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Bent Twig

<h2 id="id01371" style="margin-top: 4em">CHAPTER XXVII</h2> <h5 id="id01372">BETWEEN WINDWARD AND HEMLOCK MOUNTAINS</h5> 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." <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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