Part 22 (1/2)
She ran to the piano as to a refuge, meaning to drown out these maddening speculations, which were by this time tinctured with insanity; but the first chords she struck jarred on her ear like a discordant scream. She turned away and stood looking at the floor with a darkening face, one hand at her temple.
Her mother, darning stockings by the window, suddenly laid down her work and said: ”Sylvia, how would you like to walk with me over to the Martins' to see if they have any eggs? Our hens have absolutely gone back on us.”
Sylvia did not welcome this idea at all, feeling as overwhelming an aversion to companions.h.i.+p as to solitude, but she could think of no excuse, and in an ungracious silence put on her wraps and joined her mother, ready on the porch, the basket in her mittened hand.
Mrs. Marshall's pace was always swift, and on that crisp, cold, sunny day, with the wind sweeping free over the great open s.p.a.ces of the plain about them, she walked even more rapidly than usual. Not a word was spoken. Sylvia, quite as tall as her mother now, and as vigorous, stepped beside her, not noticing their pace, nor the tingling of the swift blood in her feet and hands. Her fresh young face was set in desolate bitterness.
The Martins' house was about six miles from the Marshalls'. It was reached, the eggs procured, and the return begun. Still not a word had been exchanged between the two women. Mrs. Marshall would have been easily capable, under the most ordinary circ.u.mstances, of this long self-contained silence, but it had worked upon Sylvia like a sojourn in the dim recesses of a church. She felt moved, stirred, shaken. But it was not until the brief winter sun was beginning to set red across the open reaches of field and meadow that her poisoned heart overflowed. ”Oh, Mother--!” she exclaimed in an unhappy tone, and said no more. She knew no words to phrase what was in her mind.
”Yes, dear,” said her mother gently. She looked at her daughter anxiously, expectantly, with a pa.s.sion of yearning in her eyes, but she said no more than those two words.
There was a silence. Sylvia was struggling for expression. They continued to walk swiftly through the cold, ruddy, sunset air, the hard-frozen road ringing beneath their rapid advance. Sylvia clasped her hands together hard in her m.u.f.f. She felt that something in her heart was dying, was suffocating for lack of air, and yet that it would die if she brought it to light. She could find no words at all to ask for help, agonizing in a shy reticence impossible for an adult to conceive. Finally, beginning at random, very hurriedly, looking away, she brought out, faltering, ”Mother, _is_ it true that all men are--that when a girl marries she must expect to--aren't there _any_ men who--” She stopped, burying her burning face in her m.u.f.f.
Her words, her tone, the quaver of desperate sincerity in her accent, brought her mother up short. She stopped abruptly and faced the girl.
”Sylvia, look at me!” she said in a commanding voice which rang loud in the frosty silences about them. Sylvia started and looked into her mother's face. It was moved so darkly and so deeply from its usual serene composure that she would have recoiled in fear, had she not been seized upon and held motionless by the other's compelling eyes.
”Sylvia,” said her mother, in a strong, clear voice, acutely contrasted to Sylvia's m.u.f.fled tones, ”Sylvia, it's a lie that men are nothing but sensual! There's nothing in marriage that a good girl honestly in love with a good man need fear.”
”But--but--” began Sylvia, startled out of her shyness.
Her mother cut her short. ”Anything that's felt by decent men in love is felt just as truly, though maybe not always so strongly, by women in love. And if a woman doesn't feel that answer in her heart to what he feels--why, he's no mate for her. Anything's better for her than going on. And, Sylvia, you mustn't get the wrong idea. Sensual feeling isn't bad in itself. It's in the world because we have bodies as well as minds--it's like the root of a plant. But it oughtn't to be a very big part of the plant. And it must be the root of the woman's feeling as well as the man's, or everything's all wrong.”
”But how can you _tell_!” burst out Sylvia.
”You can tell by the way you feel, if you don't lie to yourself, or let things like money or social position count. If an honest girl shrinks from a man instinctively, there's something not right--sensuality is too big a part of what the man feels for her--and look here, Sylvia, that's not always the man's fault. Women don't realize as they ought how base it is to try to attract men by their bodies,” she made her position clear with relentless precision, ”when they wear very low-necked dresses, for instance--” At this chance thrust, a wave of scarlet burst up suddenly over Sylvia's face, but she could not withdraw her eyes from her mother's searching, honest gaze, which, even more than her words, spoke to the girl's soul. The strong, grave voice went on unhesitatingly. For once in her life Mrs. Marshall was speaking out. She was like one who welcomes the opportunity to make a confession of faith. ”There's no healthy life possible without some sensual feeling between the husband and wife, but there's nothing in the world more awful than married life when it's the only common ground.”
Sylvia gazed with wide eyes at the older woman's face, ardent, compelling, inspired, feeling too deeply, to realize it wholly, the vital and momentous character of the moment. She seemed to see nothing, to be aware of nothing but her mother's heroic eyes of truth; but the whole scene was printed on her mind for all her life--the hard, brown road they stood on, the grayed old rail-fence back of Mrs.
Marshall, a field of brown stubble, a distant grove of beech-trees, and beyond and around them the immense sweeping circle of the horizon.
The very breath of the pure, scentless winter air was to come back to her nostrils in after years.
”Sylvia,” her mother went on, ”it is one of the responsibilities of men and women to help each other to meet on a high plane and not on a low one. And on the whole--health's the rule of the world--on the whole, that's the way the larger number of husbands and wives, imperfect as they are, do live together. Family life wouldn't be possible a day if they didn't.”
Like a strong and beneficent magician, she built up again and illuminated Sylvia's black and shattered world. ”Your father is just as pure a man as I am a woman, and I would be ashamed to look any child of mine in the face if he were not. You know no men who are not decent--except two--and those you did not meet in your parents' home.”
For the first time she moved from her commanding att.i.tude of prophetic dignity. She came closer to Sylvia, but although she looked at her with a sudden sweetness which affected Sylvia like a caress, she but made one more impersonal statement: ”Sylvia dear, don't let anything make you believe that there are not as many decent men in the world as women, and they're just as decent. Life isn't worth living unless you know that--and it's true.” Apparently she had said all she had to say, for she now kissed Sylvia gently and began again to walk forward.
The sun had completely set, and the piled-up clouds on the horizon flamed and blazed. Sylvia stood still, looking at them fixedly. The great s.h.i.+ning glory seemed reflected from her heart, and cast its light upon a regenerated world--a world which she seemed to see for the first time. Strange, in that moment of intensely personal life, how her memory was suddenly flooded with impersonal impressions of childhood, little regarded at the time and long since forgotten, but now recurring to her with the authentic and uncontrovertible brilliance which only firsthand experiences in life can bring with them--all those families of her public-school mates, the plain, ugly homes in and out of which she had come and gone, with eyes apparently oblivious of all but childish interests, but really recording life-facts which now in her hour of need stretched under her feet like a solid pathway across an oozing marsh. All those men and women whom she had seen in a thousand unpremeditated acts, those tired-faced, kind-eyed, unlettered fathers and mothers were not breathing poisoned air, were not harboring in their simple lives a ghastly devouring wild-beast. She recalled with a great indrawn breath all the farmer-neighbors, parents working together for the children, the people she knew so well from long observation of their lives, whose mediocre, struggling existence had filled her with scornful pity, but whom now she recalled with a great grat.i.tude for the explicitness of the revelations made by their untutored plainness. For all she could ever know, the Drapers and the Fiskes and the others of their world might be anything, under the discreet reticence of their sophistication; but they did not make up all the world. She knew, from having breathed it herself, the wind of health which blew about those other lives, bare and open to the view, as less artless lives were not. There was some other answer to the riddle, beside Mrs. Draper's.
Sylvia was only eighteen years old and had the childish immaturity of her age, but her life had been so ordered that she was not, even at eighteen, entirely in the helpless position of a child who must depend on the word of others. She had acc.u.mulated, unknown to herself, quite apart from polished pebbles of book-information, a small treasury of living seeds of real knowledge of life, taken in at first-hand, knowledge of which no one could deprive her. The realization of this was a steadying ballast which righted the wildly rolling keel under her feet. She held up her head bravely against the first onslaught of the storm. She set her hand to the rudder!
Perceiving that her mother had pa.s.sed on ahead of her she sprang forward in a run. She ran like a schoolboy, like a deer, like a man from whose limbs heavy shackles have been struck off. She felt so suddenly lightened of a great heaviness that she could have clapped her hands over her head and bounded into the air. She was, after all, but eighteen years old, and three years before had been a child.
She came up to her mother with a rush, radiating life. Mrs. Marshall looked at the glowing face and her own eyes, dry till then, filled with the tears so rare in her self-controlled life. She put out her hand, took Sylvia's, and they sped along through the quick-gathering dusk, hand-in-hand like sisters.
Judith and Lawrence had reached home before them, and the low brown house gleamed a cheerful welcome to them from s.h.i.+ning windows. For the first time in her life, Sylvia did not take for granted her home, with all that it meant. For an instant it looked strangely sweet to her.