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.