Part 12

"Did you ever think goodness was a sort of relative thing? That some girls are good just negatively because they never have any temptation or opportunity to be anything else?"

"Yes," said Barbara again.

"You don't know what you are really like inside until you suddenly come up against the sharp edges of things. Do you remember when Sylvia said she wanted to get acquainted with herself and I said I knew all about myself. Well, I didn't, that's all. I found out."

"Suzanne!" Barb's voice had a motherly croon to it.

"Don't be scared. I'm all right. I did get scorched a little, and I know fire now when I see it. Who do you suppose came to my rescue when I was singeing?" And Suzanne mentioned the name of a "Star" all America knows and loves--a Star of the first magnitude.

"There was a big snow storm and we were blocked for a day this side of Kansas City. Her company happened to be on the same train ours was. I dug her Chow out of a snow bank for her and we got acquainted. I guess she saw where I was drifting. Anyway, she pulled me back just in season. Never mind who the man was. He doesn't count any more. He never counted very much. I was just dizzy with life. It all frothed and bubbled and sparkled like champagne, and I was a little drunk with it all maybe. She made me see things. She'd been there. She knew."

Barb nestled closer, but did not speak. Did she not understand? Had life not frothed and bubbled and sparkled for her, too? Did she not know how nearly anything could happen when you felt like that? Especially if the man cared or pretended to care. It had been at once her own safety and torture that in her case the man had not cared.

"I saw her again at Denver," continued Suzanne, "and she told me the kind of a play she wanted. And Barb, just like a flash of lightning it came so quick, I knew I was going to try to write a play for her and I did. And she's seen it and she likes it and she wants me to take it to ----. He's her manager--just as soon as I can and tell him she liked it. And I'm going to, to-morrow. Oh, Barbie! If he should like it. But he won't. I mustn't think he's going to. I'd die if I were sure, I'd be so happy."

And to-morrow Suzanne had taken the play to the great manager and had sent in the Star's card bearing the magic caption, "Introducing Miss Morrison." The caption had worked like a charm, swung open doors and fore-shortened delays. It was an incredibly brief space of time before Suzanne found herself in the most inner of all the offices with a pair of shrewd kindly eyes fixed inquiringly upon her.

The manager had glanced over her manuscript with a swift apprising gaze, then glanced over Suzanne in something of the same manner.

"I'll read this, this afternoon," he promised. "I have the greatest confidence in the judgment of that lady," with a nod at the card which lay among the litter on his desk. "If she says this is good, I have no doubt it is. At any rate, we will hope for the best. Lord knows we are looking for something good. I'll telephone you to-morrow if you will leave me your number and address. By the way--" he frowned a little. "Haven't I seen you before somewhere, Miss Morrison?"

Suzanne twinkled.

"I've brought you three plays--all impossible," she said.

"Indeed! Let us hope this one--" he glanced at the manuscript--"will be at least--probable."

"It is more than that," said Suzanne. "It is a dead sure thing. Read it. You will see." And with that parting shot Suzanne withdrew, leaving the manager grinning at her effrontery.

But the next day when the great manager sought to communicate with Suzanne over the telephone, Suzanne, white and silent, was packing to take the next train for Norton, Pa.

A telegram had been sent to Salt Lake City in her aunt's care and followed her back to New York. The telegram had said: "Mother very sick. Come home at once."

"It is Mr. ----" said Miss Murray from the telephone. "Will you speak to him, Suzanne?"

"No," said Suzanne curtly. "Tell him I'm out of town. Tell him anything. I don't care."

Thus did the Nemesis of Suzanne's joyous tilting with the universe overtake her. At the moment when victory seemed well within her hands life had struck back. Like the star of the seer's vision, the star of her ambition fell burning into the waters.

"_And the name of the star is called wormwood; and the third part of the waters became wormwood and many died of the waters because they were made bitter._"

At the station in Norton, Roger Minot waited with his car to meet Suzanne--a crushed anguished Suzanne, her pertness and her prettiness equally in eclipse. She could only put out her hand to him with a little moan and gasp "Mother?"

"She is holding her own. There is hope--at least a little," he told her. "When did you start?"

"From New York?"

"From Salt Lake City?"

"I haven't been in Salt Lake City for days. I got to New York yesterday. I didn't know. I didn't know. Oh, Roger, it's dreadful! I've been so selfish--so everything that is horrid."

Roger Minot looked straight ahead of him and said nothing. Perhaps he knew it was for the good of Suzanne's soul to taste the whole acrid cup of her remorse.

But as they neared the parsonage his heart was smitten with pity. Suzanne looked so wan and grief-stricken and subdued, so utterly unlike the Suzanne he knew, all sparkles and ripples and laughter, like a little shallow stream running along through sunshine. The hand which was not busy at the wheel closed over Suzanne's.

"Don't give up, little girl. Maybe it will come out right, after all. Anyway, remember I'm right here if you need me."

Suzanne uttered a sound which was a little bit like a sob. When, indeed, had Roger not been right there when she needed him? though she had treated him as the very dust beneath her feet. Dear Roger! And with an impulse of penitent tenderness she gave back the pressure of his hand.

And then in a moment they were at home, where the chairs still stood stiff and angular against the wall, though up there in a quiet room above the hand that had put them in their places lay very still and white. Suzanne's mother was very sick indeed. It was she, after all, and not her willful little daughter that had pulled the family out of its comfortable rut and cast a sad spell of differentness upon the household. Suzanne had stayed away but sickness had come in and another darker guest waited outside the door, his shadow already on the threshold. Poor Suzanne! The waters were made bitter, indeed, at the falling of her star.

*CHAPTER XX*

*SYLVIA AND LIFE*

In the meanwhile Sylvia, home at Arden Hall again, slipped back very easily and naturally into the old ways and almost as easily and naturally into the new one of being engaged.

"It is really quite a comfortable state," she told Felicia. "You don't have to wonder about every new man you meet when you are all satisfactorily accounted for and checked off yourself. You can even enjoy flirting more," she added wickedly with a Sylvia twinkle, "since everybody knows you don't mean anything by it. Anyway, I'm so used to having Jack around that it isn't much different being engaged to him from not being engaged to him. I am afraid I am a hopelessly unromantic person, Felicia. I always supposed when people got engaged it was a fearsome, sublimated sort of experience like being on top of an Alp or something of the sort. But I don't feel any different from what I did before, except for the comfortable settled feeling I have already mentioned. And I'm not going to get married for a long time. I am going to make the most of the privileges and immunities of my present blissful state."

But as was perhaps natural Jack did not share his fiancee's leisurely attitude. In fact the two came more than once near to quarreling on the subject of the date of their marriage. But Sylvia's will was stronger and Sylvia would not be married for another year. That was a flat and unequivocable dictum and Jack had to put up with it as best he could. He dared not hurry his perverse lady love for it must be confessed he sometimes experienced doubts whether he had won her at all, so slight seemed the bond between them. The very tranquillizing effect of the engagement upon Sylvia was disturbing to Jack. That she could take so placidly what was the biggest thing in the universe to him was alarming and a little exasperating. Sometimes he would accuse her of not caring for him at all and then she would still further disconcert him by looking very directly and questioningly at him as if she, too, had some doubts on the subject.

Sylvia knew she had floated into the engagement from the crest of one wave of emotion to another. Her estrangement from Phil Lorrimer, her disillusionment about Jeanette's married life, the panic-stricken horror and shame with which her own affair with Porter Robinson had filled her, her generally overwrought, hysterical, nervous condition had all contributed to throw her into Jack's arms that night. He had seemed an oasis on a desert, a spar to the drowning. She had awakened soon enough to the realization that it was by no means a grand passion, a life and death affair, this placid, even affection she felt for Jack. She loved him sufficiently. She knew she could be fairly happy with him and make him happy, perhaps could even let her affection deepen into something approaching a great love in due time. They were ideal comrades already, and Sylvia had a theory that comradeship was a better basis than stormy passion for happy wedlock. Yet perhaps down in her heart there was a fear that something was lacking in it all, something that kept her stubbornly insistent on postponing the wedding for a year. Impulsively she had yielded the first redoubt. She intended to be sure of herself before she surrendered the fortress for good and all. She meant to do it in the end without reservation, for better for worse. There should be no shilly-shallying like Jeanette's in her life. That she was determined upon.

Part of the steadying effect of her engagement expressed itself in a sincere desire to stop the unsatisfactory flitting from flower to flower process, sipping honey here and there, into which she had drifted during the restless winter months past. She had had enough tasting of experience and honestly sought serious employment for her energies.

Luckily there was always plenty to occupy her on the Hill. More and more the Byrd sisters came to depend on her, especially as Julietta was now away getting acquainted with her grandson, Gloria's boy, recently arrived upon this planet. The girls at "Hester house," and Hope and Martha, also came in for a generous share of her attention. The old buoyant, radiant Sylvia seemed to have come back to them, ready to cheer and comfort and command at need. Never was her genius for happiness more in demand or more in evidence than it was that February. It seemed as if everything had been awry and sad and bad while she had been away in the city and that now she was home it must all just naturally straighten itself out.

She took up her music again with rigorous hours of practice. She fulfilled her long made threat of learning to cook, much to Aunt Mandy's pride and delight in her role as chief professor of the culinary arts. She went in, seriously, this time, into Red Cross work, organizing a unit which she kept sternly to its task of rolling bandages and all the rest of the necessary if rather prosaic labor. She also got under way a class in first aid instruction under the tuition of a young doctor whom Tom Daly had recommended, too busy himself to take on any new duties.

Doctor Tom and Sylvia saw a great deal of each other off and on but always in the comfortable, wholesome, brother and sister relation which their November interlude had interrupted but not destroyed. Sylvia was often at the cottage playing with the babies whom she adored and kept out of Lois' way as often as possible so that the latter might have time for the typing of her book which was almost ready for the publisher's hands. Marianna and Donald, too, came in for a large share of Sylvia's time. For them she spun rare tales old and new and rendered Kim and the Water Babies, the Immortal Alice and other beloved favorites of the realms of gold until she knew them nearly by heart. With the children Sylvia was happiest of all. Living in their world she almost forgot her own, which in spite of her boasted contentment did not wholly satisfy her. She had learned that the busier she was, the better life seemed, leaving fewer crannies and nooks for doubts and wonders to seep in.

Of course there was plenty of gayety both in Greendale and in the near-by city, but she steadily refused to go in for an excess of this kind of thing, though here, too, she and Jack came near to dissension. It must be admitted Jack was scarcely so assiduous a devotee of business now that he felt his assiduity no longer essential to the winning of his liege lady. He was ready now to enjoy the fruits of his labor and have a thoroughly frivolous holiday with Sylvia as mistress of the revels. But just as he wanted to cut loose Sylvia wanted to go sedately. He complained that he saw infinitely less of her now he was engaged to her than he had when he was not, and resented somewhat sharply the thousand and one claims and duties which Sylvia acknowledged. Yet the two never really quarreled. Jack was too sunny-tempered and Sylvia too tactful, and on the whole they were very happy together, Sylvia, oddly enough, happier than Jack.

Meanwhile the war went on overseas and men began to shake their heads and prophesy that we would be in it soon. But that was still nineteen hundred and fifteen and we kept out. About this time came a letter from Hilda, the first in many months. The chief item told simply and with scarcely any comment was that Bertram had been killed early in October. "I can hardly realize it or feel it," wrote Hilda. "It is getting to be an old story over here. Women see their lovers and their sons and their husbands go and they don't come back, or if they do, they come maimed and crippled, only the shadow of the men that went forth. In the meanwhile we try to heal as many as we can, though it is discouraging to heal them and send them back to be killed outright perhaps next time."

The letter and its sad news had haunted Sylvia for a long time. What a strange romance Hilda's had been--so brief it must almost have seemed a dream! She had known Bertram only a few weeks in August. By the first of September they had become engaged. A week later he had gone to the front. In October he had been overtaken by death. And that was the end. What a waste there was to it all!

Half consciously all that month Sylvia expected to hear that Barb and Phil were engaged. She had long since made up her mind that that particular consummation was natural, even desirable. She, herself, was far too sane a person to spend many moments prying among ashes to see if any sparks remained. Nor would she permit herself to regret that which had perhaps never been more than moonshine and dream stuff. She was able to persuade herself quite easily that since she was able to be so placidly happy without Phil she had never needed him overmuch. That miracle moment on Lover's Leap and that other music intoxicated moment in December came to seem to her mere magic casements through which she had looked for the briefest interval of time into another world, essentially unreal, fantastic, a sort of mirage of the soul. And mirages were not in Sylvia's line, so she did not often let herself remember those irrevocable moments.

Once in her desultory reading she came across a little poem called "Remembrance," one stanza of which particularly haunted her.

_Not unto the forest--not unto the forest, O my lover!_ _Take me from the silence of the forest!_ I will love you by the light and the beat of drums at night And echoing of laughter in my ears, _But here in the forest_ I am still, remembering a forgotten, useless thing, And my eyelids are locked down for fear of tears-- _There is memory in the forest._

She had gone to a dance with Jack that night and every now and then the music had taken words.

I will love you by the light and the beat of drums at night And echoing of laughter in my ears.

But, afterward, in her own room, she had sat a long time by the window looking out into the white night where snows lay on her rose bushes. And perhaps she remembered a "forgotten useless thing" and her eyelids, too, were "locked down for fear of tears." And a new fear awakened in Sylvia's heart that night, a fear of Love. She, too, needed to be delivered from the memory of the forest.

*CHAPTER XXI*

*A CHAPTER OF REVELATIONS*

February passed and March came in, rough and blustering, with "noise of wind and of many waters" blowing its silver trumpets to life long dormant under winter snows. There came a few warm days and the crocuses began to run gay little races through the grass in Sylvia's garden and the jocund company of daffodils appeared. One morning a bluebird flashed out in the magnolia and the cardinals called "Pretty! Pretty! Pretty!" ecstatically all day long.

But then came frost and the frivolous crocuses in their parti-colored gowns lay flat and desolate like little dead dreams. The daffodils blackened and their stalks snapped, brittle as icicles. The bluebird disappeared, nobody knew where, and the cardinal's joy was muted. And it was all a symbol of life as it was in the world that spring of nineteen hundred and fifteen. Men had dreamed of peace and good will, of strong nations hailing each other with a "God speed" across the waters, a world of quickened life and promise and progress. And suddenly, out of a clear sky, as it seemed, had come blackening, devastating war. Men who had smiled like friendly gods snarled and hissed and rolled each other in the dust like brute beasts. Hymns of hate replaced the song of the morning stars, and the Prince of Peace was again crucified.

And still America looked on, dismayed, awed, shaking herself like a great dog, but not yet ready to leap at the throat of the enemy of democracy, not yet ready to believe such an enemy could really live and move and have his mighty being in this day and generation of enlightenment. Not yet was Beowulf dedicated to Heorot's cause, not yet did he fully realize the hatefulness of Grendel, who bore God's wrath. Aloof from it all, America's great pulse beat on almost steadily. Men and women loved and sinned and suffered and bartered and sacrificed as they had been doing from the beginning, more or less unmindful of the whirlwind sowing not so far off, with only an ocean between it and themselves. And what is an ocean nowadays?

In the stuffy little town of Norton, Pa., Suzanne took a deep draught of life that March; a deeper draught, indeed, than New York, or for that matter all the cities of America could have held to her lips. Day by day, as she sat by her mother's bed, she learned lessons no college could have taught her. Suzanne's spirit had been "stabb'd broad awake." She saw the Suzanne of the past, blind, arrogant, selfish, deeming herself wise and self-sufficient, yet really knowing neither life nor herself. Here in the quiet room where the angels of life and death wrestled she saw things very clearly and was made humble.

But it was willed that she be spared the last drops of the cup of sorrow and remorse. In those early March days her mother drifted back slowly from the Hinterland. It was almost as if Suzanne's need and Suzanne's prayer and Suzanne's love had brought her back. Little by little, as the mother grew better, she and her daughter came into the grace of mutual understanding and sympathy and forgiveness, knowing at last the whole story of Suzanne's light-hearted vagabondage. Mrs. Morrison was able to smile and sigh over "Melissa on the Road," the first installment of which appeared in the April issue of the magazine whose editor had "come to life" in season to recognize a live human document when it came into his hands.

As for the play, Suzanne received a letter in March from the great manager informing her he had kept in touch with her affairs through Miss Murray, congratulating her on her mother's recovery and begging for an interview at her earliest convenience. His confidence in the Star's judgment had, it seemed, been justified. The play was as good as Suzanne had promised, so he admitted.

Accordingly, one day, when her mother was able to spare her, Suzanne went up to New York to sign contracts and discuss royalties with a glibness which scarcely betrayed her recent complete inexperience of such pleasing commodities. The play was to be tried out in early September and if it was successful would be given a chance on Broadway later.

"Of course, that is on the knees of the gods," the manager had warned. "You can't tell what the public will do. The public is a spoiled child. The thing may go. It may not. The whole thing's a devilish lottery, you understand."

Oh, yes, Suzanne understood. All life was pretty much of a devilish lottery she thought, but that made it more rather than less interesting. Long ago she had taken for her motto, "Believe and venture, as for pledges the gods give none." It was enough for her at the time that the play was to be given a trial. More would have slain her with joy she thought.

Of course she ran straight to Barb with this bucketful of delightful certainties and enchanting possibilities. And Barb was as happy as Suzanne over it all. She was an artist at rejoicing with those that rejoice as well as mourning with those that mourned. Sometimes she seemed to herself to be nothing at all but an agglomeration of sympathies for the rest of the world. Her own selfhood seemed drowned in the sea of humanity. She was not unhappy. Indeed she was quietly, humbly content. To some women to love itself is the main thing. In such the waters of affection returning back to their springs, fill them indeed full of refreshment. There was no bitterness in Barb. Gladly and freely she had broken her alabaster box of precious ointment not counting the cost, nor deeming the performance any sort of waste, rather a privilege.

As for the Cause, her dedication to it held no more scruples. Suzanne had been right in her prophecy. She was "white hot" in her faith, in her mission, the whiter-hot, perhaps, because she had managed to get "martyrized" along the way.

In March Lois Daly's book was accepted by the publishers, with hearty congratulations on her return to the field of literature after her sojourn elsewhere. The terms of her contract were generous and Lois smiled, well pleased. She took the letter at once to her husband, and when he had expressed his delight and pride in her success she had explained why she had done the thing.

"I didn't want to write a bit, Tom," she said. "I dreaded to go into it again. Of course when I once got in it I loved it just as I always have. It is exhilarating--soul-possessing. But I was happy without it, perfectly happy. I don't know whether you understand that, Tom. I was afraid sometimes it worried you that I had given it up. It needn't have. You and the home and the children were enough to fill every need."

"Then why did you do it?" He surveyed her, puzzled. It occurred to him as no doubt it occurs to many wise men at times how little he knew his wife. Do men ever really know their wives? Tom Daly thought of that little episode with Sylvia and wondered if it had had anything to do with sending Lois back to her writing.