The Bent Twig Part 28

Arnold appeared at the other end of the long row of gladioli. He was obviously looking for some one. Sylvia called to him, with the friendly tone she always had for him: "Here I am! I don't know where Judith is. Will I do?"

From a distance Arnold nodded, and continued to advance, the irregularity of his wavering gait more p.r.o.nounced than usual. As soon as she could see the expression of his face, Sylvia's heart began to beat fast, with a divination of something momentous. He sat down beside her, took off his hat, and laid it on the bench. "Do you remember," he asked in a strange, high voice, "that you said you would like me for your brother?"

She nodded.

"Well, I'm going to be," he said, and covering his face with his hands, burst into sobs.

Sylvia was so touched by his emotion, so sympathetically moved by his news, that even through her happy e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns the tears rained down her own cheeks. She tried to wipe them away and discovered, absurdly enough, that she had lost her handkerchief. "Aren't we idiots!" she cried in a voice of joyful quavers. "I never understood before why everybody cries at a wedding. See here, Arnold, I've lost my handkerchief. Loan me yours." She pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket, she wiped her eyes, she put a sisterly kiss on his thin, sallow cheek, she cried: "You dears! Isn't it too good to be true!

Arnold! So soon! Inside two weeks! How ever could you have the courage? Judith! My Judith! Why, she never looked at a man before. How did you dare?"

His overmastering fit of emotion was pa.s.sed now. His look was of white, incredulous exaltation. "We saw each other and ran into each other's arms," he said; "I didn't have to 'dare.' It was like breathing."

"Oh, how perfect!" she cried, "how simply, simply perfect!" and now there was for an instant a note of wistful envy in her voice. "It's _all_ perfect! She never so much as looked at a man before, and you said the other night you'd never been in love before."

Arnold looked at her wildly. "I said that!" he cried.

"Why, yes, don't you remember, after that funny, joking talk with me, you said that was the nearest you'd ever come to proposing to any girl?"

"G.o.d Almighty!" cried the man, and did not apologize for the blasphemy. He looked at her fixedly, as though unguessed-at horizons of innocence widened inimitably before his horrified eyes. And then, following some line of a.s.sociation which escaped Sylvia, "I'm not fit to _look_ at Judith!" he cried. The idea seemed to burst upon him like a thunder-clap.

Sylvia patted him on the shoulder rea.s.suringly. "That's the proper thing for a lover to think!" she said with cheerful, commonplace inanity. She did not notice that he shrank from her hand, because she now sprang up, crying, "But where's Judy? Where _is_ Judy?"

He nodded towards the house. "She sent me out to get you. She's in her room--she wants to tell you--but when I saw you, I couldn't keep it to myself." His exaltation swept back like a wave, from the crest of which he murmured palely, "Judith! Judith!" and Sylvia laughed at him, with the tears of sympathy in her eyes, and leaving him there on the bench staring before him at the living fire of the flame-colored flowers, she ran with all her speed into the house.

Morrison, lounging in a chair with a book, looked up, startled at her whirlwind entrance. "What's up?" he inquired.

At the sound of his voice, she checked herself and pirouetted with a thistle-down lightness to face him. Her face, always like a clear, transparent vase lighted from within, now gave out, deeply moved as she was, an almost visible brightness. "Judith!" she cried, her voice ringing like a silver trumpet, "Judith and Arnold!" She was poised like a b.u.t.terfly, and as she spoke she burst into flight again, and was gone.

She had not been near him, but the man had the distinct impression that she had thrown herself on his neck and kissed him violently, in a transport of delight. In the silent room, still fragrant, still echoing with her pa.s.sage, he closed his book, and later his eyes, and sat with the expression of a connoisseur savoring an exquisite, a perfect impression....

Tea that afternoon was that strangest of phenomena, a formal ceremony of civilized life performed in the abas.h.i.+ng and disconcerting presence of naked emotion. Arnold and Judith sat on opposite sides of the pergola, Judith s.h.i.+ning and radiant as the dawn, her usually firmly set lips soft and tremulous; Arnold rather pale, impatient, oblivious to what was going on around him, his spirit prostrated before the miracle; and when their starry eyes met, there flowed from them and towards them from every one in the pergola, a thousand unseen waves of excitement.

The mistress of the house herself poured tea in honor of the great occasion, and she was very humorous and amusing about the mistakes caused by her sympathetic agitation. "There! I've put three lumps in yours, Mr. Sommerville. How _could_ I! But I really don't know what I'm doing. This business of having love-at-first-sight in one's very family--! Give your cup to Molly; I'll make you a fresh one. Oh, Arnold! How _could_ you look at Judith just then! You made me fill this cup so full I can't pa.s.s it!"

Mr. Sommerville, very gallant and full of compliments and whimsical allusions, did his best to help their hostess strike the decent note of easy pleasantry; but they were both battling with something too strong for them. Unseconded as they were by any of the others, they gave a little the effect of people bowing and smirking to each other at the foot of a volcano in full eruption. Morrison, picking up the finest and sharpest of his conversational tools, ventured the hazardous enterprise of expressing this idea to them. Mrs.

Marshall-Smith, trying one topic after another, expressed an impatience with the slow progress of a Henry James novel she was reading, and Mr. Sommerville, remarking with a laugh, "Oh, you cannot hurry Henry," looked to see his mild witticism rewarded by a smile from the critic. But Morrison shook his head, "No, my dear old friend.

_Il faut hurler avec les loups_--especially if you are so wrought up by their hurlements that you can't hear yourself think. I'm just giving myself up to the rareness, the richness of the impression."

The new fiancee herself talked rather more than usual, though this meant by no means loquacity, and presented more the appearance of composure than any one else there; although this was amusingly broken by a sudden shortness of breath whenever she met Arnold's eyes.

She said in answer to a question that she would be going on to her hospital the day after tomorrow--her two weeks' vacation over--oh yes, she would finish her course at the hospital; she had only a few more months. And in answer to another question, Arnold replied, obviously impatient at having to speak to any one but Judith, that of course he didn't mind if she went on and got her nurse's diploma--didn't she _want_ to? Anything she wanted....

No--decidedly the thing was too big to make a successful fete of.

Morrison was silent and appreciatively observant, his eyes sometimes on Sylvia, sometimes on Judith; Mr. Sommerville, continuing doggedly to make talk, descended to unheard-of trivialities in reporting the iniquities of his chauffeur; Molly stirred an untasted cup, did not raise her eyes at all, and spoke only once or twice, addressing to Sylvia a disconnected question or two, in the answers to which she had obviously no interest. Judith and Arnold had never been very malleable social material, and in their present formidable condition they were as little a.s.sistance in the manufacture of geniality as a couple of African lions.

The professional fete-makers were consequently enormously relieved when it was over and their unavailing efforts could be decently discontinued. Professing different reasons for escape, they moved in disjointed groups across the smooth perfection of the lawn towards the house, where Molly's car stood, gleaming in the sun. Sylvia found herself, as she expected, manoeuvered to a place beside Morrison. He arranged it with his un.o.btrusive deftness in getting what he wanted out of a group of his fellow-beings, and she admired his skill, and leaned on it confidently. They had had no opportunity that day for the long talk which had been a part of every afternoon for the last week; and she now looked with a buoyant certainty to have him arrange an hour together before dinner. Her antic.i.p.ation of it on that burning day of reflected heat sent thrills of eager disquietude over her. It was not only for Judith and Arnold that the last week had been one of meeting eyes, long twilight evenings of breathless, quick-ripening intimacy....

As they slackened their pace to drop behind Mr. Sommerville, who walked hand-in-hand with his granddaughter in front of them, Morrison said, looking at her with burning eyes, "... an instrument so finely strung that it vibrates at the mere sound of another wakened to melody--what mortal man lives who would not dream of its response if he could set his own hand to the bow?"

The afternoon had been saturated with emotional excitement and the moment had come for its inevitable crystallization into fateful words.

The man spoke as though he were not wholly conscious of what he was saying. He stepped beside her like one in a dream. He could not take his eyes from her, from her flushed, grave, receptive face, from her downcast, listening eyes, her slow, trance-like step as she waited for him to go on. He went on: "It becomes, my dear, I a.s.sure you--the idea of that possibility becomes absolutely an obsession--even to a man usually quite his own master--"

They were almost at a standstill now, and the two in front of them had reached the house. Sylvia had a moment of what seemed to her the purest happiness she had ever known....

From across the lawn they saw a violent gesture--Molly had thrown her grandfather's clinging hand from her, and flashed back upon the two, lingering there in the sunlight. She cast herself on Sylvia, panting and trying to laugh. Her little white teeth showed in what was almost a grimace. "Why in the world are you two poking along so?" she cried, pa.s.sing her arm through Sylvia's. Her beautiful sunny head came no more than to Sylvia's shoulder. Without waiting for an answer she went on hurriedly, speaking in the tones of suppressed excitement which thrilled in every one's voice that day: "Come on, Sylvia--let's work it off together! Let me take you somewhere--let's go to Rutland and back."

"That's thirty miles away!" said Sylvia, "and it's past five now."

"I'll have you there and back long before seven," a.s.serted Molly.

"Come on ... come on ..." She pulled impatiently, petulantly at the other girl's arm.

"I'm not invited, I suppose," said Morrison, lighting a cigarette with care.

Molly looked at him a little wildly. "No, Felix, you're not invited!"

she said, and laughed unsteadily.

She had hurried them along to the car, and now they stood by the swift gray machine, Molly's own, the one she claimed to love more than anything else in the world. She sprang in and motioned Sylvia to the seat beside her.

"Hats?" suggested Morrison, looking at their bare, s.h.i.+ning heads. He was evidently fighting for time, manoeuvering for an opening. His success was that of a man gesticulating against a gale. Molly's baldly unscrupulous determination beat down the beginnings of his carefully composed opposition before he could frame one of his well-balanced sentences. "No--no--it takes too long to go and get hats!" she cried peremptorily. "If you can't have what you want when you want it, it's no use having it at all!"

"I'm not sure," remarked Morrison, "that Miss Marshall wants this at all."

"Yes, she does; yes, she does!" Molly contradicted him heatedly.

Sylvia, hanging undecided at the step, felt herself pulled into the car; the door banged, the engine started with a smooth sound of powerful machinery, the car leaped forward. Sylvia cast one backward glance at Morrison, an annoyed, distinguished, futile presence, standing motionless, and almost instantly disappearing in the distance in which first he, and then the house and tall poplars over it, shrank to nothingness.

Their speed was dizzying. The blazing summer air blew hot and vital in their faces; their hair tugged at the pins and flew back in fluttering strands; their thin garments clung to their limbs, molded as closely by the compressing wind as by water. Molly did not turn her eyes from the road ahead, leaping up to meet them, and vanis.h.i.+ng under the car.

She tried to make a little casual talk: "Don't you love to let it out, give it all the gas there is?" "There's nothing like a quick spin for driving the nightmares out of your mind, is there?" But as Sylvia made no answer to these overtures (the plain fact was that Sylvia had no breath for speech,--for anything but a horrified fascinated glare at the road), she said suddenly, somberly, "If I were you, I certainly should despise me!" She took the car around a sharp curve on two wheels.

Sylvia clutched at the side and asked wonderingly, "_Why_ in the world?" in a tone so permeated with sincerity that even Molly felt it.

"Don't you _know_?" she cried. "Do you mean to say you don't _know_?"

"Know _what_?" asked Sylvia. Hypnotized by the driver's intent and unwavering gaze on the road, she kept her own eyes as fiercely concentrated, her attention leaping from one quickly seen, instantly disappearing detail to another,--a pile of gravel here,--a half-buried rock there.--They both raised their voices to be heard above the sound of the engine and the rush of the car. "Know what?" repeated Sylvia loudly.

"Why do you _suppose_ I made myself ridiculous by pulling you away from Felix that idiotic, humiliating way!" Molly threw this inquiry out, straight before her, angrily. The wind caught at her words and hurled them behind.

In a flash Sylvia understood something to which she had been resolutely closing her perceptions. She felt sick and scared. She clutched the side, watched a hill rise up steep before them and flatten out under the forward leap of the car. She thought hard.

Something of her little-girl, overmastering horror of things, rough, outspoken, disagreeable, swept over her. She violently wished that she could escape from the conversation before her. She would have paid almost any price to escape.

But Molly's nerves were not so sensitive. She evidently had no desire to escape or to let Sylvia. The grim little figure at the steering-wheel controlled with her small hands the fate of the two.

She broke out now, impatient at Sylvia's silence: "Any fool could see that it was because I couldn't bear to see you with Felix another minute, and because I hadn't any other way to get you apart. Everybody else there knew why. I knew they knew. But I couldn't help it. I couldn't bear it another instant!"

She broke the gla.s.s of decent reticence with a great clattering blow.

It s.h.i.+vered into fragments. There was nothing now between them but the real issue in all its uncomely bareness. This real issue, the maenad at the wheel now held up before them in a single brutal statement--"Are you in love with Felix? I am."

There was something eerie, terrifying, in her casting these words out, straight before her. Sylvia looked in awe at the pale, pinched profile, almost unrecognizable in its stern misery. "Because if you're not," Molly went on, her white lower lip twitching, "I wish you'd keep out. It was all right before you came with your horrible cleverness.

It was all right. It was all right."