Part 45 (1/2)
Sylvia thought rapidly to herself: ”Austin _said_ he did not want me to answer at once. He _said_ he wanted me to take time--to take time!
I can decide better, make more sense out of everything, if I--after I have thought more, have taken more time. No, I am not turning my back on him. Only I must have more time to think--”
Aloud she said, after a moment's silence, ”Oh, nothing could be lovelier!”
She lay in her warm, clean white bed that night, sleeping the sound sleep of the healthy young animal which has been wet and cold and hungry, and is now dry and warmed and fed.
Outside, across the city, on his bronze pedestal, the tortured Thinker, loyal to his destiny, still strove terribly against the limitations of his ape-like forehead.
BOOK IV;
_THE STRAIT PATH_
CHAPTER XL
A CALL FROM HOME
It was quite dark when they arrived in the harbor at Naples; and they were too late to go through the necessary formalities of harbor entering. In company with several other in-and outward-bound steamers, the _Carnatic_ lay to for the night. Some one pointed out a big liner which would sail for New York the next morning, lying like a huge, gaily lighted island, the blare of her band floating over the still water.
Sylvia slept little that night, missing the rolling swing of the s.h.i.+p, and feeling breathless in the stifling immobility of the cabin. She tossed about restlessly, dozing off at intervals and waking with a start to get up on her knees and look out through the port-hole at the lights of Naples blazing steadily in their semicircle. She tried to think several times, about her relations to Felix, to Austin--but nothing came to her mind except a series of scenes in which they had figured, scenes quite disconnected, which brought no enlightenment to her.
As she lay awake thus, staring at the ceiling, feeling in the intense silence and blackness that the fluttering of her eyelids was almost audible, her heart beating irregularly, now slow, now fast, it occurred to her that she was beginning to know something of the intensity of real life--real grown-up life. She was astonished to enjoy it so little.
She fell at last, suddenly, fathoms deep into youthful slumber, and at once pa.s.sed out from tormented darkness into some strange, sunny, wind-swept place on a height. And she was all one anguish of longing for Austin. And he came swiftly to her and took her in his arms and kissed her on the lips. And it was as it had been when she was a child and heard music, she was carried away by a great swelling tide of joy ... But dusk began to fall again; Austin faded; through the darkness something called and called to her, imperatively. With great pain she struggled up through endless stages of half-consciousness, until she was herself again, Sylvia Marshall, heavy-eyed, sitting up in her berth and saying aloud, ”Yes, what is it?” in answer to a knocking on the door.
The steward's voice answered, announcing that the first boat for sh.o.r.e would leave in an hour. Sylvia sprang out of bed, the dream already nothing more than confused brightness in her mind. By the time she was dressed, it had altogether gone, and she only knew that she had had a restless night. She went out on the deck, longing for the tonic of pure air. The morning was misty--it had rained during the night--and clouds hung heavy and low over the city. Out from this gray smother the city gleamed like a veiled opal. Neither Felix nor her aunt was to be seen. When she went down to breakfast, after a brisk tramp back and forth across the deck, she was rosy and dewy, her triumphant youth showing no sign of her vigils. She was saying to herself: ”Now I've come, it's too idiotic not to enjoy it. I _shall_ let myself go!”
Helene attended to the ladies' packing and to the labeling and care of the baggage. Empty-handed, care-free, feeling like a traveling princess, Sylvia climbed down from the great steamer into a dirty, small harbor-boat. Aunt Victoria sat down at once on the folding camp-chair which Helene always carried for her. Sylvia and Felix stood together at the blunt prow, watching the spectacle before them. The clouds were lifting from the city and from Vesuvius, and from Sylvia's mind. Her spirits rose as the boat went forward into the strange, foreign, glowing scene.
The oily water s.h.i.+mmered in smooth heavings as the clumsy boat advanced upon it. The white houses on the hills gleamed out from their palms. As the boat came closer to the wharf, the travelers could see the crowds of foreign-looking people, with swarthy faces and cheap, ungraceful clothes, looking out at the boat with alert, speculative, unwelcoming eyes. The noise of the city streets, strange to their ears after the days of sea silence, rose clattering, like a part of the brilliance, the sparkle. The sun broke through the clouds, poured a flood of glory on the refulgent city, and shone hotly on the pools of dirty water caught in the sunken spots of the uneven stone pavement.
Aunt Victoria made her way up the gang-plank to the landing dock, achieving dignity even there. Felix sprang after her, to hand her her chair, and Helene and Sylvia followed. Mrs. Marshall-Smith sat down at once, opening her dark-purple parasol, the tense silk of which was changed by the hot Southern sun into an iridescent bubble. ”We will wait here till the steward gets our trunks out,” she announced.”
It will be amusing to watch the people.” The four made an oasis of aristocracy in the seething, shouting, frowzy, gaudy, Southern crowd, running about with the scrambling, undignified haste of ants, sweating, gesticulating, their faces contorted with care over their poor belongings. Sylvia was acutely conscious of her significance in the scene. She was also fully aware that Felix missed none of the contrast she made with the other women. She felt at once enhanced and protected by the ign.o.bly dressed crowd about her. Felix was right--in America there could be no distinction, there was no background for it.
The scene about them was theatrically magnificent. In the distance Vesuvius towered, cloud-veiled and threatening, the harbor shone and sparkled in the sun, the vivid, outreaching arms of Naples clasped the jewel-like water. From it all Sylvia extracted the most perfect distillation of traveler's joy. She felt the well-to-do tourist's care-free detachment from the fundamentals of life, the tourist's sense that everything exists for the purpose of being a sight for him to see. She knew, and knew with delight, the wanderer's lightened, emanc.i.p.ated sense of being at a distance from obligations, that cheerful sense of an escape from the emprisoning solidarity of humanity which furnishes the zest of life for the tourist and the tramp, enabling the one light-heartedly to offend proprieties and the other casually to commit murder. She was embarked upon a moral vacation. She was out of the Bastile of right and wrong. She had a vision of what freedom from entangling responsibilities is secured by traveling. She understood her aunt's cla.s.sing it as among the positive goods of life.
A man in a shabby blue uniform, with a bundle of letters in his hand, walked past them towards the boat.
”Oh, the mail,” said Mrs. Marshall-Smith. ”There may be some for us.”
She beckoned the man to her, and said, ”Marshall-Smith? Marshall?
Morrison?”
The man sorted over his pile. ”Cable for Miss Marshall,” he said, presenting it to the younger lady with a bold, familiar look of admiration. ”Letter for F. Morrison: two letters for Mrs.
Marshall-Smith.” Sylvia opened her envelope, spread out the folded sheet of paper, and read what was scrawled on it, with no realization of the meaning. She knew only that the paper, Felix, her aunt, the crowd, vanished in thick blackness, through which, much later, with a great roaring in her ears, she read, as though by jagged flashes of lightning: ”Mother very ill. Come home at once. Judith.”
It seemed to her an incalculably long time between her first glance at the words and her understanding of them, but when she emerged from the blackness and void, into the flaunting sunlight, the roaring still in her ears, the paper still in her hands, the scrawled words still venomous upon it, she saw that not a moment could have pa.s.sed, for Felix and her aunt were unfolding letters of their own, their eyes beginning to run quickly over the pages.