Part 35 (1/2)
A gaunt roaming figure of ennui and restlessness, Arnold appeared at the door of the pergola and with a petulant movement tore a brilliant autumn leaf to pieces as he lingered for a moment, listening moodily to the talk within. He refused with a grimace the chair to which Sylvia motioned him. ”Lord, no! Hear 'em go it!” he said quite audibly and turned away to lounge back towards the house. Sylvia had had time to notice, somewhat absently, that he looked ill, as though he had a headache.
Mrs. Marshall-Smith glanced after him with misgiving, and, under cover of a brilliantly resounding pa.s.sage at arms between Morrison and Page, murmured anxiously to Sylvia, ”I wish Judith would give up her nonsense and _marry_ Arnold!”
”Oh, they've only been engaged a couple of months,” said Sylvia.
”What's the hurry! She'll get her diploma in January. It'd be a pity to have her miss!”
Arnold's stepmother broke in rather impatiently, ”If I were a girl engaged to Arnold, I'd _marry_ him!”
”--the trouble with all you connoisseurs, Morrison, is that you're barking up the wrong tree. You take for granted, from your own tastes, when people begin to buy jade Buddhas and Zuloaga bull-fighters that they're wanting to surround themselves with beauty. Not much! It's the consciousness of money they want to surround themselves with!”
Morrison conceded part of this. ”Oh, I grant you, there's a disheartening deal of imitation in this matter. But America's new to aesthetics. Don't despise beginnings because they're small!”
”A nettle leaf is small. But that's not the reason why it won't ever grow into an oak. Look here! A sheaf of winter gra.s.ses, rightly arranged in clear gla.s.s, has as much of the essence of beauty as a bronze vase of the Ming dynasty. I ask you just one question, How many people do you know who are capable of--”
The art-critic broke in: ”Oh come! You're setting up an impossibly high standard of aesthetic feeling.”
”I'm not presuming to do any such thing as setting up a standard!
I'm just insisting that people who can't extract joy from the shadow pattern of a leafy branch on a gray wall, are liars if they claim to enjoy a fine j.a.panese print. What they enjoy in the print is the sense that they've paid a lot for it. In my opinion, there's no use trying to advance a step towards any sound aesthetic feeling till _some_ step is taken away from the idea of cost as the criterion of value about anything.” He drew a long breath and went on, rather more rapidly than was his usual habit of speech: ”I've a real conviction on that point.
It's come to me of late years that one reason we haven't any national art is because we have too much magnificence. All our capacity for admiration is used up on the splendor of palace-like railway stations and hotels. Our national tympanum is so deafened by that blare of sumptuousness that we have no ears for the still, small voice of beauty. And perhaps,” he paused, looking down absently at a crumb he rolled between his thumb and finger on the table, ”it's possible that the time is ripening for a wider appreciation of another kind of beauty ... that has little to do even with such miracles as the shadow of a branch on a wall.”
Morrison showed no interest in this vaguely phrased hypothesis, and returned to an earlier contention: ”You underestimate,” he said, ”the amount of education and taste and time it takes to arrange that simple-looking vase of gra.s.ses, to appreciate your leaf-shadows.”
”All I'm saying is that your campaign of aesthetic education hasn't made the matter vital enough to people, to any people, not even to people who call themselves vastly aesthetic, so that they _give_ time and effort and self-schooling to the acquisition of beauty. They not only want their money to do their dirty work for them, they try to make it do their fine living for them too, with a minimum of effort on their part. They want to _buy_ beauty, outright, with cash, and have it stay put, where they can get their fingers on it at any time, without bothering about it in the meantime. That's the way a Turk likes his women--same impulse exactly,”
”I've known a few Caucasians too ...,” Mrs. Marshall-Smith contributed a barbed point of malice to the talk.
Page laughed, appreciating her hit. ”Oh, I mean Turk as a generic term.” Sylvia, circling warily about the contestants, looking for a chance to make her presence felt, without impairing the masculine gusto with which they were monopolizing the center of the stage, tossed in a suggestion, ”Was it Hawthorne's--it's a queer fancy like Hawthorne's--the idea of the miser, don't you remember, whose joy was to roll naked in his gold pieces?”
Page s.n.a.t.c.hed up with a delighted laugh the metaphor she had laid in his hand. ”Capital! Precisely! There's the thing in a nutsh.e.l.l. We twentieth century Midases have got beyond the simple taste of that founder of the family for the s.h.i.+ning yellow qualities of money, but we love to wallow in it none the less. We like to put our feet on it, in the shape of rugs valued according to their cost, we like to eat it in insipid, out-of-season fruit and vegetables.”
”Doesn't it occur to you,” broke in Morrison, ”that you may be attacking something that's a mere phase, an incident of transition?”
”Is anything ever anything else!” Page broke in to say.
Morrison continued, with a slight frown at the interruption, ”America is simply emerging from the frontier condition of bareness, and it is only natural that one, or perhaps two generations must be sacrificed in order to attain a smooth mastery of an existence charged and enriched with possession.” He gave the effect of quoting a paragraph from one of his lectures.
”Isn't the end of that 'transition,'” inquired Page, ”usually simply that after one or two generations people grow dulled to everything _but_ possession and fancy themselves worthily occupied when they spend their lives regulating and caring for their possessions. I hate,” he cried with sudden intensity, ”I hate the very sound of the word!”
”Does you great credit, I'm sure,” said Morrison, with a faint irony, a hidden acrimony, p.r.i.c.king, for an instant, an ugly ear through his genial manner.
Ever since the day of the fire, since Page had become a more and more frequent visitor in Lydford and had seen more and more of Sylvia, she had derived a certain amount of decidedly bad-tasting amus.e.m.e.nt from the fact of Morrison's animosity to the other man. But this was going too far. She said instantly, ”Do you know, I've just thought what it is you all remind me of--I mean Lydford, and the beautiful clothes, and n.o.body bothering about anything but tea and ideas and knowing the right people. I knew it made me think of something else, and now I know--it's a Henry James novel!”
Page took up her lead instantly, and said gravely, putting himself beside her as another outsider: ”Well, of course, that's their ideal.
That's what they _try_ to be like--at least to talk like James people.
But it's not always easy. The vocabulary is so limited.”
”Limited!” cried Mrs. Marshall-Smith. ”There are more words in a Henry James novel than in any dictionary!”
”Oh yes, _words_ enough!” admitted Page, ”but all about the same sort of thing. It reminds me of the seminarists in Rome, who have to use Latin for everything. They can manage predestination and vicarious atonement like a shot, but when it comes to ordering somebody to call them for the six-twenty train to Naples they're lost. Now, you can talk about your bric-a-brac in Henry-Jamesese, you can take away your neighbor's reputation by subtle suggestion, you can appreciate a fine deed of self-abnegation, if it's not too definite! I suppose a man could even make an attenuated sort of love in the lingo, but I'll be hanged if I see how anybody could order a loaf of bread,”