Part 26 (1/2)

”How do you mean?” he asked.

”Why--it's hard to say--” she hesitated, but evidently not at all in embarra.s.sment, looking at him with serious eyes, limpid and unafraid.

”I've been with boys and men a lot, of course, in my cla.s.ses and in the laboratories and everywhere, and I've found out that in most cases if the men and the girls really, really in their own hearts don't want to hurt each other, don't want to get something out of the other, but just want to be friends--why, they _can_ be! Psychologists and all the big-wigs say they can't be, I know--but, believe me!--I've tried it--and it's awfully nice, and it's a shame that everybody shouldn't know that lots of the time you _can_ do it--in spite of the folks who write the books! Maybe it wasn't so when the books were written, maybe it's only going to be so, later, if we all are as square as we can be now. But as a plain matter of fact, in one girl's experience, it's so, _now_! Of course,” she modified by a sweeping qualification the audacity of her navely phrased, rashly innocent guess at a new possibility for humanity, ”of course if the man's a _decent_ man.”

Arnold had not taken his gaze for an instant from her gravely thoughtful eyes. He was quite pale. He looked astonis.h.i.+ngly moved, startled, arrested. When she stopped, he said, almost at once, in a very queer voice as though it were forced out of him, ”I'm not a decent man.”

And then, quite as though he could endure no longer her clear, steady gaze, he covered his eyes with his hand. An instant later he had sprung up and walked rapidly away out to the low marble parapet which topped the terrace. His gesture, his action had been so eloquent of surprised, intolerable pain, that Sylvia ran after him, all one quick impulse to console. ”Yes, you are, Arnold; yes, you are!” she said in a low, energetic tone, ”you _are_!”

He made a quavering attempt to be whimsical. ”I'd like to know what _you_ know about it!” he said.

”I know! I _know_!” she simply repeated.

He faced her in an exasperated shame. ”Why, a girl like you can no more know what's done by a man like me ...” his lips twitched in a moral nausea.

”Oh ... what you've _done_ ...” said Sylvia ... ”it's what you are!”

”What I _am_,” repeated Arnold bitterly. ”If I were worth my salt I'd hang myself before morning!” The heartsick excitement of a man on the crest of some moral crisis looked out luridly from his eyes.

Sylvia rose desperately to meet that crisis. ”Look here, Arnold. I'm going to tell you something I've never spoken of to anybody ... not even Mother ... and I'm going to do it, so you'll _believe_ me when I say you're worth living. When I was eighteen years old I was a horrid, selfish, self-willed child. I suppose everybody's so at eighteen. I was just crazy for money and fine dresses and things like that, that we'd never had at home; and a man with a lot of money fell in love with me. It was my fault. I made him, though I didn't know then what I was doing, or at least I wouldn't let myself think what I was doing.

And I got engaged to him. I got engaged at half-past four in the afternoon, and at seven o'clock that evening I was running away from him, and I've never seen him since.” Her voice went on steadily, but a quick hot wave of scarlet flamed up over her face. ”He was not a decent man,” she said briefly, and went on: ”It frightened me almost to death before I got my bearings: I was just a little girl and I hadn't understood anything--and I don't _understand_ much now. But I did learn one thing from all that--I learned to know when a man isn't decent. I can't tell you how I know--it's all over him--it's all over me--it's his eyes, the way he stands, the expression of his mouth--I don't only see it--I feel it--I feel it the way a thermometer feels it when you put a match under the bulb ... I _know_!” She brought her extravagant, her preposterous, her ignorant, her incredibly convincing claims to an abrupt end.

”And you 'feel' that I ...” began Arnold, and could not go on.

”I'd like you for my brother,” she said gently.

He tried to laugh at her, but the honest tears were in his eyes.

”You don't know what you're talking about, you silly dear,” he said unsteadily, ”but I'm awfully glad you came to Lydford.”

With her instinct for avoiding breaks, rough places, Sylvia quickly glided into a transition from this speech back into less personal talk. ”Another queer thing about that experience I've never understood:--it cured me of being so crazy about clothes. You wouldn't think it would have anything to do with _that_, would you? And I don't see how it did. Oh, I don't mean I don't dearly love pretty dresses now. I _do_. And I spend altogether too much time thinking about them--but it's not the same. Somehow the poison is out. I used to be like a drunkard who can't get a drink, when I saw girls have things I didn't. I suppose,” she speculated philosophically, ”I suppose any great jolt that shakes you up a lot, shakes things into different proportions.”

”Say, that fellow must have been just about the limit!” Arnold's rather torpid imagination suddenly opened to the story he had heard.

”No, no!” said Sylvia. ”As I look back on it, I make a lot more sense out of it” (she might have been, by her accent, fifty instead of twenty-three), ”and I can see that he wasn't nearly as bad as I thought him. When I said he wasn't decent, I meant that he belonged in the Stone Age, and I'm twentieth-century. We didn't fit together. I suppose that's what we all mean when we say somebody isn't decent ...

that he's stayed behind in the procession. I don't mean that man was a degenerate or anything like that ... if he could have found a Stone Age woman he'd have ... they'd have made a good Stone Age marriage of it. But he _didn't_, the girl he....”

”Do you know, Sylvia,” Arnold broke in wonderingly, ”I never before in all my life had anybody speak to me of anything that really mattered.

And I never spoke this way myself. I've wanted to, lots of times; but I didn't know people ever did. And to think of its being a girl who does it for me, a girl who....” His astonishment was immense.

”Look here, Arnold,” said Sylvia, with a good-natured peremptoriness.

”Let a girl be something besides a girl, can't you!”

But her attempt to change the tone to a light one failed. Apparently, now that Arnold had broken his long silence, he could not stop himself. He turned towards her with a pa.s.sionate gesture of bewilderment and cried: ”Do you remember, before dinner, you asked me as a joke what was the use of anything, and I said I didn't know?

Well, I _don't!_ I've been getting sicker and sicker over everything.

What the devil _am_ I here for, anyhow!”

As he spoke, a girl's figure stepped from the house to the veranda, from the veranda to the turf of the terrace, and walked towards them.