THE ROAD IS NOT SO CLEAR
It shocked Sylvia that Molly's death should make so little difference.
After one sober evening with the stunning words fresh before their
eyes, the three friends quickly returned to their ordinary routine
of life. It was not that they did not care, she reflected--she _did_
care. She had cried and cried at the thought of that quivering, vital
spirit broken by the inert crushing mass of steel--she could not bring
herself to think of the soft body, mangled, bloody. Austin cared too:
she was sure of it; but when they had expressed their pity, what more
could they do? The cabled statement was so bald, they hardly could
believe it--they failed altogether to realize what it meant--they
had no details on which to base any commentary. She who had lived so
intensely, was dead. They were sorry for her. That was all.
As an apology for their seeming callousness they reiterated Aunt
Victoria's dictum: "We can know nothing about it until Felix comes.
Let us hold our minds in suspense until we know what to think." That
Morrison would be in Paris soon, none of them doubted. Indeed,
they united in insisting on the number of natural--oh, perfectly
natural--reasons for his coming. He had always spent a part of every
winter there, had in fact a tiny apartment on the Rue St. Honoré which
dated from his bachelor life; and now he had a double reason for
coming, since much of Molly's fortune chanced to be in French bonds.
Her father had been (among other things) American agent for the
Comptoir National des Escomptes, and he had taken advantage of his
unusual opportunities for acquiring solid French and remunerative
Algerian securities. Page had said at once that Morrison would need to
go through a good many formalities, under the French laws. So pending
fuller information, they did not discuss the tragedy. Their lives ran
on, and Molly, dead, was in their minds almost as little as Molly,
living but absent, had been.
It was only two months before Felix Morrison arrived in Paris. They
had expected him. They had spoken of the chance of his arrival on
this or that day. Sylvia had rehearsed all the possible forms of
self-possession for their first meeting; but on the rainy February
afternoon when she came in from representing Aunt Victoria at a
reception and saw him sitting by the fire, her heart sank down and
stopped for an instant, and when it went on beating she could hear no
sound but the drumming of her pulse. The back of his chair was towards
her. All she could see as she stood for a moment in the doorway
was his head, the thick, graying dark hair, and one long-fingered,
sensitive, beautiful hand lying on the arm of the chair. At the
sight, she felt in her own palm the soft firmness of those fingers as
palpably as ever she had in reality.
The instant's pause before Aunt Victoria saw her standing there, gave
her back her self-control. When Mrs. Marshall-Smith turned and gravely
held out her hand, Sylvia came forward with a sober self-possession.
The man turned too, sprang up with an exclamation apparently of
surprise, "Miss Marshall, you _here_!" and extended his hand. Sylvia,
searching his face earnestly, found it so worn, saw in it such dark
traces of suffering and sorrow, that the quick tears of sympathy stood
in her eyes.
Her dread of the meeting, a morbid dread that had in it an
acknowledged element of horror, vanished. Before that moment she had
seen only Molly's face as it had looked the day of their desperate
talk, white and despairing, and resolutely bent over the
steering-wheel. She had not been able to imagine Felix' face at all,
had instinctively put it out of her mind; but as she looked into it
now, her fear of it disappeared. It was the fine, sensitive face of a
fine, sensitive man who has known a great shock. What had she feared
she would see there? He was still holding her hand, very much affected
at seeing her, evidently still in a super-sensitive condition when
everything affected him strongly. "She loved you--she admired you so!"
he said, his wonderful voice wavering and uncertain. Sylvia's tears
fell openly at this. She sat down on a low stool near her aunt's
knees. "I can't believe it--I haven't been able to believe it!" she
told him; "Molly was--she was more alive than anybody I ever saw!"
"If you had seen her that morning," he told them both,--"like a flame
of vitality--almost frightening--so vivid. She waved good-bye, and
then that was not enough; she got out of the car and ran back up
the hotel-step to say good-bye for just those few moments--and was
off--such youth! such youth in all her--"
Sylvia cried out, "Oh, no! no! it's too dreadful!" She felt the horror
sweep down on her again; but now it did not bear Felix' face among
its baneful images. He stood there, shocked, stricken, but utterly
bewildered, utterly ignorant--for the moment in her relief she had
called his ignorance utter innocence ...
They did not see him again for many days, and when he came, very
briefly, speaking of business technicalities which absorbed him, he
was noticeably absent and careworn. He looked much older. The gray in
his thick hair had increased. He looked very beautiful and austere to
Sylvia. They exchanged no more than the salutations of arrival and
farewell.
Then one day, as she and Aunt Victoria and Austin Page strolled down
the long gallery of the Louvre, they came upon him, looking at the
Ribera Entombment. He joined them, walking with them through the Salon
Carré and out to the Winged Victory, calling Sylvia's attention to the
Botticelli frescoes beyond on the landing. "It's the first time I've
been here," he told them, his only allusion to what lay back of him.
"It is like coming back to true friends. Blessed be all true friends."
He shook hands with them, and went away down the great stairway, a
splendid figure of dignity and grace.
After this he came once and again to the apartment of the Rue de
Presbourg, generally it would appear to use the piano. He had none in
his own tiny _pied-à-terre_ and he missed it. Sylvia immensely liked
his continuing to cling for a time to the simple arrangements of his
frugal bachelor days. He could now of course have bought a thousand
pianos. They understood how he would miss his music, and stole in
quietly when, upon opening the door, Tojiko told them that Mr.
Morrison had come in, and they heard from the salon his delicately
firm touch on the keys. Sometimes they listened from their rooms,
sometimes the two women took possession of the little octagonal room
off the salon, all white paneling and gilt chairs, and listened there;
sometimes, as the weeks went on and an especially early spring began
to envelop Paris in a haze of sunshine and budding leaves, they
stepped out to listen on the wrought-iron balcony which looked down
the long, shining vista of the tree-framed avenue. For the most part
he played Bach, grave, courageous, formal, great-hearted music.
Sometimes he went away with no more than a nod and a smile to them,
but more and more, when he had finished, he came out where they were,
and stood or sat to exchange brief impressions on the enchanting
season, or on some social or aesthetic treat which "_ces dames_" had
been enjoying. Austin Page was frequently with them, as in the earlier
part of the winter, and it was finally he himself who one day took the
step of asking Morrison if he would not go with them to the Louvre.
"No one could appreciate more than Miss Marshall what has always been
such a delight to us all."
They went, and not only once. That was the beginning of another phase;
a period when, as he began to take up life again, he turned to his old
friends to help him do it. He saw almost no one else, certainly no one
else there, for he was sure to disappear upon the arrival of a caller,
or the announcement of an expedition in which other people were
included. But he returned again and again to the Louvre with them, his
theory of galleries necessitating frequent visits. Nothing could be
more idiotic, he held, than to try to see on one occasion all, or even
half, or even a tenth part, of a great collection of works of art. "It
is exactly as reasonable," he contended, "as to read through on the
same day every poem in a great anthology. Who could have anything but
nausea for poetry after such a gorge? And they _must_ hate pictures or
else be literally blind to them, the people who look at five hundred
in a morning! If I had looked at every picture in the Long Gallery
in one walk through it, I should thrust my cane through the Titian
Francis-First itself when I came to the Salon Carré."
So he took them to see only a few, five or six, carefully selected
things--there was one wonderful day when he showed them nothing
but the Da Vinci Saint Anne, and the Venus of Melos, comparing the
dissimilar beauty of those two divine faces so vitally, that Sylvia
for days afterwards, when she closed her eyes and saw them, felt that
she looked on two living women. She told them this and, "Which one do
you see most?" he asked her. "Oh, the Saint Anne," she told him.
He seemed dissatisfied. But she did not venture to ask him why. They
lived in an atmosphere where omissions were vital.
Sylvia often wondered in those days if there ever had been a situation
so precariously balanced which continued to hang poised and stable,
minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day. There were
moments when her head was swimming with moral dizziness. She wondered
if such moments ever came to the two quiet, self-controlled men who
came and went, with cordial, easy friendliness, in and out of the
appartement on the Rue de Presbourg. They gave no sign of it, they
gave no sign of anything beyond the most achieved appearance of a
natural desire to be obliging and indulgent to the niece of an old
friend. This appearance was kept up with such unflagging perseverance
that it almost seemed consciously concerted between them. They so
elaborately avoided the slightest appearance of rivalry that their
good taste, like a cloth thrown over an unknown object, inevitably
excited curiosity as to what was concealed beneath it.
And Sylvia was not to be outdone. She turned her own eyes away from
it as sedulously as they. She never let a conscious thought dwell on
it--and like all other repressed and strangled currents of thought, it
grew swollen and restive, filling her subconsciousness with monstrous,
unformulated speculations. She was extremely absorbed in the luxury,
the amenity, the smooth-working perfection of the life about her.
She consciously concentrated all her faculties on her prodigious
opportunity for aesthetic growth, for appreciation of the fine and
marvelous things about her. She let go the last scruple which had held
her back from accepting from Aunt Victoria the shower of beautiful
things to wear which that connoisseur in wearing apparel delighted
to bestow upon an object so deserving. She gave a brilliant outward
effect of enjoying life as it came which was as impersonal as that of
the two men who looked at her so frequently, and this effect went as
deep as her will-power had command. But beneath--unacknowledged waves
beating on the shore of her life and roughly, irresistibly, rudely
fashioning it--rolled a ground-swell of imperious questionings....
Was Felix' perfect manner of impersonal interest solely due to the
delicacy of his situation? Did he feel now that he was as rich as
Austin ...? But, on the other hand, why did he come now and put
himself in a situation which required the utmost efforts for
unconsciousness on everybody's part if not because Austin's being
there had meant he dared not wait? And Austin's change of manner since
the arrival of the other man, the film of ceremony which had slid
imperceptibly over the tender friendliness of his manner, did that
mean that he would not take advantage of Morrison's temporarily tied
hands, but, with a scrupulousness all his own, would wait until the
race was even and they stood foot to foot on the same level? Or had he
noticed at once, with those formidably clear eyes of his, some shade
of her manner to Felix which she had not been able to command, and was
he waiting for some move from her? And how could she move until she
had some sign from Felix and how could he give a sign? There was
nothing to do but to wait, to hope that the thin ice which now bent
perilously under the pleasant ceremonies of their life in common,
would hold them until.... Even the wildest up-leaping wave of that
tossing tide never went beyond the blank wall which came after the
"until...."
There were other moments when all that surge swung back and forth
to the rhythm of the poisoned recollection of her unacknowledged
humiliation in Lydford; when, inflamed with determination to avoid
another such blow in the face, Sylvia almost consciously asked
herself, self-contemptuously, "Who am I, an obscure, poverty-stricken
music-teacher out of the West, to fancy that I have but to choose
between two such men, two such fortunes?" but against this counted
strongly the constantly recurring revelations of the obscure pasts of
many of the women whom she met during those days, women who were now
shining, acknowledged firsts in the procession of success. The serene,
stately, much-admired Princesse de Chevrille had been a Miss Sommers
from Cleveland, Ohio, and she had come to Paris first as a governess.
The beautiful Mrs. William Winterton Perth, now Aunt Victoria's
favorite friend, who entertained lesser royalty and greater men of
letters with equal quiet dignity, had in her youth, so she chanced
casually one day to mention, known what it was to be thrifty about
car-fares. There was nothing intrinsically impossible in any of the
glittering vistas down which Sylvia's quick eye cast involuntary
glances.
But inevitably, when the heaving dark tide rose as high as this, there
came a swift and deadly ebbing away of it all, and into Sylvia's
consciousness (always it seemed to her with the most entire
irrelevance) there flared up the picture of Molly as she had seen
her last, shimmering like a jewel in her white veil--then the other
picture, the over-turned car, the golden head bruised and bloody and
forever stilled--and always, always beyond that, the gaunt, monstrous
possibility, too awful ever to be put into words, too impossible for
credence ...
From that shapeless, looming, black mass, Sylvia fled away actually
and physically, springing to her feet wherever she was, entering
another room, taking up some other occupation.
Just once she had the faintest sign from beyond the wall that she was
not alone in her fear of this horror. She was sitting near Austin Page
at a tea, one of the frequent, small, richly chosen assemblages which
Mrs. Marshall-Smith gathered about her. Part of the ensuing chatter on
one of these occasions turned, as modern chatter frequently does, on
automobiles. The husband of Mrs. William Winterton Perth was an expert
on such matters, having for some years diverted by an interest
in mechanics the immense enforced leisure of a transplanted male
American. He was talking incessantly that day of the wonderful
improvement in steering mechanism the last few years had brought
about. "I tell you what, Miss Marshall!" he insisted, as though she
had disputed the point with him, "I tell you _what_, there used to
be some excuse for piling your car up by the side of the road, but
nowadays any one who doesn't keep in the road and right side up must
be just plain _looking_ for a chance to use his car like a dose of
cold poison." For a moment Sylvia could not conceive why she felt so
sickening a thrust at her heart. She turned her eyes from the speaker.
They fell on a man's hand, on the arm of the chair next hers. It was
Austin's hand and it was shaking uncontrollably. As she gazed at it,
fascinated, he thrust it deep into his pocket. She did not look at
him. In a moment he rose and crossed the room. The husband of Mrs.
William Winterton Perth asked for another _petit four_, confessing his
fondness for chocolate éclairs,--and embarked upon demountable rims.