The Bent Twig Part 25

"No such a thing!" she said, as lightly as he.

"It's the nearest _I_ ever came to it!" he averred.

She continued to flit up the terraces before him, her voice rippling with amus.e.m.e.nt dropping down on him through the dusk. "Well, you'll have to come nearer than that, if you ever want to make a go of it!" she called over her shoulder. Upon which note this very modern conversation ended.

CHAPTER XXIII

MORE TALK BETWEEN YOUNG MODERNS

When they met at dinner, they laughed outright at the sight of one another, a merry and shadowless laugh. For an instant they looked like light-hearted children. The change of Arnold's long sallow face was indeed so noticeable that Mrs. Marshall-Smith glanced sharply at him, and then looked again with great satisfaction. She leaned to Sylvia and laid her charming white hand affectionately over the girl's slim, strong, tanned fingers. "It's just a joy to have you here, my dear.

You're brightening us stupid, bored people like fresh west wind!" She went on addressing herself to the usual guest of the evening: "Isn't it always the most beautiful sight, Felix, how the mere presence of radiant youth can transform the whole atmosphere of life!"

"I hadn't noticed that my radiant youth had transformed much,"

commented Arnold dryly; "and Sylvia's only a year younger than I."

He was, as usual, disregarded by the course of the conversation. "Yes, suns.h.i.+ne in a shady place ..." quoted Morrison, in his fine mellow tenor, looking at Sylvia. It was a wonderful voice, used with discretion, with a fine instinct for moderation which would have kept the haunting beauty of its intonations from seeming objectionable or florid to any but American ears. In spite of the invariable good taste with which it was used, American men, accustomed to the toneless speech of the race, and jealously suspicious of anything approaching art in everyday life, distrusted Morrison at the first sound of his voice. Men who were his friends (and they were many) were in the habit of rather apologizing for those rich and harmonious accents. The first time she had heard it, Sylvia had thought of the G string of old Reinhardt's violin.

"I never in my life saw anything that looked less like a shady place,"

observed Sylvia, indicating with an admiring gesture the table before them, gleaming and flas.h.i.+ng its gla.s.s and silver and close-textured, glossy damask up into the light.

"It's _morally_ that we're so shady!" said Arnold, admiring his own wit so much that he could not refrain from adding, "Not so bad, what?"

The usual conversation at his stepmother's table was, as he would have said, so pestilentially high-brow that he seldom troubled himself to follow it enough to join in. Arnold was in the habit of dubbing "high-brow" anything bearing on aesthetics; and Mrs. Marshall-Smith's conversational range hardly extending at all outside of aesthetics of one kind or another, communication between these two house-mates of years' standing was for the most part reduced to a primitive simplicity for which a sign-language would have sufficed. Arnold's phrase for the situation was, "I let Madrina alone, and she don't bother me." But now, seeing that neither the facade of Rouen, nor the influence of Chardin on Whistler, had been mentioned, his unusual loquacity continued. "Well, if one west wind (I don't mean that as a slam on Sylvia for coming from west of the Mississippi) has done us so much good, why not have another?" he inquired. "Why couldn't Judith come on and make us a visit too? It would be fun to have a sc.r.a.p with her again." He explained to Morrison: "She's Sylvia's younger sister, and we always quarreled so, as kids, that after we'd been together half an hour the referee had to shoulder in between and tell us, 'Nix on biting in clinches.' She was great, all right, Judith was! How _is_ she now?" he asked Sylvia. "I've been meaning ever so many times to ask you about her, and something else has seemed to come up. I can't imagine Judy grown up. She hasn't pinned up that great long braid, has she, that used to be so handy to pull?"

Sylvia took the last of her soup, put the spoon on the plate, and launched into a description of Judith, one of her favorite topics.

"Oh, Judith's just _fine_! You ought to see her! She's worth ten of me: she has such lots of character! And handsome! You never saw anything like Judith's looks. Yes, she's put her hair up! She's twenty years old now, what do you _suppose_ she does with her hair? She wears it in a great smooth braid all around her head. And she has _such_ hair, Aunt Victoria!" She turned from Arnold to another woman, as from some one who would know nothing of the fine shades of the subject. "No short hairs at all, you know, like everybody else, that _will_ hang down and look untidy!" She pulled with an explanatory petulance at the soft curls which framed her own face in an aureole of light. "Hers is all long and smooth, and the color like a fresh chestnut, just out of the burr; and her nose is like a Greek statue--she _is_ a Greek statue!"

She had been carried by her affectionate enthusiasm out of her usual self-possession, her quick divination of how she was affecting everybody, and now, suddenly finding Morrison's eyes on her with an expression she did not recognize, she was brought up short. What had she said to make him look at her so oddly?

He answered her unspoken question at once, his voice making his every casual word of gold: "I am thinking that I am being present at a spectacle which cynics say is impossible, the spectacle of a woman delighting--and with the most obvious sincerity--in the beauty of another."

"Oh!" said Sylvia, relieved to know that the odd look concealed no criticism, "I didn't know that anybody nowadays made such silly Victorian generalizations about woman's cattiness,--anybody under old Mr. Sommerville's age, that is. And anyhow, Judith's my _sister_."

"Cases of sisters, jealous of each other's good looks, have not been entirely unknown to history," said Morrison, smiling and beginning to eat his fish with a delicate relish.

"Well, if Judy's so all-fired good-looking, let's _have_ her come on, Madrina," said Arnold. "With her and Sylvia together, we'd crush Lydford into a pulp." He attacked his plate with a straggling fork, eating negligently, as he did everything else.

"She has a standing invitation, of course," said Mrs. Marshall-Smith.

"Indeed, I wrote the other day, asking her if she could come here instead of to La Chance for her vacation. It's far nearer for her."

"Oh, Judith couldn't waste time to go visiting," said Sylvia. "I've told you she is worth ten of me. She's on the home-stretch of her trained-nurse's course now. She has only two weeks' vacation."

"She's going to be a trained nurse?" asked Arnold in surprise, was.h.i.+ng down a large mouthful of fish with a large mouthful of wine. "What the d.i.c.kens does she do that for?"

"Why, she's crazy about it,--ever since she was a little girl, fifteen years old and first saw the inside of a hospital. That's just Judith,--so splendid and purposeful, and single-minded. I wish to goodness _I_ knew what I want to do with myself half so clearly as she always has."

If she had, deep under her consciousness, a purpose to win more applause from Morrison, by more disinterested admiration of Judith's good points, she was quite rewarded by the quickness with which he championed her against her own depreciation. "I've always noticed,"

he said meditatively, slowly taking a sip from his wine-gla.s.s, "that n.o.body can be single-minded who isn't narrow-minded; and I think it likely that people who aren't so c.o.c.ksure what they want to do with themselves, hesitate because they have a great deal more to do _with_.

A nature rich in fine and complex possibilities takes more time to dispose of itself, but when it does, the world's beauty is the gainer." He pointed the reference frankly by a smile at Sylvia, who flushed with pleasure and looked down at her plate. She was surprised at the delight which his leisurely, whimsically philosophical little speech gave her. She forgot to make any answer, absorbed as she was in poring over it and making out new meanings in it. How he had understood at less than a word the secret uncertainty of herself which so troubled her; and with what astonis.h.i.+ng sureness he had known what to say to rea.s.sure her, to make her see clear! And then, her quick mind leaped to another significance.... All during these past weeks when she had been falling more and more under the fascination of his personality, when she had been piqued at his disregard of her, when she had thought he found her "young," and had bracketed her carelessly with Arnold, he had been in reality watching her, he had found her interesting enough to observe her, to study her, to have a theory about her character; and having done all that, to admire her as she admired him. Never in her life had she been the recipient of flattery so precisely to her taste. Her glow of pleasure was so warm that she suddenly distrusted her own judgment, she looked up at him quickly to see if she had not mistaken his meaning, had not absurdly exaggerated the degree to which he ... she found his eyes on hers, deep-set, shadowy eyes which did not, as she looked up, either smile or look away. Under cover of a rather wrangling discussion between Arnold and his stepmother as to having some champagne served, the older man continued to look steadily into Sylvia's eyes, with the effect of saying to her, gravely, kindly, intimately: "Yes, I am here. You did not know how closely you have drawn me to you, but here I am." Across the table, across the lights, the service, the idle talk of the other two, she felt him quietly, ever so gently but quite irresistibly, open an inner door of her nature ... and she welcomed him in.

After dinner, when Mrs. Marshall-Smith lifted her eyebrows at Sylvia and rose to go, Arnold made no bones of his horror at the prospect of a tete-a-tete with the distinguished critic. "Oh, I'm going in with you girls!" he said, jumping up with his usual sprawling uncertainty of action. He reserved for athletic sports all his capacity for physical accuracy. "Morrison and I bore each other more than's legal!"

"I may bore _you_, my dear Arnold," said the other, rising, "but you never bored me in your life, and I've known you from childhood."

To which entirely benevolent speech, Arnold returned nothing but the uneasy shrug and resentful look of one baffled by a hostile demonstration too subtle for his powers of self-defense. He picked up the chair he had thrown over, and waited sulkily till the others were in the high-ceilinged living-room before he joined them. Then when Morrison, in answer to a request from his hostess and old friend, sat down to the piano and began to play a piece of modern, plaintive, very wandering and chromatic music, the younger man drew Sylvia out on the wide, moon-lighted veranda.

"Morrison is the very devil for making you want to punch his head, and yet not giving you a decent excuse. I declare, Sylvia, I don't know but that what I like best of all about you is the way you steer clear of him. He's opening up on you too. Maybe you didn't happen to notice ... at the dinner-table? It wasn't much, but I spotted it for a beginning. I know old Felix, a few." Sylvia felt uneasy at the recurrence of this topic, and cast about for something to turn the conversation. "Oh, Arnold," she began, rather at random, "whatever became of Professor Saunders? I've thought about him several times since I've been here, but I've forgotten to ask you or Tantine. He was my little-girl admiration, you know."

Arnold smoked for a moment before answering. Then, "Well, I wouldn't ask Madrina about him, if I were you. He's not one of her successes.

He wouldn't stay put."

Sylvia scented something uncomfortable, and regretted having introduced the subject.

Arnold added thoughtfully, looking hard at the ash of his cigarette, "I guess Madrina was pretty bad medicine for Saunders, all right."

Sylvia s.h.i.+vered a little and drew back, but she instantly put the matter out of her mind with a trained and definite action of her will.

It was probably "horrid"; nothing could be done about it now; what else could they talk about that would be cheerful? This was a thought-sequence very familiar to Sylvia, through which she pa.s.sed with rapid ease.

Arnold made a fresh start by offering her his cigarette-box. "Have one," he invited her, sociably.

She shook her head.

"Oh, all the girls do," he urged her.

Sylvia laughed. "I may be a fresh breeze from beyond the Mississippi, but I'm not so fresh as to think it's wicked for a girl to smoke. In fact I like to, myself, but I can't stand the dirty taste in my mouth the next morning. Smoking's not worth it."

"_Well_ ..." commented Arnold. Apparently he found something very surprising in this speech. His surprise spread visibly from the particular to the general, like the rings widening from a thrown pebble, and he finally broke out: "You certainly do beat the band, Sylvia. You get _me_! You're a sample off a piece of goods that I never saw before!"

"What now?" asked Sylvia, amused.

"Why, for instance,--that reason for your not smoking. That's not a girl's reason. That's a man's ... a man who's tried it!"

"No, it isn't!" she said, the flicker of amus.e.m.e.nt still on her lips.

"A man wouldn't have sense enough to know that smoking isn't worth waking up with your mouth full of rancid fur."

"Oh gos.h.!.+" cried Arnold, tickled by the metaphor: "rancid fur!"

"The point about me, why I seem so queer to you," explained Sylvia, brightening, "is that I'm a State University girl. I'm used to you.

I've seen hundreds of you! The fact that you wear trousers and have to shave and wear your hair cut short, and smell of tobacco, doesn't thrill me for a cent. I know that I could run circles around you if it came to a problem in calculus, not that I want to brag."

Arnold did not seem as much amused as she thought he would be. He smoked in a long, meditative silence, and when he spoke again it was with an unusual seriousness. "It's not what _you_ feel or don't feel about me ... it's what _I_ feel and don't feel about you, that gets me," he explained, not very lucidly. "I mean liking you so, without ... I never felt so about a girl. I like it.... I don't make it out...." He looked at her with sincerely puzzled eyes.

She answered him as seriously. "I think," she said, speaking a little slowly, "I think the two go together, don't they?"