia fleetingly that she had never made any sense out
of her position in life either, and had been obliged to do a great
many disagreeable things into the bargain, but she kept this thought
to herself, and looked conspicuously what she genuinely felt, a
sympathetic interest. The note of plain direct sincerity which was
Page's hallmark never failed to arrest her attention, a little to
arouse her wonder, and occasionally, for a reason that she did not
like to dwell upon, somewhat to abash her. The reason was that he
never spoke for effect, and she often did. He was not speaking for
effect now: he seemed scarcely even to be speaking to her, rather to
be musingly formulating something for his own enlightenment. He
went on. "The fact is that there _is_ no sense to be made out of my
situation in life. I am like a man with a fine voice, who has no ear."
He showed surprise that Sylvia failed to follow this, and explained.
"I mean the voice is no good to that kind of a man, it's no good to
anybody. It's the craziest, accidental affair anyhow, haven't you ever
noticed it?--who draws the fine voices. Half the time--more than half
the time, _most_ of the time it seems to me when I've been recently to
a lot of concerts, the people who have the voices haven't any other
qualifications for being singers. And it's so with coal-mines, with
everything else that's inherited. For five years now I've given up
what I'd like to do, and I've tried, under the best _maestri_ I could
find, to make something out of my voice, so to speak. And it's no
go. It's in the nature of things that I can't make a go of it.
Over everything I do lies the taint that I'm the 'owner'! They are
suspicious of me, always will be--and rightly so. Anybody else not
connected with the mediaeval idea of 'possession' could do better than
I. The whole relation's artificial. I'm in it for the preposterous
reason that my father, operating on Wall Street, made a lucky
guess,--as though I should be called upon to run a locomotive because
my middle initial is L!"
Sylvia still felt the same slight sense of flatness when this
recurring topic thrust itself into a personal talk; but during the
last month she had adjusted herself to Page so that this no longer
showed on the surface. She was indeed quite capable of taking an
interest in the subject, as soon as she could modulate herself into
the new key. "Yes, of course," she agreed, "it's like so many other
things that are perfectly necessary to go on with, perfectly absurd
when you look closely at them. My father nearly lost his position once
for saying that all inheritance was wrong. But even he never had
the slightest suggestion as to what to do about it, how to get an
inheritance into the hands of the people who might make the best use
of it." She was used from her childhood to this sort of academic doubt
of everything, conducted side by side with a practical acceptance of
everything. Professor and Madame La Rue, in actual life devotedly
faithful married lovers, staid, stout, habit-ridden elderly people,
professed a theoretical belief in the flexibility of relationships
sanctioned by the practice of free love. It was perhaps with this
recollection in her mind that she suggested, "Don't you suppose it
will be like the institution of marriage, very, very gradually altered
till it fits conditions better?"
"In the meantime, how about the cases of those who are unhappily
married?"
"I don't see anything for them but just to get along the best they
can," she told him.
"You think I'd better give up trying to do anything with my
Colorado--?" he asked her, as though genuinely seeking advice.
"I should certainly think that five years was plenty long enough for a
fair trial! You'd make a better ambassador than an active captain of
industry, anyhow," she said with conviction. Whereupon he bestowed on
her a long, thoughtful stare, as though he were profoundly pondering
her suggestion.
They moved forward towards the Grand Canal in silence. Privately she
was considering his case hardly one of extreme hardship. Privately
also, as they advanced nearer and nearer the spot where they had left
Mrs. Marshall-Smith, she was a little dreading the return to the
perfect breeding with which Aunt Victoria did not ask, or intimate, or
look, the question which was in her mind after each of these strolling
tête-à-têtes which consistently led nowhere. There were instants when
Sylvia would positively have preferred the vulgar openness of a direct
question to which she might have answered, with the refreshing effect
to her of a little honest blood-letting: "Dear Aunt Victoria, I
haven't the least idea myself what's happening! I'm simply letting
myself go because I don't see anything else to do. I have even no very
clear idea as to what is going on inside my own head. I only know that
I like Austin Page so much (in spite of a certain quite unforgotten
episode) there would be nothing at all unpleasant about marrying him;
but I also know that I didn't feel the least interest in him until
Hélène told me about his barrels of money: I also know that I feel the
strongest aversion to returning to the Spartan life of La Chance; and
it occurs to me that these two things may throw considerable light
on my 'liking' for Austin. As for what's in _his_ mind, there is
no subject on which I'm in blacker ignorance. And after being so
tremendously fooled, in the case of Felix, about the degree of
interest a man was feeling, I do not propose to take anything for
granted which is not on the surface. It is quite possible that this
singularly sincere and simple-mannered man may not have the slightest
intention of doing anything more than enjoy a pleasant vacation from
certain rather hair-splitting cares which seem to trouble him from
time to time." As they walked side by side along the stagnant waters,
she was sending inaudible messages of this sort towards her aunt; she
had even selected the particular mauve speck at the top of the steps
which might be Mrs. Marshall-Smith.
In the glowing yellow gold of the sky, a faintly whirring dark-gray
spot appeared: an airman made his way above the Grand Canal, passed
above the Château, and disappeared. They had sat down on a bench, the
better to crane their heads to watch him out of sight. Sylvia was
penetrated with the strangeness of that apparition in that spot and
thrilled out: "Isn't it wonderful! Isn't it wonderful! _Here!_"
"There's something _more_ wonderful!" he said, indicating with his
cane the canal before them, where a group of neat, poorly dressed,
lower middle-class people looked proudly out from their triumphal
progress in the ugly, gasping little motor-boat which operates at
twenty-five centimes a trip.
She had not walked and talked a month with him for nothing. She knew
that he did not refer to motor-boats as against aëroplanes. "You
mean," she said appreciatively, "you mean those common people going
freely around the royal canal where two hundred years ago--"
He nodded, pleased by her quickness. "Two hundred years from now,"
he conjectured, "the stubs of my checkbook will be exhibited in an
historical museum along with the regalia of the last hereditary
monarch."
Here she did not follow, and she was too intelligent to pretend she
did.
He lifted his eyebrows. "Relic of a quaint old social structure
inexplicably tolerated so late as the beginning of the twentieth
century,"
"Oh, coal-mines forever!" she said, smiling, her eyes brilliant with
friendly mockery.
"Aye! _Toujours perdrix!_" he admitted. He continued to look steadily
and seriously into her smiling, sparkling face, until, with a sudden
pulse of premonition, she was stricken into a frightened gravity. And
then, with no prelude, no approach, quite simply and directly, he
spoke. "I wonder how much you care for me?" he said musingly, as he
had said everything else that afternoon: and as she positively paled
at the eeriness of this echo from her own thought, he went on, his
voice vibrating in the deep organ note of a great moment, "You must
know, of course, by this time that I care everything possible for
you."
Compressed into an instant of acute feeling Sylvia felt the pangs
which had racked her as a little girl when she had stood in the
schoolyard with Camilla Fingál before her, and the terrifying hostile
eyes about her. Her two selves rose up against each other fiercely,
murderously, as they had then. The little girl sprang forward to help
the woman who for an instant hesitated. The fever and the struggle
vanished as instantly as they had come. Sylvia felt very still, very
hushed. Page had told her that she always rose to crucial moments. She
rose to this one. "I don't know," she said as quietly as he, with as
utter a bravery of bare sincerity, "I don't know how much I care for
you--but I think it is a great deal." She rose upon a solemn wing of
courage to a greater height of honesty. Her eyes were on his, as clear
as his. The mere beauty of her face had gone like a lifted veil. For a
instant he saw her as Sylvia herself did not dream she could be. "It
is very hard," said Sylvia Marshall, with clear eyes and trembling
lips of honest humility, "for a girl with no money to know how much
she cares for a very rich man."
She had never been able to imagine what she would say if the moment
should come. She had certainly not intended to say this. But an
unsuspected vein of granite in her rang an instant echo to his
truth. She was bewildered to see his ardent gaze upon her deepen to
reverence. He took her hand in his and kissed it. He tried to speak,
but his voice broke.
She was immensely moved to see him so moved. She was also entirely at
a loss. How strangely different things always were from forecasts of
them! They had suddenly taken the long-expected stride away from their
former relation, but she did not know where they had arrived. What was
the new status between them? What did Austin think she meant? It came
to her with a shock that the new status between them was, on the
surface, exactly what it was in reality; that the avowed relation
between them was, as far as it went, precisely in accord with the
facts of the case. The utter strangeness of this in any human
relationship filled her with astonishment, with awe, almost with
uneasiness. It seemed unnatural not to have to pretend anything!
Apparently it did not seem unnatural to the man beside her. "You are a
very wonderful woman," he now said, his voice still but partly under
his control. "I had not thought that you could exist." He took her
hand again and continued more steadily: "Will you let me, for a little
while longer, go on living near you? Perhaps things may seem clearer
to us both, later--"
Sylvia was swept by a wave of gratitude as for some act of
magnanimity. "_You_ are the wonderful one!" she cried. Not since the
day Hélène had told her who he was, had she felt so whole, so sound,
so clean, as now. The word came rushing on the heels of the thought:
"You make one feel so _clean_!" she said, unaware that he could
scarcely understand her, and then she smiled, passing with her free,
natural grace from the memorable pause, and the concentration of a
great moment forward into the even-stepping advance of life. "That
first day--even then you made me feel clean--that soap! that cold,
clean water--it is your aroma!"
Their walk along the silent water, over the great lawn, and up the
steps was golden with the level rays of the sun setting back of them,
at the end of the canal, between the distant, sentinel poplars. Their
mood was as golden as the light. Sometimes they spoke, sometimes they
were silent. Truth walked between them.
Sylvia's mind, released from the tension of that great moment, began
making its usual, sweeping, circling explorations of its own depths.
Not all that it found was of an equal good report. Once she thought
fleetingly: "This is only a very, very pretty way of saying that it
is all really settled. With his great wealth, he is like a reigning
monarch--let him be as delicate-minded as he pleases, when he
indicates a wish--" More than once--many, many times--Felix Morrison's
compelling dark eyes looked at her penetratingly, but she resolutely
turned away her head from them, and from the impulse to answer their
reproach even with an indignant, well-founded reproach of her own.
Again and again she felt a sweet strangeness in her new position. The
aroma of utter sincerity was like the scent of a wildflower growing in
the sun, spicy, free. She wondered at a heart like his that could be
at once ardent and subtle, that could desire so profoundly (the deep
vibrations of that voice of yearning were in her ears still) and yet
pause, and stand back, and wait, rather than force a hair's breadth
of pretense. How he had liberated her! And once she found herself
thinking, "I shall have sables myself, and diamonds, and a house as
great as Molly's, and I shall learn how to entertain ambassadors,
as she will never know." She was ashamed of this, she knew it to be
shockingly out of key with the grand passage behind them. But she had
thought it.
And, as these thoughts, and many more, passed through her mind, as she
spoke with a quiet peace, or was silent, she was transfigured into a
beauty almost startling, by the accident of the level golden beams of
light back of her. Her aureole of bright hair glowed like a saint's
halo. The curiously placed lights and unexpected shadows brought
out new subtleties in the modeling of her face. Her lightened heart
gleamed through her eyes, like a lighted lamp. After a time, the man
fell into a complete silence, glancing at her frequently as though
storing away a priceless memory....