rigor; but she recognized it as an unexaggerated statement of the facts. “You can’t go home now, Sylvia–everybody would say you couldn’t stand seeing Molly’s snatch at Felix successful. You really must stay on to let people see that you are another kind of girl from Molly, capable of impersonal interest in a man of Felix’s brains.”
Sylvia thought of making the obviously suitable remark that she cared nothing about what people thought, but such a claim was so preposterously untrue to her character that she could not bring the words past her lips. As a matter of fact, she did care what people thought. She always had! She always would! She remained silent, looking fixedly out of the great, plate-glass window, across the glorious sweep of blue mountain-slope and green valley commanded by Mrs. Marshall-Smith’s bedroom. She did not resemble the romantic conception of a girl crossed in love. She looked very quiet, no paler than usual, quite self-possessed. The only change a keen eye could have noted was that now there was about her an atmosphere of slightly rigid dignity, which had not been there before. She seemed less girlish.
No eyes could have been more keenly analytical than those of Mrs. Marshall-Smith. She saw perfectly the new attribute, and realized perfectly what a resolute stiffening of the will it signified. She had never admired and loved Sylvia more, and being a person adept in self-expression, she saturated her next speech with her admiration and affection. “Of course, you know, my dear, that _I’m_ not one of the herd. I know entirely that your feeling for Felix was just what mine is–immense admiration for his taste and accomplishments. As a matter of fact it was apparent to every one that, even in spite of all Molly’s money, if you’d really cared to …”
Sylvia winced, actually and physically, at this speech, which brought back to her with a sharp flick the egregiousness of her absurd self-deception. What a simpleton she had been–what a little naive, provincial simpleton! In spite of her high opinion of her own cleverness and knowledge of people, how stupidly steeped she had been in the childish, idiotic American tradition of entire disinterestedness in the relations of men and women. It was another instance of how betrayed she constantly was, in any manoeuver in the actual world, by the fatuous idealism which had so colored her youth–she vented her emotion in despising that idealism and thinking of hard names to call it.
“… though of course you showed your intelligence by _not_ really caring to,” went on Mrs. Marshall-Smith; “it would have meant a crippled life for both of you. Felix hasn’t a cent more than he needs for himself. If he was going to marry at all, he was forced to marry carefully. Indeed, it has occurred to me that he may have thrown himself into this, because he was in danger of losing his head over you, and knew how fatal it would be. For you, you lovely thing of great possibilities, you need a rich soil for _your_ roots, too, if you’re to bloom out as you ought to.”
Sylvia, receiving this into a sore and raw consciousness, said to herself with an embittered instinct for cynicism that she had never heard more euphonious periphrases for selling yourself for money. For that was what it came down to, she had told herself fiercely a great many times during the night. Felix had sold himself for money as outright as ever a woman of the streets had done.
Mrs. Marshall-Smith, continuing steadily to talk (on the theory that talking prevents too great concentration of thought), and making the round of all the possible things to say, chanced at this moment upon a qualification to this theory of Morrison’s conduct which for an instant caught Sylvia’s attention, “–and then there’s always the possibility that even if you _had_ cared to–Molly might have been too much for you, for both of you. She always has had just what she wanted–and people who have, get the habit. I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, in the little you’ve seen of her, but it’s very apparent to me, knowing her from childhood up as I have, that there’s a slight coarseness of grain in Molly, when it’s a question of getting what she wants. I don’t mean she’s exactly horrid. Molly’s a dear in her way, and I’m very fond of her, of course. If she can get what she wants _without_ walking over anybody’s prostrate body, she’ll go round. But there’s a directness, a brilliant lack of fine shades in Molly’s grab…. It makes one remember that her Montgomery grandfather had firmness of purpose enough to raise himself from an ordinary Illinois farmer to arbiter of the wheat pit. Such impossible old aunts–such cousins–occasionally crop up still from the Montgomery connection. But all with the same crude force. It’s almost impossible for a temperament like Felix’s to contend with a nature like that.”
Sylvia was struck by the reflection, but on turning it over she saw in it only another reason for anger at Morrison. “You make your old friend out as a very weak character,” she said.
Mrs. Marshall-Smith’s tolerant, clear view of the infirmities of humanity was grieved by this fling of youthful severity. “Oh, my dear! my dear! A young, beautiful, enormendously rich, tremendously enamored girl? That’s a combination! I don’t think we need consider Felix exactly weak for not having resisted!”
Sylvia thought she knew reasons for his not yielding, but she did not care to discuss them, and said nothing.
“But whether,” continued Mrs. Marshall-Smith, attempting delicately to convey the only reflection supposed to be of comfort to a girl in Sylvia’s situation, “whether or not Molly will find after marriage that even a very masterful and ruthless temperament may fail entirely to possess and hold the things it has grabbed and carried off …”
Sylvia repudiated the tacit conception that this would be a balm to her. “Oh, I’m sure I hope they’ll manage!” she said earnestly.
“Of course! Of course!” agreed Mrs. Marshall-Smith. “Who doesn’t hope so?” She paused, her loquacity run desperately thin. There was the sound of a car, driving up to the front door. Sylvia rose in apprehension. Her aunt motioned a reassurance. “I told Tojiko to tell every one that we are not in–to anybody.”
Helene came to the door on silent, felt-shod feet, a black-and-white picture of well-trained servility. “Pardon, Madame, Tojiko says that Mlle. Sommerville wishes to see Mlle. Sylvie.”
Mrs. Marshall-Smith looked with considerable apprehension at her niece. “You must get it over with some time, Sylvia. It’ll be easier here than with a lot of people staring at you both, and making nasty speculations.” Neither she nor Sylvia noticed that for an instant, in her haste, she had quite dropped her careful pretension that Sylvia could, of course, if she had really cared to….
Sylvia set her jaw, an action curiously visible under the smooth, subtle modeling of her young cheeks. She said to Helene in a quiet voice: “_Mais bien sur!_ Tell her we’re not yet dressed, but if she will give herself the trouble to come up….”
Helene nodded and retreated. Sylvia looked rather pale.
“You don’t know what a joy your perfect French is to me, dear,” said Mrs. Marshall-Smith, still rapidly turning every peg in sight in an endeavor to loosen tension; but no noticeable relaxation took place in Sylvia. It did not seem to her at just that moment of great importance that she could speak good French.
With desperate haste she was saying to herself, “At least Molly doesn’t know about anything. I told her I didn’t care. She believed me. I must go on pretending that I don’t. But can I! But can I!”
Light, rapid steps came flying up the stairs and down the long hall. “Sylvia! Sylvia!” Molly was evidently hesitating between doors.
“Here–this way–last door–Aunt Victoria’s room!” called Sylvia, and felt like a terror-stricken actor making a first public appearance, enormously surprised, relieved, and heartened to find her usual voice still with her. As Molly came flying into the room, she ran to meet her. They fell into each other’s arms with incoherent ejaculations and, under the extremely appreciative eye of Mrs. Marshall-Smith, kissed each other repeatedly.
“Oh, isn’t she the dear!” cried Molly, shaking out amply to the breeze a victor’s easy generosity. “Isn’t she the darlingest girl in the world! She _understands_ so! When I saw how perfectly _sweet_ she was the day Arnold and Judith announced their engagement, I said to myself I wanted her to be the first person I spoke to about mine.”
The approach of the inexorable necessity for her first words roused Sylvia to an inspiration which struck out an almost visible spark of admiration from her aunt. “You just count too much on my being ‘queer,’ Molly,” she said playfully, pulling the other girl down beside her, with an affectionate gesture. “How do _you_ know that I’m not fearfully jealous of you? _Such_ a charmer as your fiance is!”
Molly laughed delightedly. “Isn’t she wonderful–not to care a bit–really!” she appealed to Sylvia’s aunt. “How anybody _could_ resist Felix–but then she’s so clever. She’s wonderful!”
Sylvia, smiling, cordial, clear-eyed and bitter-hearted, thought that she really was.
“But I can’t talk about it here!” cried Molly restlessly. “I came to carry Sylvia off. I can’t sit still at home. I want to go ninety miles an hour! I can’t think straight unless I’m behind the steering-wheel. Come along, Sylvia!”
Mrs. Marshall-Smith thereupon showed herself, for all her amenity and grace, more of a match of Molly’s force and energy than either Sylvia or Morrison had been on a certain rather memorable occasion ten days before. She opposed the simple irresistible obstacle of a flat command. “Sylvia’s _not_ going out in a car dressed in a lace-trimmed negligee, with a boudoir cap on, whether you get what you want the minute you want it or not, Molly Sommerville,” she said with the authoritative accent which had always quelled Arnold in his boyhood (as long as he was within earshot). The method was effective now. Molly laughed. Sylvia even made shift to laugh; and Helene was summoned to put on the trim shirt-waist, the short cloth skirt and close hat which Mrs. Marshall-Smith selected with care and the history of which she detailed at length, so copiously that there was no opportunity to speak of anything less innocuous. Her unusual interest in the matter even caused her to accompany the girls to the head of the stairs, still talking, and she called down to them finally as they went out of the front door, “… it’s the only way with Briggs–he’s simply incorrigible about delays–and yet nobody does skirts as he does! You just have to tell him you _will not take it_, if he doesn’t get it done on time!”
Sylvia cast an understanding, grateful upward look at her aunt and stepped into the car. So far it had gone better than she feared. But a tete-a-tete with Molly, overflowing with the confidences of the newly betrothed–she was not sure that she could get through with that with credit.
Molly, however, seemed as little inclined to overflow as Sylvia to have her. She talked of everything in the world except of Felix Morrison; and it was not long before Sylvia’s acuteness discovered that she was not thinking of what she was saying. There passed through her mind a wild, wretched notion that Molly might after all know–that Felix might have been base enough to talk about her to Molly, that Molly might be trying to “spare her.” But this idea was instantly rejected: Molly was not subtle enough to conceive of such a course, and too headlong not to make a hundred blunders in carrying it out; and besides, it would not explain her manner. She was abstracted obviously for the simple reason that she had something on her mind, something not altogether to her liking, judging from the uneasy color which came and went in her face, by her rattling, senseless flow of chatter, by her fidgeting, unnecessary adjustments of the mechanism of the car.
Sylvia herself, in spite of her greater self-control, looked out upon the world with nothing of her usual eager welcome. The personality of the man they did not name hung between and around the two women like a cloud. As they swept along rapidly, young, fair, well-fed, beautifully dressed, in the costly, shining car, their clouded faces might to a country eye have been visible proofs of the country dictum that “rich city folks don’t seem to get no good out’n their money and their automobiles: always layin’ their ears back and lookin’ ’bout as cheerful as a balky horse.”
But the country eyes which at this moment fell on them were anything but conscious of class differences. It was a desperate need which reached out a gaunt claw and plucked at them when, high on the flank of the mountain, as they swung around the corner of a densely wooded road, they saw a wild-eyed man in overalls leap down from the bushes and yell at them.
Sylvia was startled and her first impression was the natural feminine one of fear–a lonely road, a strange man, excited, perhaps drunk–But Molly, without an instant’s hesitation, ground the car to a stop in a cloud of dust. “What’s the matter?” she shouted as the man sprang up on the running-board. He was gasping, purple, utterly spent, and for an instant could only beat the air with his hands. Then he broke out in a hoarse shout–the sound in that quiet sylvan spot was like a tocsin: “Fire! An awful fire! Hewitt’s pine woods–up that road!” He waved a wild, bare arm–his shirt-sleeve was torn to the shoulder. “Go and git help. They need all the men they can git!”
He dropped from the running-board and ran back up the hill through the bushes. They saw him lurch from one side to the other; he was still exhausted from his dash down the mountain to the road; they heard the bushes crash, saw them close behind him. He was gone.
Sylvia’s eyes were still on the spot where he had disappeared when she was thrown violently back against the seat in a great leap forward of the car. She caught at the side, at her hat, and saw Molly’s face. It was transfigured. The brooding restlessness was gone as acrid smoke goes when the clear flame leaps up.
“What are you doing?” shouted Sylvia.
“To get help,” answered Molly, opening the throttle another notch. The first staggering plunge over, the car settled down to a terrific speed, purring softly its puissant vibrant song of illimitable strength. “Hear her sing! Hear her sing!” cried Molly. In three minutes from the time the man had left them, they tore into the nearest village, two miles from the woods. It seemed that in those three minutes Molly had not only run the car like a demon, but had formed a plan. Slackening speed only long enough to waltz with the car on a street-corner while she shouted an inquiry to a passer-by, she followed the wave of his hand and flashed down a side-street to a big brick building which proclaimed itself in a great sign, “Peabody Brush-back Factory.”
The car stopped. Molly sprang out and ran as though the car were a rifle and she the bullet emerging from it. She ran into a large, ugly, comfortable office, where several white-faced girls were lifting their thin little fingers from typewriter keys to stare at the young woman who burst through and in at a door marked “Manager.”
“There’s a fire on the mountain–a great fire in Hewitt’s pine woods,” she cried in a clear, peremptory voice that sounded like a young captain leading a charge. “I can take nine men on my car. Will you come with me and tell which men to go?”
A dignified, elderly man, with smooth, gray hair and a black alpaca office coat, sat perfectly motionless behind his desk and stared at her in a petrified silence. Molly stamped her foot. “There’s not an instant to lose,” she said; “they need every man they can get.”
“Who’s the fire-warden of this township?” said the elderly man foolishly, trying to assemble his wits.
Molly appeared visibly to propel him from his chair by her fury. “Oh, they need help _NOW_!” she cried. “Come on! Come on!”
Then they stood together on the steps of the office. “Those men unloading lumber over there could go,” said the manager, “and I’ll get three more from the packing-rooms.”
“Don’t go yourself! Send somebody to get them!” commanded Molly. “You go and telephone anybody in town who has a car. There’ll be sure to be one or two at the garage.”
Sylvia gasped at the prodigy taking place before her eyes, the masterful, keen-witted captain of men who emerged like a thunderbolt from their Molly–Molly, the pretty little beauty of the summer colony!
She had galvanized the elderly New Englander beside her out of his first momentary apathy of stupefaction. He now put his own competent hand to the helm and took command.
“Yes,” he said, and with the word it was evident that he was aroused. Over his shoulder, in a quiet voice that carried like the crack of a gun: “Henderson, go get three men from the packing-room to go to a forest-fire. Shut down the machinery. Get all the able-bodied men ready in gangs of seven. Perkins, you ‘phone Tim O’Keefe to bring my car here at once. And get Pat’s and Tom’s and the two at the hotel.”
“Tools?” said Molly.
He nodded and called out to the men advancing with a rush on the car: “There are hoes and shovels inside the power-house door. Better take some axes too.”
In four minutes from the time they had entered the village (Sylvia had her watch in her hand) they were flying back, the car packed with men in overalls and clustered thick with others on the running-board. Back of them the whistle of the factory shrieked a strident announcement of disaster. Women and children ran to the doors to stare up and down, to cry out, to look and with dismayed faces to see the great cloud of gray smoke pouring up from the side of the mountain. There was no soul in that village who did not know what a forest-fire meant.
Then in a flash the car had left the village and was rushing along the dusty highroad, the huge, ominous pillar of smoke growing nearer. The men stared up at it with sober faces. “Pretty hot fire!” said one uneasily.
They reached the place where the man had yelled to them–ten minutes exactly since they had left it. Molly turned the car into the steep sandy side-road which led up the mountain. The men shouted out in remonstrance, “Hey, lady! You can’t git a car up there. We’ll have to walk the rest of the way. They don’t never take cars there.”
“This one is going up,” sang out Molly gallantly, almost gaily, opening the throttle to its fullest and going into second speed.
The sound of the laboring engine jarred loudly through all the still, hot woods; the car shook and trembled under the strain on it. Molly dropped into low. A cloud of evil-smelling blue gasoline smoke rose up from the exhaust behind, but the car continued to advance. Rising steadily, coughing and choking, up the cruelly steep grades, bumping heavily down over the great water-bars, smoking, rattling, quivering–the car continued to advance. A trickle of perspiration ran down Molly’s cheeks. The floor was hot under their feet, the smell of hot oil pungent in their nostrils.
They were eight minutes from the main road now, and near the fire. Over the trail hung a cloud of smoke, and, as they turned a corner and came through this, they saw that they had arrived. Sylvia drew back and crooked her arm over her eyes. She had never seen a forest fire before. She came from the plain-country, where trees are almost sacred, and her first feeling was of terror. But then she dropped her arm and looked, and looked again at the glorious, awful sight which was to furnish her with nightmares for months to come.
The fire was roaring down one side of the road towards them, and away to the right was eating its furious, sulphurous way into the heart of the forest. They stopped a hundred feet short, but the blare of heat struck on their faces like a blow. Through the dense masses of smoke, terrifying glimpses of fierce, clean flame; a resinous dead stump burning like a torch; a great tree standing helpless like a martyr at the stake, suddenly transformed into a frenzied pillar of fire…. Along the front of this whirlpool of flame toiled, with despairing fury, four lean, powerful men. As they raised their blackened, desperate faces and saw the car there, actually there, incredibly there, black with its load of men, they gave a deep-throated shout of relief, though they did not for an instant stop the frantic plying of their picks and hoes. The nine men sprang out, their implements in their hands, and dispersed along the fighting-line.
Molly backed the car around, the rear wheels churning up the sand, and plunged down the hill into the smoke. Through the choking fumes of this, Sylvia shouted at her, “Molly! Molly! You’re _great_!” She felt that she would always hear ringing in her ears that thrilling, hoarse shout of relief.
Molly shouted in answer, “I could scream, I’m so happy!” And as they plunged madly down the mountain road, she said: “Oh, Sylvia, you don’t know–I never was any use before–never once–never! I got the first load of help there! How they shouted!”
At the junction of the side-road with the highway, a car was discharging a load of men with rakes and picks. “_I_ took my car up!” screamed Molly, leaning from the steering wheel but not slackening speed as she tore past them.
The driver of the other car, a young man with the face of a fighting Celt, flushed at the challenge and, motioning the men back into the car, started up the sandy hill. Molly laughed aloud. “I never was so happy in my life!” she said again.
Both girls had forgotten the existence of Felix Morrison.
They passed cars now, many of them, streaming south at breakneck speed, full to overflowing with unsmiling men in working clothes, bristling with long-handled implements. But as they fled down the street to the factory they saw, waiting still, some twenty or more men in overalls drawn up, ready, armed, resolute….
“How strong men are!” said Molly, gazing in ecstasy at this array of factory hands. “I love them!” She added under her breath, “But _I_ take them there!”
While the men were swarming into the car, the gray-haired manager came out to report, as though to an officer equal in command, “I’ve telephoned to Ward and Howe’s marble-works in Chitford,” he said. “They’ve sent down fifty men from there. About seventy-five have gone from this village. I suppose all the farmers in that district are there by this time.”
“Will they ever stop it!” asked Sylvia despairingly, seeing wherever she looked nothing but that ravening, fiery leap of the flames, feeling that terrible hot breath on her cheek.
The question and accent brought the man for the first time to a realization of the girls’ youth and sex. He shifted to paternal reassurance. “Oh yes, oh yes,” he said, looking up the valley appraisingly at the great volume of the smoke, “with a hundred and fifty men there, almost at once, they’ll have it under control before long. Everything with a forest fire depends on getting help there _quickly_. Ten men there almost at once do more than fifty men an hour later. That’s why your friend’s promptness was so important. I guess it might have been pretty bad if they’d had to wait for help till one of them could have run to the village. A fire, a bad fire like that, gets so in an hour that you can’t stop it–can’t stop it till it gets out where you can plow a furrow around it. And that’s a terrible place for a fire up there. Lots of slash left.”
Molly called over her shoulder to the men climbing on the car, “All ready there?” and was off, a Valkyr with her load of heroes.
Once more the car toiled and agonized up the execrable sandy steepness of the side-road; but in the twenty minutes since they had been there the tide had turned. Sylvia was amazed at the total shifting of values. Instead of four solitary workers, struggling wildly against overwhelming odds, a long line of men, working with a disciplined, orderly haste, stretched away into the woods. Imperious and savage, the smoke and swift flames towered above them, leaping up into the very sky, darkening the sun. Bent over their rakes, their eyes on the ground, mere black specks against the raging glory of the fire, the line of men, with an incessant monotonous haste, drew away the dry leaves with their rakes, while others who followed them tore at the earth with picks and hoes. It was impossible to believe that such ant-labors could avail, but already, near the road, the fire had burnt itself out, baffled by its microscopic assailants. As far as the girls could see into the charred underbrush, a narrow, clean line of freshly upturned earth marked where the fiercest of all the elements had been vanquished by the humblest of all the tools of men. Bewildered, Sylvia’s eyes shifted from the toiling men to the distance, across the blackened desolation near them, to where the fire still tossed its wicked crest of flames defiantly into the forest. She heard, but she did not believe the words of the men in the car, who cried out expertly as they ran forward, “Oh, the worst’s over. They’re shutting down on it.” How could the worst be over, when there was still that whirling horror of flame and smoke beyond them?
Just after the men had gone, exultant, relieved, the girls turned their heads to the other side of the road, and there, very silent, very secret and venomous, leaped and glittered a little ring of flames. An hour before, it would have looked a pretty, harmless sight to the two who now sat, stricken by horror into a momentary frozen stillness. The flames licked at the dry leaves and playfully sprang up into a clump of tall dry grass. The fire was running swiftly towards a bunch of dead alders standing at the edge of the forest. Before it had spread an inch further, the girls were upon it, screaming for help, screaming as people in civilization seldom scream, with all their lungs. With uplifted skirts they stamped and trod out, under swift and fearless feet, the sinister, silent, yellow tongues. They snatched branches of green leaves and beat fiercely at the enemy. It had been so small a spot compared to the great desolation across the road, they stamped out the flames so easily, that the girls expected with every breath to see the last of it. To see it escape them, to see it suddenly flare up where it had been dead, to see it appear behind them while they were still fighting it in front, was like being in a nightmare when effort is impossible. The ring widened with appalling, with unbelievable rapidity. Sylvia could not think it possible that anything outside a dream could have such devouring swiftness. She trod and snatched and stamped and screamed, and wondered if she were indeed awake….
Yet in an instant their screams had been heard, three or four smoke-blackened fire-fighters from beyond the road ran forward with rakes, and in a twinkling the danger was past. Its disappearance was as incredible as its presence.
“Ain’t that just like a fire in the woods?” said one of the men, an elderly farmer. He drew a long, tremulous breath. “It’s so tarnation _quick_! It’s either all over before you can ketch your breath, or it’s got beyond you for good.” It evidently did not occur to him to thank the girls for their part. They had only done what every one did in an emergency, the best they could. He looked back at the burned tract on the other side of the road and said: “They’ve got the best of that all right, too. I jest heard ’em shoutin’ that the men from Chitford had worked round from the upper end. So they’ve got a ring round it. Nothin’ to do now but watch that it don’t jump. My! ‘Twas a close call. I’ve been to a lot of fires in my day, but I d’know as I ever see a _closeter_ call!”
“It can’t be _over_!” cried Sylvia, looking at the lurid light across the road. “Why, it isn’t an hour since we–“
“Land! No, it ain’t _over!_” he explained, scornful of her inexperience. “They’ll have to have a gang of men here watchin’ it all night–and maybe all tomorrow–‘less we have some rain. But it won’t go no further than the fire-line, and as soon as there’re men enough to draw that all around, it’s _got_ to stop!” He went on to his companion, irritably, pressing his hand to his side: “There ain’t no use talkin’, I got to quit fire-fightin’. My heart ‘most gi’n out on me in the hottest of that. And yit I’m only sixty!”
“It ain’t no job for old folks,” said the other bitterly. “If it had ha’ gone a hundred feet further that way, ‘twould ha’ been in where Ed Hewitt’s been lumberin’, and if it had got into them dry tops and brush–well, I guess ‘twould ha’ gone from here to Chitford village before it stopped. And ‘twouldn’t ha’ stopped there, neither!”
The old man said reflectively: “‘Twas the first load of men did the business. ‘Twas nip and tuck down to the last foot if we could stop it on that side. I tell you, ten minutes of that kind o’ work takes about ten years off’n a man’s life. We’d just about gi’n up when we saw ’em coming. I bet I won’t be no gladder to see the pearly gates than I was to see them men with hoes.”
Molly turned a glowing, quivering face of pride on Sylvia, and then looked past her shoulder with a startled expression into the eyes of one of the fire-fighters, a tall, lean, stooping man, blackened and briar-torn like the rest. “Why, Cousin Austin!” she cried with vehement surprise, “what in the world–” In spite of his grime, she gave him a hearty, astonished, affectionate kiss.
“I was just wondering,” said the man, smiling indulgently down on her, “how soon you’d recognize me, you little scatter-brain.”
“I thought you were going to stick in Colorado all summer,” said Molly.
“Well, I heard they were short of help at Austin Farm and I came on to help get in the hay,” said the man. Both he and Molly seemed to consider this a humorous speech. Then, remembering Sylvia, Molly went through a casual introduction. “This is my cousin–Austin Page–my _favorite_ cousin! He’s really awfully nice, though so plain to look at.” She went on, still astonished, “But how’d you get _here?_”
“Why, how does anybody in Vermont get to a forest fire?” he answered. “We were out in the hayfield, saw the smoke, left the horses, grabbed what tools we could find, and beat it through the woods. That’s the technique of the game up here.”
“I didn’t know your farm ran anywhere near here,” said Molly.
“It isn’t so terribly near. We came across lots tolerable fast. But there’s a little field, back up on the edge of the woods that isn’t so far. Grandfather used to raise potatoes there. I’ve got it into hay now,” he explained.
As they talked, the fire beyond them gave definite signs of yielding. It had evidently been stopped on the far side and now advanced nowhere, showed no longer a malign yellow crest, but only rolling sullenly heavenward a diminishing cloud of smoke. The fire-fighters began to straggle back across the burned tract towards the road, their eyeballs gleaming white in their dark faces.
“Oh, they mustn’t walk! I’ll take them back–the darlings!” said Molly, starting for her car. She was quite her usual brisk, free-and-easy self now. “Cracky! I hope I’ve got gas enough. I’ve certainly been going _some!_”
“Why don’t you leave me here?” suggested Sylvia. “I’ll walk home. That’ll leave room for one more.”
“Oh, you can’t do that!” protested Molly faintly, though she was evidently at once struck with the plan. “How’d you find your way home?” She turned to her cousin. “See here, Austin, why don’t _you_ take Sylvia home? You ought to go anyhow and see Grandfather. Hell be awfully hurt to think you’re here and haven’t been to see him.” She threw instantly into this just conceived idea the force which always carried through her plans. “Do go! I feel so grateful to these men I don’t want one of them to walk a step!”
Sylvia had thought of a solitary walk, longing intensely for isolation, and she did not at all welcome the suggestion of adapting herself to a stranger. The stranger, on his part, looked a very unchivalrous hesitation; but this proved to be only a doubt of Sylvia’s capacity as a walker.
“If you don’t mind climbing a bit, I can take you over the gap between Hemlock and Windward Mountain and make a bee-line for Lydford. It’s not an hour from here, that way, but it’s ten miles around by the road–and hot and dusty too.”
“Can she _climb_!” ejaculated Molly scornfully, impatient to be off with her men. “She went up to Prospect Rock in forty minutes.”
She high-handedly assumed that everything was settled as she wished it, and running towards the car, called with an easy geniality to the group of men, starting down the road on foot, “Here, wait a minute, folks, I’ll take you back!”
She mounted the car, started the engine, waved her hand to the two behind her, and was off.
The lean, stooping man looked dubiously at Sylvia. “You’re sure you don’t mind a little climb?” he said.
“Oh no, I like it,” she said listlessly. The moment for her was of stale, wearied return to real life, to the actual world which she was continually finding uglier than she hoped. The recollection of Felix Morrison came back to her in a bitter tide.
“All ready?” asked her companion, mopping his forehead with a very dirty handkerchief.
“All ready,” she said and turned, with a hanging head, to follow him.
CHAPTER XXVII
BETWEEN WINDWARD AND HEMLOCK MOUNTAINS
For a time as they plodded up the steep wood-road, overgrown with ferns and rank grass, with dense green walls of beech and oak saplings on either side, what few desultory remarks they exchanged related to Molly, she being literally the only topic of common knowledge between them. Sylvia, automatically responding to her deep-lying impulse to give pleasure, to be pleasing, made an effort to overcome her somber lassitude and spoke of Molly’s miraculous competence in dealing with the fire. Her companion said that of course Molly hadn’t made all that up out of her head on the spur of the moment. After spending every summer of her life in Lydford, it would be surprising if so energetic a child as Molly hadn’t assimilated the Vermont formula for fighting fire. “They always put for the nearest factory and get all hands out,” he explained, adding meditatively, as he chewed on a twig: “All the same, the incident shows what I’ve always maintained about Molly: that she is, like ‘most everybody, lamentably miscast. Molly’s spirit oughtn’t to have taken up its abiding place in that highly ornamental blond shell, condemned after a fashionable girl’s education to pendulum swings between Paris and New York and Lydford. It doesn’t fit for a cent. It ought to have for habitation a big, gaunt, powerful man’s body, and for occupation the running of a big factory.” He seemed to be philosophizing more to himself than to Sylvia, and beyond a surprised look into his extremely grimy face, she made no comment. She had taken for granted from the talk between him and Molly that he was one of the “forceful, impossible Montgomery cousins,” and had cast her own first remarks in a tone calculated to fit in with the supposititious dialect of such a person. But his voice, his intonations, and his whimsical idea about Molly fitted in with the conception of an “impossible” as little as with the actual visible facts of his ragged shirt-sleeves and faded, earth-stained overalls. They toiled upwards in silence for some moments, the man still chewing on his birch-twig. He noticed her sidelong half-satirical glance at it. “Don’t you want one?” he asked, and gravely cut a long, slim rod from one of the saplings in the green wall shutting them into the road. As he gave it to her he explained, “It’s the kind they make birch beer of. You nip off the bark with your teeth. You’ll like it.”
Still more at sea as to what sort of person he might be, and now fearing perhaps to wound him if he should turn out to be a very unsophisticated one, Sylvia obediently set her teeth to the lustrous, dark bark and tore off a bit, which gave out in her mouth a mild, pleasant aromatic tang, woodsy and penetrating, unlike any other taste she knew. “Good, isn’t it?” said her companion simply.
She nodded, slowly awakening to a tepid curiosity about the individual who strode beside her, lanky and powerful in his blue jeans. What an odd circumstance, her trudging off through the woods thus with a guide of whom she knew nothing except that he was Molly Sommerville’s cousin and worked a Vermont farm–and had certainly the dirtiest face she had ever seen, with the exception of the coal-blackened stokers in the power-house of the University. He spoke again, as though in answer to what might naturally be in her mind: “At the top of the road it crosses a brook, and I think a wash would be possible. I’ve a bit of soap in my pocket that’ll help–though it takes quite a lot of scrubbing to get off fire-fighting grime.” He looked pointedly down at her as he talked.
Sylvia was so astonished that she dropped back through years of carefully acquired self-consciousness into a moment of the stark simplicity of childhood. “Why–is _my_ face dirty?” she cried out.
The man beside her apparently found the contrast between her looks and the heartfelt sincerity of her question too much for him. He burst into helpless laughter, though he was adroit enough to thrust forward as a pretext, “The picture of my _own_ grime that I get from your accent is tremendous!” But it was evidently not at his own joke that he was laughing.
For an instant Sylvia hung poised very near to extreme annoyance. Never since she had been grown up, had she appeared at such an absurd disadvantage. But at once the mental picture of herself, making inaudible carping strictures on her companion’s sootiness and, all unconscious, lifting to observe it a critical countenance as swart as his own–the incongruity smote her deliciously, irresistibly! Sore heart or not, black depression notwithstanding, she needs must laugh, and having laughed, laugh again, laugh louder and longer, and finally, like a child, laugh for the sake of laughing, till out through this unexpected channel she discharged much of the stagnant bitterness around her heart.
Her companion laughed with her. The still, sultry summer woods echoed with the sound. “How human, how lusciously _human_!” he exclaimed. “Neither of us thought that _he_ might be the blackened one!”
“Oh, mine _can’t_ be as bad as yours!” gasped out Sylvia, but when she rubbed a testing handkerchief on her cheek, she went off in fresh peals at the sight of the resultant black smears.
“Don’t, for Heaven’s sake, waste that handkerchief,” cautioned her companion. “It’s the only towel between us. Mine’s impossible!” He showed her the murky rag which was his own; and as they spoke, they reached the top of the road, heard the sound of water, and stood beside the brook.
He stepped across it, in one stride of his long legs, rolled up his shirt-sleeves, took a book out of his pocket, laid it on a stone, and knelt down. “I choose this for _my_ wash-basin,” he said, indicating a limpid pool paved with clean gray pebbles.
Sylvia answered in the same note of play, “This’ll be mine.” It lay at the foot of a tiny waterfall, plashing with a tinkling note into transparent shallows. She cast an idle glance on the book he had laid down and read its title, “A History of the Institution of Property,” and reflected that she had been right in thinking it had a familiar-looking cover. She had dusted books with that sort of cover all her life.
Molly’s cousin produced from his overalls a small piece of yellow kitchen-soap, which he broke into scrupulously exact halves and presented with a grave flourish to Sylvia. “Now, go to it,” he exhorted her; “I bet I get a better wash than you.”
Sylvia took off her hat, rolled up her sleeves, and began on vigorous ablutions. She had laughed, yes, and heartily, but in her complicated many-roomed heart a lively pique rubbed shoulders with her mirth, and her merriment was tinctured with a liberal amount of the traditional feminine horrified disgust at having been uncomely, at having unconsciously been subjected to an indignity. She was determined that no slightest stain should remain on her smooth, fine-textured skin. She felt, as a pretty woman always feels, that her personality was indissolubly connected with her looks, and it was a symbolic act which she performed as she fiercely scrubbed her face with the yellow soap till its acrid pungency blotted out for her the woodland aroma of moist earth and green leaves. She dashed the cold water up on her cheeks till the spattering drops gleamed like crystals on the crisp waviness of her ruddy brown hair. She washed her hands and arms in the icy mountain water till they were red with the cold, hot though the day was. She was chilled, and raw with the crude astringency of the soap, but she felt cleansed to the marrow of her bones, as though there had been some mystic quality in this lustration in running water, performed under the open sky. The racy, black-birch tang still lingering on her tongue was a flavor quite in harmony with this severely washed feeling. It was a taste notably clean.
She looked across the brook at her companion, now sitting back on his heels, and saw that there had emerged from his grime a thin, tanned, high-nosed face, topped by drab-colored hair of no great abundance and lighted by a pair of extraordinarily clear, gray eyes. She perceived no more in the face at that moment, because the man, as he looked up at her, became nothing but a dazzled mirror from which was reflected back to her the most flattering image of her own appearance. Almost actually she saw herself as she appeared to him, a wood-nymph, kneeling by the flowing water, vital, exquisite, strong, radiant in a cool flush, her uncovered hair gleaming in a thousand loosened waves. Like most comely women of intelligence Sylvia was intimately familiar with every phase of her own looks, and she knew down to the last blood-corpuscle that she had never looked better. But almost at once came the stab that Felix Morrison was not the man who was looking at her, and the heartsick recollection that he would never again be there to see her. Her moment of honest joy in being lovely passed. She stood up with a clouded face, soberly pulled down her sleeves, and picked up her hat.
“Oh, why don’t you leave it off?” said the man across the brook. “You’d be so much more comfortable!” She knew that he meant her hair was too pretty to cover, and did not care what he meant. “All right, I’ll carry it,” she assented indifferently.
He did not stir, gazing up at her frankly admiring. Sylvia made out, from the impression he evidently now had of her, that her face had really been very, very dirty; and at the recollection of that absurd ascent of the mountain by those two black-faced, twig-chewing individuals, a return of irrepressible laughter quivered on her lips. Before his eyes, as swiftly, as unaccountably, as utterly as an April day shifts its moods, she had changed from radiant, rosy wood-goddess to saddened mortal and thence on into tricksy, laughing elf. He burst out on her, “Who _are_ you, anyhow?”
She remembered with a start. “Why, that’s so, Molly didn’t mention my name–isn’t that like Molly! Why, I’m Sylvia Marshall,”
“You may be _named_ Sylvia Marshall!” he said, leaving an inference in the air like incense.
“Well, yes, to be sure,” rejoined Sylvia; “I heard somebody only the other day say that an introduction was the quaintest of grotesques, since people’s names are the most–“
He applied a label with precision. “Oh, you know Morrison?”
She was startled at this abrupt emergence of the name which secretly filled her mind and was aware with exasperation that she was blushing. Her companion appeared not to notice this. He was attempting the difficult feat of wiping his face on the upper part of his sleeve, and said in the intervals of effort: “Well, you know _my_ name. Molly didn’t forget that.”
“But _I_ did,” Sylvia confessed. “I was so excited by the fire I never noticed at all. I’ve been racking my brains to remember, all the way up here.”
For some reason the man seemed quite struck with this statement and eyed her with keenness as he said: “Oh–really? Well, my name is Austin Page.” At the candid blankness of her face he showed a boyish flash of white teeth in a tanned face. “Do you mean to say you’ve never heard of me?”
“_Should_ I?” said Sylvia, with a graceful pretense of alarm. “Do you write, or something? Lay it to my ignorance. It’s immense.”
He shook his head. He smiled down on her. She noticed now that his eyes were very kind as well as clear and keen. “No, I don’t write, or anything. There’s no reason why you should ever have heard of me. I only thought–I thought possibly Molly or Uncle George might have happened to mention me.”
“I’m only on from the West for a visit,” explained Sylvia. “I never was in Lydford before. I don’t know the people there.”
“Well then, to avoid Morrison’s strictures on introductions I’ll add to my name the information that I am thirty-two years old; a graduate of Columbia University; that I have some property in Colorado which gives me a great deal of trouble; and a farm with a wood lot in Vermont which is the joy of my heart. I cannot endure politics; I play the flute, like my eggs boiled three minutes, and admire George Meredith.”
His manoeuvers with his sleeve were so preposterous that Sylvia now cried to him: “Oh, don’t twist around that way. You’ll give yourself a crick in the neck. Here’s my handkerchief. We were going to share that, anyhow.”
“And you,” he went on gravely, wiping his face with the bit of cambric, “are Sylvia Marshall, presumably Miss; you can laugh at a joke on yourself; are not afraid to wash your face with kitchen soap; and apparently are the only girl in the twentieth century who has not a mirror and a powder-puff concealed about her person.”
All approbation was sweet to Sylvia. She basked in this. “Oh, I’m a Hottentot, a savage from the West, as I told you,” she said complacently.
“You’ve been in Lydford long enough to hear Morrison hold forth on the idiocies of social convention, the while he neatly manipulates them to his own advantage.”
Sylvia had dreaded having to speak of Morrison, but she was now greatly encouraged by the entire success of her casual tone, as she explained, “Oh, he’s an old friend of my aunt’s, and he’s been at the house a good deal.” She ventured to try herself further, and inquired with a bright look of interest, “What do you think of his engagement to your cousin Molly?”
He was petrified with astonishment. “_Molly_ engaged to _Morrison_!” he cried. “We can’t be talking about the same people. I mean _Felix_ Morrison the critic.”
She felt vindicated by his stupefaction and liked him for it. “Why, yes; hadn’t you heard?” she asked, with an assumption of herself seeing nothing surprising in the news.
“No, I hadn’t, and I can’t believe it now!” he said, blinking his eyes. “I never heard such an insane combination of names in my life.” He went on, “What under the _sun_ does Molly want of Morrison!”
Sylvia was vexed with him for this unexpected view. He was not so discerning as she had thought. She turned away and picked up her hat. “We ought to be going on,” she said, and as they walked she answered, “You don’t seem to have a very high opinion of Mr. Morrison.”
He protested with energy. “Oh yes, I have. Quite the contrary, I think him one of the most remarkable men I know, and one of the finest. I admire him immensely. I’d trust his taste sooner than I would my own.”
To this handsome tribute Sylvia returned, smiling, “The inference is that you don’t think much of Molly.”
“I _know_ Molly!” he said simply. “I’ve known her and loved her ever since she was a hot-tempered, imperious little girl–which is all she is now. Engaged … and engaged to Morrison! It’s a plain case of schoolgirl infatuation!” He was lost in wonder, uneasy wonder it seemed, for after a period of musing he brought out: “They’ll cut each other’s throats inside six months. Or Molly’ll cut her own. What under the sun was her grandfather thinking of?”
Sylvia said gravely, “Girls’ grandfathers have such an influence in their marriages.”
He smiled a rueful recognition of the justice of her thrust and then fell into silence.
The road did not climb up now, but led along the side of the mountain. Through the dense woods the sky-line, first guessed at, then clearly seen between the thick-standing tree-trunks, sank lower and lower. “We are approaching,” said Page, motioning in front of them, “the jumping-off place.” They passed from the tempered green light of the wood and emerged upon a great windy plateau, carpeted thickly with deep green moss, flanked right and left with two mountain peaks and roofed over with an expanse of brilliant summer sky. Before them the plateau stretched a mile or more, wind-swept, sun-drenched, with an indescribable bold look of great altitude; but close to them at one side ran a parapet-like line of tumbled rock and beyond this a sheer descent. The eye leaped down abrupt slopes of forest to the valley they had left, now a thousand feet below them, jewel-like with mystic blues and greens, tremulous with heat. On the noble height where they stood, the wind blew cool from the sea of mist-blue peaks beyond the valley.
Sylvia was greatly moved. “Oh, what a wonderful spot!” she said under her breath. “I never dreamed that anything could be–” She burst out suddenly, scarcely knowing what she said, “Oh, I wish my _mother_ could be here!” She had not thought of her mother for days, and now hardly knew that she had spoken her name. Standing there, poised above the dark richness of the valley, her heart responding to those vast airy spaces by an upward-soaring sweep, the quick tears of ecstasy were in her eyes. She had entirely forgotten herself and her companion. He did not speak. His eyes were on her face.
She moved to the parapet of rock and leaned against it. The action brought her to herself and she flashed around on Page a grateful smile. “It’s a very beautiful spot you’ve brought me to,” she said.
He came up beside her now. “It’s a favorite of mine,” he said quietly. “If I come straight through the woods it’s not more than a mile from my farm. I come up here for the sunsets sometimes–or for dawn.”
Sylvia found the idea almost too much for her. “_Oh!_” she cried–“dawn here!”
“Yes,” said the man, smiling faintly. “It’s all of that!”
In her life of plains and prairies Sylvia had never been upon a great height, had never looked down and away upon such reaches of far valley, such glorious masses of sunlit mountain; and beyond them, giving wings to the imagination, were mountains, more mountains, distant, incalculably distant, with unseen hollow valleys between; and finally, mountains again, half cloud, melting indistinguishably into the vaporous haze of the sky. Above her, sheer and vast, lay Hemlock Mountain, all its huge bulk a sleeping, passionless calm. Beyond was the solemnity of Windward Mountain’s concave shell, full to the brim with brooding blue shadows, a well of mystery in that day of wind-blown sunshine. Beneath her, above her, before her, seemingly the element in which she was poised, was space, illimitable space. She had never been conscious of such vastness, she was abashed by it, she was exalted by it, she knew a moment of acute shame for the pettiness of her personal grievances. For a time her spirit was disembarrassed of the sorry burden of egotism, and she drank deep from the cup of healing which Nature holds up in such instants of beatitude. Her eyes were shining pools of peace….
They went on in a profound silence across the plateau, the deep, soft moss bearing them up with a tough elasticity, the sun hot and lusty on their heads, the sweet, strong summer wind swift and loud in their ears, the only sound in all that enchanted upland spot. Often Sylvia lifted her face to the sky, so close above her, to the clouds moving with a soundless rhythm across the sky; once or twice she turned her head suddenly from one side to the other, to take in all the beauty at one glance, and smiled on it all, a vague, sunny, tender smile. But she did not speak.
As she trod on the thick moss upspringing under her long, light step, her advance seemed as buoyant as though she stepped from cloud to cloud….
When they reached the other side, and were about to begin the descent into Lydford valley, she lingered still. She looked down into the valley before her, across to the mountains, and, smiling, with half-shut eyes of supreme satisfaction, she said under her breath: “It’s Beethoven–just the blessedness of Beethoven! The valley is a legato passage, quiet and flowing; those far, up-pricking hills, staccato; and the mountains here, the solemn chords.”
Her companion did not answer. She looked up at him, inquiringly, thinking that he had not heard her, and found him evidently too deeply moved to speak. She was startled, almost frightened, almost shocked by the profundity of his gaze upon her. Her heart stood still and gave a great leap. Chiefly she was aware of an immense astonishment and incredulity. An hour before he had never seen her, had never heard of her–and during that hour she had been barely aware of him, absorbed in herself, indifferent. How could he in that hour have …
He looked away and said steadily, “–and the river is the melody that binds it all together.”
Sylvia drew a great breath of relief. She had been the victim of some extraordinary hallucination: “–with the little brooks for variations on the theme,” she added hastily.
He held aside an encroaching briar, stretching its thorny arm across the path. “Here’s the beginning of the trail down to Lydford,” he said. “We will be there in twenty minutes. It’s almost a straight drop down.”
CHAPTER XXVIII
SYLVIA ASKS HERSELF “WHY NOT?”
If Sylvia wondered, as she dropped down the heights to the valley, what her reception might be at her aunt’s ceremonious household when she entered escorted by a strange hatless man in blue overalls, her fancy fell immeasurably short of the actual ensuing sensation. Mrs. Marshall-Smith, her stepson, Felix Morrison, and old Mr. Sommerville were all sitting together on the wide north veranda, evidently waiting to be called to luncheon when, at half-past one, the two pedestrians emerged through a side wicket in the thick green hedge of spruce, and advanced up the path, with the free, swinging step of people who have walked far and well. The effect on the veranda was unimaginable. Sheer, open-mouthed stupefaction blurred for an instant the composed, carefully arranged masks of those four exponents of decorum. They gaped and stared, unable to credit their eyes.
And then, according to their natures, they acted. Mrs. Marshall-Smith rose quickly, smiled brilliantly, and stepped forward with welcoming outstretched hands. “Why, Sylvia dear, how delightful! What an unexpected pleasure, Mr. Page!”
Old Mr. Sommerville fairly bounded past Sylvia, caught the man’s arm, and said in an anxious, affectionate, startled voice, “Why, Austin! Austin! Austin!”
Morrison rose, but stood quietly by his chair, his face entirely expressionless, palpably and correctly “at attention.” He had not seen Sylvia since the announcement of his engagement the day before. He gave her now a graceful, silent, friendly salute from a distance as she stood by her aunt, he called out to her companion a richly cordial greeting of “Well, Page. This is luck indeed!” but he indicated by his immobility that as a stranger he would not presume to go further until the first interchange between blood-kin was over.
As for Arnold, he neither stirred from his chair, nor opened his mouth to speak. A slow smile widened on his lips: it expanded. He grinned delightedly down at his cigarette, and up at the ceiling, and finally broke into an open laugh of exquisite enjoyment of the scene before him.
Four people were talking at once; Mr. Sommerville, a dismayed old hand still clutching at the new-comer, was protesting with extreme vigor, and being entirely drowned out by the others. “Of course he can’t stay–as he _is!_ I’ll go home with him at once! His room at my house is always ready for him!–fresh clothes!–No, no–impossible to stay!” Mrs. Marshall-Smith was holding firm with her loveliest manner of warm friendliness concentrated on Page. “Oh, no ceremony, Mr. Page, not between old friends. Luncheon is just ready–who cares how you look?” She did not physically dispute with Mr. Sommerville the possession of the new-comer, but she gave entirely that effect.
Sylvia, unable to meet Morrison’s eyes, absorbed in the difficulty of the moment for her, unillumined by the byplay between her aunt and old Mr. Sommerville, strove for an appearance of vivacious loquacity, and cast into the conversation entirely disregarded bits of description of the fire. “Oh, Tantine, such an excitement!–we took nine men with hoes up such a steep–!” And finally Page, resisting old Mr. Sommerville’s pull on his arm, was saying: “If luncheon is ready, and I’m invited, no more needs to be said. I’ve been haying and fire-fighting since seven this morning. A wolf is nothing compared with me.” He looked across the heads of the three nearest him and called to Arnold: “Smith, you’ll lend me some flannels, won’t you? We must be much of the same build.”
Mrs. Marshall-Smith turned, taking no pains to hide her satisfaction. She positively gloated over the crestfallen Mr. Sommerville. “Sylvia, run quick and have Helene smooth your hair. And call to Tojiko to put on an extra place for luncheon. Arnold, take Mr. Page up to your room, won’t you, so that he–“
Sylvia, running up the stairs, heard her late companion protesting: “Oh, just for a change of clothes, only a minute–you needn’t expect me to do any washing. I’m clean. I’m washed within an inch of my life–yellow soap–kitchen soap!”
“And our little scented toilet futilities,” Morrison’s cameo of small-talk carried to the upper hall. “What could they add to such a Spartan lustration?”
“Hurry, Helene,” said Sylvia. “It is late, and Mr. Page is dying of hunger,”
In spite of the exhortation to haste, Helene stopped short, uplifted brush in hand. “Mr. Page, the millionaire!” she exclaimed.
Sylvia blinked at her in the glass, amazed conjectures racing through her mind. But she had sufficient self-possession to say, carelessly as though his identity was nothing to her: “I don’t know. It is the first time I have seen him. He certainly is not handsome.”
Helene thrust in the hairpins with impassioned haste and deftness, and excitedly snatched a lace jacket from a drawer. To the maid’s despair Sylvia refused this adornment, refused the smallest touch of rouge, refused an ornament in her hair. Helene wrung her hands. “But see, Mademoiselle is not wise! For what good is it to be so savage! He is more rich than all! They say he owns all the State of Colorado!”
Sylvia, already in full retreat towards the dining-room, caught this last geographic extravagance of Gallic fancy, and laughed, and with this mirth still in her face made her re-entry on the veranda. She had not been away three minutes from the group there, and she was to the eye as merely flushed and gay when she came back as when she went away; but a revolution had taken place. Closely shut in her hand, she held, held fast, the key Helene had thrust there. Behind her smile, her clear, bright look of valiant youth, a great many considerations were being revolved with extreme rapidity by an extremely swift and active brain.
Swift and active as was the brain, it fairly staggered under the task of instantly rearranging the world according to the new pattern: for the first certainty to leap into sight was that the pattern was utterly changed by the events of the morning. She had left the house, betrayed, defenseless save for a barren dignity, and she had re-entered it in triumph, or at least with a valid appearance of triumph, an appearance which had already tided her over the aching difficulty of the first meeting with Morrison and might carry her … she had no time now to think how far.
Page and Arnold were still invisible when she emerged again on the veranda, and Mrs. Marshall-Smith pounced on her with the frankest curiosity. “Sylvia, do tell us–how in the world–“
Sylvia was in the midst of a description of the race to the fire, as vivid as she could make it, when Arnold sauntered back and after him, in a moment, Page, astonishingly transformed by clothes. His height meant distinction now. Sylvia noted again his long, strong hands, his aquiline, tanned face and clear eyes, his thoughtful, observant eyes. There was a whimsical quirk of his rather thin but gentle lips which reminded her of the big bust of Emerson in her father’s study. She liked all this; but her suspiciousness, alert for affront, since the experience with Morrison, took offense at his great ease of manner. It had seemed quite natural and unaffected to her, in fact she had not at all noticed it before; but now that she knew of his great wealth, she instantly conceived a resentful idea that possibly it might come from the self-assurance of a man who knows himself much courted. She held her head high, gave to him as to Arnold a nod of careless recognition, and continued talking: “Such a road–so steep–sand half-way to the hubs, such water-bars!” She turned to Morrison with her first overt recognition of the new status between them. “You ought to have seen your fiancee! She was wonderful! I was proud of her!”
Morrison nodded a thoughtful assent. “Yes, Molly’s energy is irresistible,” he commented, casting his remark in the form of a generalization the significance of which did not pass unnoticed by Sylvia’s sharp ears. They were the first words he had spoken to her since his engagement.
“Luncheon is ready,” said Mrs. Marshall-Smith. “Do come in.” Every one by this time being genuinely hungry, and for various reasons extremely curious about the happenings back of Sylvia’s appearance, the meal was dedicated frankly to eating, varied only by Sylvia’s running account of the fire. “And then Molly wanted to take the fire-fighters home, and I offered to walk to have more room for them, and Mr. Page brought me up the other side of Hemlock and over the pass between Hemlock and Windward and down past Deer Cliff, home,” she wound up, compressing into tantalizing brevity what was patently for her listeners by far the most important part of the expedition.
“Well, whatever route he took, it is astonishing that he knew the way to Lydford at all,” commented Mrs. Marshall-Smith. “I don’t believe you’ve been here before for years!” she said to Page.
“It’s my confounded shyness,” he explained, turning to Sylvia with a twinkle. “The grand, sophisticated ways of Lydford are too much for the nerves of a plain-living rustic like me. When I farm in Vermont the spirit of the place takes hold of me. I’m quite apt to eat my pie with my knife, and Lydford wouldn’t like that.”
Sylvia was aware, through the laughter which followed this joking remark, that there was an indefinable stir around the table. His turning to her had been pronounced. She took a sore pleasure in Morrison’s eclipse. For the first time he was not the undisputed center of that circle. He accepted it gravely, a little preoccupied, a little absent, a wonderfully fine and dignified figure. Under her misanthropic exultation, Sylvia felt again and again the stab of her immense admiration for him, her deep affinity for his way of conducting life. Whatever place he might take in the circle around the luncheon table, she found him inevitably at the center of all her own thoughts. However it might seem to those evidently greatly struck with her extraordinary good luck, her triumph was in reality only the most pitiful of pretenses. But such as it was, and it gleamed richly enough on the eyes of the onlookers, she shook it out with a flourish and gave no sign of heartsick qualms. She gave a brilliantly undivided attention to the bit of local history Page was telling her, of a regiment of Green Mountain Boys who had gone down to the Battle of Bennington over the pass between Windward and Hemlock Mountain, and she was able to stir Page to enthusiasm by an appreciative comparison of their march with the splendid and affecting incident before Marathon, when the thousand hoplites from the little town of Plataea crossed the Cithaeron range and went down to the plain to join the Athenians in their desperate stand.
“How do you _happen_ to come East just now, anyhow?” inquired old Mr. Sommerville, resolutely shouldering his way into the conversation.
“My yellow streak!” affirmed his nephew. “Colorado got too much for me. And besides, I was overcome by an atavistic longing to do chores.” He turned to Sylvia again, the gesture as unconscious and simple as a boy’s. “My great-grandfather was a native of these parts, and about once in so often I revert to type.”
“All my mother’s people came from this region too,” Sylvia said. She added meditatively, “And I think I must have reverted to type–up there on the mountain, this morning.”
He looked at her silently, with softening eyes.
“You’ll be going back soon, I suppose, as usual!” said old Mr. Sommerville with determination.
“To Colorado?” inquired Page. “No, I think–I’ve a notion I’ll stay on this summer for some time. There is an experiment I want to try with alfalfa in Vermont.”
Over his wineglass Arnold caught Sylvia’s eye, and winked.
“Still reading as much as ever, I suppose.” Mr. Sommerville was not to be put down. “When I last saw you, it was some fool socialistic poppycock about the iniquity of private exploitation of natural resources. How’d they ever have been exploited any other way I’d like to know! What’s socialism? Organized robbery! Nothing else! ‘Down with success! Down with initiative! Down with brains!’ Stuff!”
“It’s not socialism this time: it’s Professor Merritt’s theories on property,” said Sylvia to the old gentleman, blandly ignoring his ignoring of her.
Page stared at her in astonishment. “Are you a clairvoyant?” he cried.
“No, no,” she explained, laughing. “You took it out of your pocket up there by the brook.”
“But you saw only the title. Merritt’s name isn’t on the cover.”
“Oh, it’s a pretty well-known book,” said Sylvia easily. “And my father’s a professor of Economics. When I was little I used to have books like that to build houses with, instead of blocks. And I’ve had to keep them in order and dusted ever since. I’m not saying that I know much about their insides.”
“Just look there!” broke in Arnold. “Did I ever see a young lady pass up such a perfectly good chance to bluff!”
As usual nobody paid the least attention to his remark. The conversation shifted to a radical play which had been on the boards in Paris, the winter before.
After luncheon, they adjourned into the living-room. As the company straggled across the wide, dimly shining, deeply shaded hall, Sylvia felt her arm seized and held, and turning her head, looked into the laughing face of Arnold. “What kind of flowers does Judy like the best?” he inquired, the question evidently the merest pretext to detain her, for as the others moved out of earshot he said in a delighted whisper, his eyes gleaming in the dusk with amused malice: “Go it, Sylvia! Hit ’em out! It’s worth enduring oceans of Greek history to see old Sommerville squirm. Molly gone–Morrison as poor as a church mouse; and now Page going fast before his very eyes–“
She shook off his hand with genuine annoyance. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Arnold. You’re horrid! Judith doesn’t like cut flowers at all,–any kind. She likes them alive, on plants.”
“She _would!_” Arnold was rapt in his habitual certainty that every peculiarity of Judith’s was another reason for prostrate adoration. “I’ll send her a window-box for every window in the hospital.” His admiration overflowed to Judith’s sister. He patted her on the shoulder. “You’re all right too, Sylvia. You’re batting about three-sixty, right now. I’ve always told the girls when they said Page was offish that if they could only get in under his guard once–and somehow you’ve done it. I bet on _you_–” He began to laugh at her stern face of reproof. “Oh, yes, yes, I agree! You don’t know what I’m talking about! It’s just alfalfa in Vermont! Only my low vulgarity to think anything else!” He moved away down the hall. “Beat it! I slope!”
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Away! Away!” he answered. “Anywhere that’s away. The air is rank with Oscar Wilde and the Renaissance. I feel them coming.” Still laughing, he bounded upstairs, three steps at a time.
Sylvia stepped forward, crossed the threshold of the living-room, and paused by the piano, penetrated by bitter-sweet associations. If Morrison felt them also, he gave no sign. He had chosen a chair by a distant window and was devoting himself to Molly’s grandfather, who accepted this delicate and entirely suitable attention with a rather glum face. Mrs. Marshall-Smith and Page still stood in the center of the room, and turned as Sylvia came in. “Do give us some music, Sylvia,” said her aunt, sinking into a chair while Page came forward to sit near the piano.
Sylvia’s fingers rested on the keys for a moment, her face very grave, almost somber, and then, as though taking a sudden determination, she began to play a Liszt Liebes-Traum. It was the last music Morrison had played to her before the beginning of the change. Into its fevered cadences she poured the quivering, astonished hurt of her young heart.
No one stirred during the music nor for the moment afterward, in which she turned about to face the room. She looked squarely at Morrison, who was rolling a cigarette with meticulous care, and as she looked, he raised his eyes and gave her across the room one deep, flashing glance of profound significance. That was all. That was enough. That was everything. Sylvia turned back to the piano shivering, hot and cold with secret joy. His look said, “Yes, of course, a thousand times of course, you are the one in my heart.” What the facts said for him was, “But I am going to marry Molly because she has money.”
Sylvia was horrified that she did not despise him, that she did not resent his entering her heart again with the intimacy of that look. Her heart ran out to welcome him back; but from the sense of furtiveness she shrank back with her lifetime habit and experience of probity, with the instinctive distaste for stealth engendered only by long and unbroken acquaintance with candor. With a mental action as definite as the physical one of freeing her feet from a quicksand she turned away from the alluring, dim possibility opened to her by that look. No, no! No stains, no smears, no shufflings! She was conscious of no moral impulse, in the usual sense of the word. Her imagination took in no possibility of actual wrong. But when, with a fastidious impulse of good taste, she turned her back on something ugly, she turned her back unwittingly on something worse than ugly.
But it was not easy! Oh, not at all easy! She quailed with a sense of her own weakness, so unexpected, so frightening. Would she resist it the next time? How pierced with helpless ecstasy she had been by that interchange of glances! What was there, in that world, by which she could steady herself?
“How astonishingly well you play,” said Page, rousing himself from the dreamy silence of appreciation.
“I ought to,” she said with conscious bitterness. “I earn my living by teaching music.”
She was aware from across the room of an electric message from Aunt Victoria protesting against her perversity; and she reflected with a morose amusement that however delicately phrased Aunt Victoria’s protests might be, its substance was the same as that of Helene, crying out on her for not adding the soupcon of rouge. She took a sudden resolution. Well, why not? Everything conspired to push her in that direction. The few factors which did not were mere imbecile idealism, or downright hypocrisy. She drew a long breath. She smiled at Page, a smile of reference to something in common between them. “Shan’t I play you some Beethoven?” she asked, “something with a legato passage and great solemn chords, and a silver melody binding the whole together?”
“Oh yes, do!” he said softly. And in a moment she was putting all of her intelligence, her training, and her capacity to charm into the tones of the E-flat Minuet.
CHAPTER XXIX
A HYPOTHETICAL LIVELIHOOD
The millionaire proprietor had asked them all over to the Austin Farm, and as they drew near the end of the very expensive and delicately served meal which Page had spoken of as a “picnic-lunch,” various plans for the disposition of the afternoon were suggested. These suggestions were prefaced by the frank statement of the owner of the place that whatever else the others did, it was his own intention to take Miss Marshall through a part of his pine plantations and explain his recent forestry operations to her. The assumption that Miss Marshall would of course be interested in his pine plantations and lumbering operations struck nobody but Miss Marshall as queer. With the most hearty and simple unconsciousness, they unanimously felt that of course Miss Marshall _would_ be interested in the pine plantations and the lumbering operations of any man who was worth nobody knew how many millions in coal, and who was so obviously interested in her.
Sylvia had been for some weeks observing the life about her with very much disillusioned eyes and she now labeled the feeling on the part of her friends with great accuracy, saying to herself cynically, “If it were prize guinea-pigs or collecting beer-steins, they would all be just as sure that I would jump up and say, ‘Oh yes, _do_ show me, Mr. Page!'” Following this moody reflection she immediately jumped up and said enthusiastically, “Oh yes, _do_ show me, Mr. Page!” The brilliance in her eyes during these weeks came partly from a relieved sense of escape from a humiliating position, and partly from an amusement at the quality of human nature which was as dubiously enjoyable as the grim amusement of biting on a sore tooth.
She now took her place by the side of their host, and thought, looking at his outdoor aspect, that her guess at what to wear had been better than Aunt Victoria’s or Molly’s. For the question of what to wear had been a burning one. Pressure had been put on her to don just a lacy, garden-party toilette of lawn and net as now automatically barred both Aunt Victoria and Molly from the proposed expedition to the woods. Nobody had had the least idea what was to be the color of the entertainment offered them, for the great significance of the affair was that it was the first time that Page had ever invited any one to the spot for which he evidently felt such an unaccountable affection. Aunt Victoria had explained to Sylvia, “It’s always at the big Page estate in Lenox that he entertains, or rather that he gets his mother to do the absolutely indispensable entertaining for him.” Morrison said laughingly: “Isn’t it the very quintessence of quaintness to visit him there! To watch his detached, whimsical air of not being in the least a part of all the magnificence which bears his name. He insists, you know, that he doesn’t begin to know his way around that huge house!” “It was his father who built the Lenox place,” commented Mrs. Marshall-Smith. “It suited _his_ taste to perfection. Austin seems to have a sort of Marie-Antoinette reaction towards a somewhat painfully achieved simplicity. He’s not the man to take any sort of pose. If he were, it would be impossible not to suspect him of a little pose in his fondness for going back to his farmer great-grandfather’s setting.” Guided by this conversation, and by shrewd observations of her own, Sylvia had insisted, even to the point of strenuousness, upon wearing to this first housewarming a cloth skirt and coat, tempering the severity of this costume with a sufficiently feminine and beruffled blouse of silk. As their car had swung up before the plain, square, big-chimneyed old house, and Page had come to meet them, dressed in khaki-colored forester’s garb, with puttees, Aunt Victoria had been generous enough to admit by an eye-flash to Sylvia that the girl knew her business very well. There was not, of course, Sylvia reflected, the slightest pretense of obscurity between them as to what, under the circumstances, her business was.
All this lay back of the fact that, as Sylvia, her face bright with spontaneous interest in pine plantations and lumbering operations, stepped to the side of the man in puttees, her costume exactly suited his own.
From the midst of a daring and extremely becoming arrangement of black and white striped chiffon and emerald-green velvet, Molly’s beautiful face smiled on them approvingly. For various reasons, the spectacle afforded her as much pleasure as it did extreme discomfort to her grandfather, and with her usual masterful grasp on a situation she began to arrange matters so that the investigation of pine plantations and lumber operations should be conducted _en tete-a-tete_. “Mrs. Marshall-Smith, you’re going to stay here, of course, to look at Austin’s lovely view! Think of his having hidden that view away from us all till now! I want to go through the house later on, and without Austin, so I can linger and pry if I like! I want to look at every single thing. It’s lovely–the completest Yankee setting! It looks as though we all ought to have on clean gingham aprons and wear steel-rimmed spectacles. No, Austin, don’t frown! I don’t mean that for a knock. I love it, honestly I do! I always thought I’d like to wear clean gingham aprons myself. The only things that are out of keeping are those shelves and shelves and shelves of solemn books with such terrible titles!”
“That’s a fact, Page,” said Morrison, laughing. “Molly’s hit the nail squarely. Your modern, economic spasms over the organization of industrialism are out of place in that delightful, eighteenth century, plain old interior. They threw _their_ fits over theology!”
The owner of the house nodded. “Yes, you know your period! A great-great-grandfather of mine, a ministerial person, had left a lot of books on the nature of the Trinity and Free Will and such. They had to be moved up to the attic to make room for mine. What books will be on those shelves a hundred years from now, I wonder?”
“Treatises on psychic analysis, on how to transfer thought without words, unless I read the signs of the times wrong,” Morrison hazarded a guess.
Molly was bored by this talk and anxious to get the walkers off. “You’d better be starting if you’re going far up on the mountain, Austin. We have to be back for a tea at Mrs. Neville’s, where Sylvia’s to pour. Mrs. Neville would have a thing or two to say to us, if we made her lose her main drawing card.”
“Are you coming, Morrison?” asked Page.
“No, he isn’t,” said Molly decidedly. “He’s going to stay to play to me on that delicious tin-panny old harpsichordy thing in your ‘best room.’ You do call it the ‘best room,’ don’t you? They always do in New England dialect stories. Grandfather, you have your cards with you, haven’t you? You always have. If you’ll get them out, Felix and Arnold and I’ll play whist with you.”
Only one of those thus laid hold of, slipped out from her strong little fingers. Arnold raised himself, joint by joint, from his chair, and announced that he was a perfect nut-head when it came to whist. “And, anyhow,” he went on insistently, raising his voice as Molly began to order him back into the ranks–“And, anyhow, I don’t want to play whist! And I do want to see what Page has been up to all this time he’s kept so dark about his goings-on over here. No, Molly, you needn’t waste any more perfectly good language on me. You can boss everybody else if you like, but I’m the original, hairy wild-man who gets what he wants.”
He strolled off across the old-fashioned garden and out of the gate with the other two, his attention given as usual to lighting a cigarette. It was an undertaking of some difficulty on that day of stiff September wind which blew Sylvia’s hair about her ears in bright, dancing flutters.
They were no more than out of earshot of the group left on the porch, than Sylvia, as so often happened in her growing acquaintanceship with Page, found herself obliged entirely to reconstruct an impression of him. It was with anything but a rich man’s arrogant certainty of her interest that he said, very simply as he said everything: “I appreciate very much, Miss Marshall, your being willing to come along and see all this. It’s a part of your general kindness to everybody. I hope it won’t bore you to extremity. I’m so heart and soul in it myself, I shan’t know when to stop talking about it. In fact I shan’t want to stop, even if I know I should. I’ve never said much about it to any one before, and I very much want your opinion on it.”
Sylvia felt a decent pinch of shame, and her eyes were not brilliant with sardonic irony but rather dimmed with self-distrust as she answered with a wholesome effort for honesty: “I really don’t know a single thing about forestry, Mr. Page. You’ll have to start in at the very beginning, and explain everything. I hope I’ve sense enough to take an intelligent interest.” Very different, this, from the meretricious sparkle of her, “Oh yes, _do_ show me, Mr. Page.” She felt that to be rather cheap, as she remembered it. She wondered if he had seen its significance, had seen through her. From a three weeks’ intensive acquaintance with him, she rather thought he had. His eyes were clear, formidably so. He put her on her mettle.
Arnold had lighted his cigarette by this time, offered one to Page with his incurable incapacity to remember that not every sane man smokes, and on being refused, put his hands deep in his pockets. The three tall young people were making short work of the stretch of sunny, windy, upland pasture, and were already almost in the edge of the woods which covered the slope of the mountain above them up to the very crest, jewel-green against the great, piled, cumulus clouds.
“Well, I _will_ begin at the beginning, then,” said Page. “I’ll begin back in 1762, when this valley was settled and my ever-so-many-greats-grandfather took possession of a big slice of this side of Hemlock Mountain, with the sole idea that trees were men’s enemies. The American colonists thought of forests, you know, as places for Indians to lurk, spots that couldn’t be used for corn, growths to be exterminated as fast as possible.”
They entered the woods now, walking at a good pace up the steeply rising, grass-grown wood-road. Sylvia quite consciously summoned all her powers of attention and concentration for the hour before her, determined to make a good impression to counteract whatever too great insight her host might have shown in the matter of her first interest. She bent her fine brows with the attention she had so often summoned to face a difficult final examination, to read at the correct tempo a complicated piece of music, to grasp the essentials of a new subject. Her trained interest in understanding things, which of late had been feeding on rather moldy scraps of cynical psychology, seized with energy and delight on a change of diet. She not only tried to be interested. Very shortly she was interested, absorbed, intent. What Page had to say fascinated her. She even forgot who he was, and that he was immensely rich. Though this forgetfulness was only momentary it was an unspeakable relief and refreshment to her.
She listened intently; at times she asked a pertinent question; as she walked she gave the man an occasional direct survey, as impersonal as though he were a book from which she was reading. And exactly as an intelligent reader, in a first perusal of a new subject, snatches the heart out of paragraph after paragraph, ignoring the details until later, she took to herself only the gist of her host’s recital. Yes, yes, she saw perfectly the generations of Vermont farmers who had hated trees because they meant the wilderness, and whose destruction of forests was only limited by the puniness of the forces they matched against the great wooded slopes of the mountains they pre-empted. And she saw later, the long years of utter neglect of those hacked-at and half-destroyed forests while Page’s grandfather and father descended on the city and on financial operations with the fierce, fresh energy of frontiersmen. She was struck by the fact that those ruthless victors of Wall Street had not sold the hundreds of worthless acres, which they never took the trouble to visit; and by the still more significant fact that as the older ones of the family died, the Austins, the Pages, the Woolsons, the Hawkers, and as legacy after legacy of more worthless mountain acres came by inheritance to the financiers, those tracts too were never sold. They never thought of them, Page told her, except grumblingly to pay the taxes on them; they considered them of ridiculously minute proportions compared to their own titanic manipulations, but they had never sold them. Sylvia saw them vividly, those self-made exiles from the mountains, and felt in them some unacknowledged loyalty to the soil, the barren soil which had borne them, some inarticulate affection which had lived through the heat and rage of their embattled lives. The taproot had been too deep for them to break off, and now from it there was springing up this unexpected stem, this sole survivor of their race who turned away from what had been the flaming breath of life in their brazen nostrils, back to the green fragrance of their mutilated and forgotten forests.
Not the least of the charm of this conception for Sylvia came from the fact that she quarried it out for herself from the bare narration presented to her, that she read it not at all in the words, but in the voice, the face, the manner of the raconteur. She was amused, she was touched, she was impressed by his studiously matter-of-fact version of his enterprise. He put forward with the shy, prudish shamefacedness of the New Englander the sound financial basis of his undertaking, as its main claim on his interest, as its main value. “I heard so much about forestry being nothing but a rich man’s plaything,” he said. “I just got my back up, and wanted to see if it couldn’t be made a paying thing. And I’ve proved it can be. I’ve had the closest account kept of income and outgo, and so far from being a drain on a man to reforest his woodland and administer it as he should, there’s an actual profit in it, enough to make a business of it, enough to occupy a man for his lifetime and his son after him, if he gives it his personal care.”
At this plain statement of a comprehensible fact, Arnold’s inattention gave place to a momentary interest. “Is there?” he asked with surprise. “How much?”
“Well,” said Page, “my system, as I’ve gradually worked it out, is to clear off a certain amount each year of our mediocre woodland, such as for the most part grows up where the bad cutting was done a couple of generations ago–maple and oak and beech it is, mostly, with little stands of white birch, where fires have been. I work that up in my own sawmill so as to sell as little of a raw product as possible; and dispose of it to the wood-working factories in the region.” (Sylvia remembered the great “brush-back factory” whence Molly had recruited her fire-fighters.) “Then I replant that area to white pine. That’s the best tree for this valley. I put about a thousand trees to the acre. Or if there seems to be a good prospect of natural reproduction, I try for that. There’s a region over there, about a hundred acres,” he waved his hand to the north of them, “that’s thick with seedling ash. I’m leaving that alone. But for the most part, white pine’s our best lay. Pine thrives on soil that stunts oak and twists beech. Our oak isn’t good quality, and maple is such an interminably slow grower. In about twenty years from planting, you can make your first, box-board cutting of pine, and every ten years thereafter–“
Arnold had received this avalanche of figures and species with an astonished blink, and now protested energetically that he had had not the slightest intention of precipitating any such flood. “Great Scott, Page, catch your breath! If you’re talking to me, you’ll have to use English, anyhow. I’ve no more idea what you’re talking about! Who do you take me for? _I_ don’t know an ash-tree from an ash-cart. You started in to tell me what the profit of the thing is.”
Page looked pained but patient, like a reasonable man who knows his hobby is running away with him, but who cannot bring himself to use the curb. “Oh yes,” he said apologetically. “Why, we cleared last year (exclusive of the farm, which yields a fair profit)–we cleared about two thousand dollars.” Arnold seemed to regard this statement as quite the most ridiculous mouse which ever issued from a mountain. He burst into an open laugh. “Almost enough to buy you a new car a year, isn’t it?” he commented.
Page looked extremely nettled. An annoyed flush showed through the tan of his clear skin. He was evidently very touchy about his pet lumbering operations. “A great many American families consider that a sufficient income,” he said stiffly.
Sylvia had another inspiration, such as had been the genesis of her present walking-costume. “You’re too silly, Arnold. The important thing isn’t what the proportion with Mr. Page’s own income is! What he was trying to do, and what he _has_ done, only you don’t know enough to see it, is to prove that sane forestry is possible for forest-owners of small means. I know, if you don’t, that two thousand is plenty to live on. My father’s salary is only twenty-four hundred now, and we were all brought up when it was two thousand.”
She had had an intuitive certainty that this frank revelation would please Page, and she was rewarded by an openly ardent flash from his clear eyes. There was in his look at her an element of enchanted, relieved recognition, as though he had nodded and said: “Oh, you _are_ my kind of a woman after all! I was right about you.”
Arnold showed by a lifted eyebrow that he was conscious of being put down, but he survived the process with his usual negligent obliviousness of reproof. “Well, if two thousand a year produced Judith, go ahead, Page, and my blessing on you!” He added in a half-apology for his offensive laughter, “It just tickled me to hear a man who owns most of several counties of coal-mines so set up over finding a nickel on the street!”
Page had regained his geniality. “Well, Smith, maybe I needn’t have jumped so when you stepped on my toe. But it’s my pet toe, you see. You’re quite right–I’m everlastingly set up over my nickel. But it’s not because I found it. It’s because I earned it. It happens to be the only nickel I ever earned. It’s natural I should want it treated with respect.”
Arnold did not trouble to make any sense out of this remark, and Sylvia was thinking bitterly to herself: “But that’s pure bluff! I’m _not_ his kind of a woman. I’m Felix Morrison’s kind!” No comment, therefore, was made on the quaintness of the rich man’s interest in earning capacity.
They were now in one of the recent pine plantations, treading a wood-road open to the sky, running between acres and acres of thrifty young pines. Page’s eyes glistened with affection as he looked at them, and with the unwearied zest of the enthusiast he continued expanding on his theme. Sylvia knew the main outline of her new subject now, felt that she had walked all around it, and was agreeably surprised at her sympathy with it. She continued with a genuine curiosity to extract more details; and like any man who talks of a process which he knows thoroughly, Page was wholly at the mercy of a sympathetic listener. His tongue tripped itself in his readiness to answer, to expound, to tell his experiences, to pour out a confidently accurate and precise flood of information. Sylvia began to take a playful interest in trying to find a weak place in his armor, to ask a question he could not answer. But he knew all the answers. He knew the relative weight per cubic foot of oak and pine and maple; he knew the railroad rates per ton on carload lots; he knew why it is cheaper in the long run to set transplants in sod-land instead of seeding it; he knew what per cent to write off for damage done by the pine weevil, he reveled in complicated statistics as to the actual cost per thousand for chopping, skidding, drawing, sawing logs. He laughed at Sylvia’s attempts to best him, and in return beat about her ears with statistics for timber cruising, explained the variations of the Vermont and the scribner’s decimal log rule, and recited log-scaling tables as fluently as the multiplication table. They were in the midst of this lively give-and-take, listened to with a mild amusement on Arnold’s part, when they emerged on a look-out ledge of gray slate, and were struck into silence by the grave loveliness of the immense prospect below them.
“–and of course,” murmured Page finally, on another note, “of course it’s rather a satisfaction to feel that you are making waste land of use to the world, and helping to protect the living waters of all that–” He waved his hand over the noble expanse of sunlit valley. “It seems”–he drew a long breath–“it seems something quite worth doing.”
Sylvia was moved to a disinterested admiration for him; and it was a not unworthy motive which kept her from looking up to meet his eyes on her. She felt a petulant distaste for the calculating speculations which filled the minds of all her world about his intentions towards her. He was really too fine for that. At least, she owed it to her own dignity not to abuse this moment of fine, impersonal emotion to advance another step into intimacy with him.
But as she stood, looking fixedly down at the valley, she was quite aware that a sympathetic silence and a thoughtful pose might make, on the whole, an impression quite as favorable as the most successfully managed meeting of eyes.
CHAPTER XXX
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-a-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 fiance–oh, least of all to her fiance–but heart and soul and body to a devouring horde of dressmakers and tailors and milliners and hairdressers and corsetieres 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