Read Ebook: The Bent Twig by Fisher Dorothy Canfield

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Ebook has 366 lines and 161559 words, and 8 pages

It was on Sunday evening that the quartet met regularly for their seance. Old Reinhardt, the violin teacher, was first violin and leader; Mr. Bauermeister was second violin; Professor Marshall played the viola, and old Professor Kennedy bent his fine, melancholy face over the 'cello. Any one who chose might go to the Marshall house on Sunday evenings, on condition that he should not talk during the music, and did not expect any attention.

The music began at seven promptly and ended at ten. A little before that time, Mrs. Marshall, followed by any one who felt like helping, went out into the kitchen and made hot coffee and sandwiches, and when the last chord had stopped vibrating, the company adjourned into the dining-room and partook of this simple fare. During the evening no talk was allowed except the occasional wranglings of the musicians over tempo and shading, but afterwards, every one's tongue, chastened by the long silence, was loosened into loud and cheerful loquacity. Professor Marshall, sitting at the head of the table, talked faster and louder than any one else, throwing the ball to his especial favorite, brilliant young Professor Saunders, who tossed it back with a sureness and felicity of phrase which he had learned nowhere but in this give-and-take. Mrs. Marshall poured the coffee, saw that every one was served with sandwiches, and occasionally when the talk, running over every known topic, grew too noisy, or the discussion too hot, cast in one of the pregnant and occasionally caustic remarks of which she held the secret. They were never brilliant, Mrs. Marshall's remarks--but they were apt to have a dry humor, and almost always when she had said her brief say? there loomed out of the rainbow mist of her husband's flashing, controversial talk the outlines of the true proportions of the case.

After the homely feast was eaten, each guest rose and carried his own cup and saucer and plate into the kitchen in a gay procession, and since it was well known that, for the most part, the Marshalls "did their own work," several of the younger ones helped wash the dishes, while the musicians put away the music-racks and music, and the rest put on their wraps. Then Professor Marshall stood at the door holding up a lamp while the company trooped down the long front walk to the gate in the hedge, and turned along the country road to the cross-roads where the big Interurban cars whizzed by.

All this happened with that unbroken continuity which was the characteristic of the Marshall life, most marking them as different from the other faculty families. Week after week, and month after month, this program was followed with little variation, except for the music which was played, and the slight picturesque uncertainty as to whether old Reinhardt would or would not arrive mildly under the influence of long Sunday imbibings. Not that this factor interfered at all with the music. One of Sylvia's most vivid childhood recollections was the dramatic contrast between old Reinhardt with, and without, his violin. Partly from age, and partly from a too convivial life, the old, heavily veined hands trembled so that he could scarcely unbutton his overcoat, or handle his cup of hot coffee. His head shook too, and his kind, rheumy eyes, in their endeavor to focus themselves, seemed to flicker back and forth in their sockets. The child used to watch him, fascinated, as he fumbled endlessly at the fastenings of his violin-case, and put back the top with uncertain fingers. She was waiting for the thrilling moment when he should tuck the instrument away under his pendulous double chin and draw his bow across the strings in the long sonorous singing chord, which ran up and down Sylvia's back like forked lightning.

This was while all the others were tuning and scraping and tugging at their pegs, a pleasant bustle of discord which became so much a part of Sylvia's brain that she could never in after years hear the strumming and sawing of an orchestra preparing to play, without seeing the big living-room of her father's house, with its low whitewashed ceiling, its bare, dully shining floor, its walls lined with books, its shabby, comfortable furniture, the whole quickened by the Promethean glow from the blaze in the grate and glorified by the chastened passion of the singing strings.

The two Anglo-Saxon, professors were but able amateurs of their instruments. Bauermeister, huge, red, and impassive, was by virtue of his blood, a lifelong training, and a musical ancestry, considerably more than an amateur; and old Reinhardt was the master of them all. His was a history which would have been tragic if it had happened to any but Reinhardt, who cared for nothing but an easy life, beer, and the divine tones which he alone could draw from his violin. He had offered, fifty years ago in Vienna, the most brilliant promise of a most brilliant career, a promise which had come to naught because of his monstrous lack of ambition, and his endless yielding to circumstance, which had finally, by a series of inconceivable migrations, landed him in the German colony of La Chance, impecunious and obscure and invincibly convinced that he had everything worth having in life. "Of vat use?" he would say, even now, when asked to play in public--"de moosic ist all--and dat is eben so goodt here mit friends." Or, "Dere goes a thousand peoples to a goncert--maybe fife from dat thousand lofes de moosic--let dose fife gome to me--and I play dem all day for noding!" or again, more iconoclastically still,--when told of golden harvests to be reaped, "And for vat den? I can't play on more dan von fioleen at a time--is it? I got a good one now. And if I drink more beer dan now, I might make myself seeck!" This with a prodigiously sly wink of one heavy eyelid.

He gave enough music lessons to pay his small expenses, although after one or two stormy passages in which he treated with outrageous and unjustifiable violence the dawdling pupils coming from well-to-do families, he made it a rule to take no pupils whose parents employed a servant, and confined himself to children of the poorer classes, among whom he kept up a small orchestra which played together twice a week and never gave any concerts. And almost since the arrival of the Marshalls in La Chance and his unceremonious entrance into the house as, walking across the fields on a Sunday afternoon, he had heard Professor Marshall playing the Doric Toccata on the newly installed piano, he had spent his every Sunday evening in their big living-room.

He had seen the children appear and grow older, and adored them with Teutonic sentimentality, especially Sylvia, whom he called his "Moonbeam brincess," his "little ellfen fairy," and whom, when she was still tiny, he used to take up on his greasy old knees and, resting his violin on her head, play his wildest fantasies, that she might feel how it "talked to her bones."

In early childhood Sylvia was so used to him that, like the others of her circle, she accepted, indeed hardly noticed, his somewhat startling eccentricities, his dirty linen, his face and hands to match, his shapeless garments hanging loosely over the flabby corpulence of his uncomely old body, his beery breath. To her, old Reinhardt was but the queer external symbol of a never-failing enchantment. Through the pleasant harmonious give-and-take of the other instruments, the voice of his violin vibrated with the throbbing passion of a living thing. His dirty old hand might shake and quaver, but once the neck of the fiddle rested between thumb and forefinger, the seraph who made his odd abiding-place in old Reinhardt's soul sang out in swelling tones and spoke of heavenly things, and of the Paradise where we might live, if we were but willing.

Even when they were quite little children, Sylvia and Judith, and later, Lawrence, were allowed to sit up on Sunday evenings to listen to the music. Judith nearly always slept, steadily; and not infrequently after a long day of outdoor fun, stupefied with fresh air and exercise, Lawrence, and Sylvia too, could not keep their eyes open, and dozed and woke and dozed again, coiled like so many little kittens among the cushions of the big divan. In all the intensely enjoyed personal pleasures of her later youth, and these were many for Sylvia, she was never to know a more utter sweetness than thus to fall asleep, the music a far-off murmur in her ears, and to wake again to the restrained, clarified ecstasy of the four concerted voices.

"--every Sunday evening--it's beautiful, and now I'm getting so big I can help some. I can turn over the pages for them in hard places, and when old Mr. Reinhardt has had too much to drink and his hands tremble, he lets me unfasten his violin-case and tighten up his bow and--"

Mrs. Hubert cried out, "Your parents don't let you have anything to do with that old, drunken Reinhardt!"

"Well, upon my word!" exclaimed Mrs. Hubert, in a widely spaced, emphatic phrase of condemnation. To her sister she added, "It's really not exaggeration then, what one hears about their home life." One of her daughters, a child about Sylvia's age, turned a candid, blank little face up to hers, "Mother, what is a drunken reinhardt?" she asked in a thin little pipe.

Mrs. Hubert frowned, shook her head, and said in a tone of dark mystery: "Never mind, darling, don't think about it. It's something that nice little girls shouldn't know anything about. Come, Margery; come, Eleanor." She took their hands and began to draw them away without another look at Sylvia, who remained behind, drooping, ostracised, pierced momentarily with her first blighting misgiving about the order of things she had always known.

BROTHER AND SISTER

A fuller initiation into the kaleidoscopic divergencies of adult standards was given Sylvia during the visits of her Aunt Victoria. These visits were angelic in their extreme rarity, and for Sylvia were always a mixture of the beatific and the distressing. Only to look at Aunt Victoria was a bright revelation of elegance and grace. And yet the talk around table and hearth on the two or three occasions when the beautiful young widow honored their roof with a sojourn was hard on Sylvia's sensitive nerves.

It was not merely that a good deal of what was said was unintelligible. The Marshall children were quite accustomed to incessant conversations between their elders of which they could gather but the vaguest glimmering. They played about, busy in their own absorbing occupations, lending an absent but not wholly unattentive ear to the gabble of their elders, full of odd and ridiculous-sounding words like Single-tax, and contrapuntal development, and root-propagation, and Benthamism, and Byzantine, and nitrogenous fertilizers, and Alexandrine, and chiaroscuro, and surviving archaisms, and diminishing utility--for to keep up such a flood-tide of talk as streamed through the Marshall house required contributions from many diverging rivers. Sylvia was entirely used to this phenomenon and, although it occasionally annoyed her that good attention was wasted on projects so much less vital than those of the children, she bore it no grudge. But on the rare occasions when Aunt Victoria was with them, there was a different and ominous note to the talk which made Sylvia acutely uneasy, although she was quite unable to follow what was said. This uncomfortable note did not at all come from mere difference of opinion, for that too was a familiar element in Sylvia's world. Indeed, it seemed to her that everybody who came to the Marshall house disagreed with everybody else about everything. The young men, students or younger professors, engaged in perpetual discussions, carried on in acrimonious tones which nevertheless seemed not in the least to impair the good feeling between them. When there was nobody else there for Father to disagree with, he disagreed with Mother, occasionally, to his great delight, rousing her from her customary self-contained economy of words to a heat as voluble as his own. Often as the two moved briskly about, preparing a meal together, they shouted out from the dining-room to the kitchen a discussion on some unintelligible topic such as the "anachronism of the competitive system," so loudly voiced and so energetically pursued that when they came to sit down to table, they would be quite red-cheeked and stirred-up, and ate their dinners with as vigorous an appetite as though they had been pursuing each other on foot instead of verbally.

The older habitu?s of the house were no more peaceable and were equally given to what seemed to childish listeners endless disputes about matters of no importance. Professor La Rue's white mustache and pointed beard quivered with the intensity of his scorn for the modern school of poetry, and Madame La Rue, who might be supposed to be insulated by the vast bulk of her rosy flesh from the currents of passionate conviction flashing through the Marshall house, had fixed ideas on the Franco-Prussian War, on the relative values of American and French bed-making, and the correct method of bringing up girls , which needed only to be remotely stirred to burst into showers of fiery sparks. And old Professor Kennedy was nothing less than abusive when started on an altercation about one of the topics vital to him, such as the ignoble idiocy of the leisure-class ideal, or the generally contemptible nature of modern society. No, it was not mere difference of opinion which so charged the air during Aunt Victoria's rare visits with menacing electricity.

As a matter of fact, if she did differ in opinion from her brother and his wife, the children would never have been able to guess it from the invariably restrained tones of her fluent and agreeable speech, so different from the outspoken virulence with which people in that house were accustomed to defend their ideas. But, indefinable though it was to Sylvia's undeveloped powers of analysis, she felt that the advent of her father's beautiful and gracious sister was like a drop of transparent but bitter medicine in a glass of clear water. There was no outward sign of change, but everything was tinctured by it. Especially was her father changed from his usual brilliantly effervescent self. In answer to the most harmless remark of Aunt Victoria, he might reply with a sudden grim sneering note in his voice which made Sylvia look up at him half-afraid. If Aunt Victoria noticed this sardonic accent, she never paid it the tribute of a break in the smooth surface of her own consistent good-will, rebuking her brother's prickly hostility only by the most indulgent tolerance of his queer ways, a tolerance which never had on Professor Marshall's sensibilities the soothing effect which might have seemed its natural result.

The visit which Aunt Victoria paid them when Sylvia was ten years old was more peaceable than the one before it. Perhaps the interval of five years between the two had mellowed the relationship; or more probably the friction was diminished because Aunt Victoria arranged matters so that she was less constantly in the house than usual. On that occasion, in addition to the maid who always accompanied her, she brought her little stepson and his tutor, and with characteristic thoughtfulness refused to impose this considerable train of attendants on a household so primitively organized as that of the Marshalls. They all spent the fortnight of their stay at the main hotel of the town, a large new edifice, the conspicuous costliness of which was one of the most recent sources of civic pride in La Chance. Here in a suite of four much-decorated rooms, which seemed unutterably elegant to Sylvia, the travelers slept, and ate most of their meals, making their trips out to the Marshall house in a small, neat, open carriage, which, although engaged at a livery-stable by Mrs. Marshall-Smith for the period of her stay, was not to be distinguished from a privately owned equipage.

It can be imagined what an event in the pre-eminently stationary life of the Marshall children was this fortnight. To Judith and Lawrence, eight and four respectively, Aunt Victoria's charms and amenities were non-existent. She was for Judith as negligible as all other grown-ups, save the few who had good sense enough to play games and go in swimming. Judith's interest centered in the new boy, whom the Marshalls now saw for the first time, and who was in every way a specimen novel in their limited experience of children. During their first encounter, the well-groomed, white-linen-clad boy with his preternaturally clean face, his light-brown hair brushed till it shone like lacquer, his polished nails and his adult appendage of a tutor, aroused a contempt in Judith's mind which was only equaled by her astonishment. On that occasion he sat upright in a chair between his stepmother and his tutor, looking intently out of very bright blue eyes at the two gipsy-brown little girls in their single-garment linen play-clothes, swinging their tanned bare legs and feet from the railing of the porch. They returned this inspection in silence--on Sylvia's part with the keen and welcoming interest she always felt in new people who were well-dressed and physically attractive, but as for Judith with a frankly hostile curiosity, as at some strange and quite unattractive new animal.

The next morning, a still, oppressive day of brazen heat, it was suggested that the children take their guest off to visit some of their own favorite haunts to "get acquainted." This process began somewhat violently by the instant halt of Arnold as soon as they were out of sight of the house. "I'm going to take off these damn socks and shoes," he announced, sitting down in the edge of a flower-bed.

"Isn't it your best?" asked Sylvia, aghast. "Have you another?" "I haven't anything but!" said the boy savagely. "There's a whole trunk full of them!" He was fumbling with a rough clumsiness at the lacing of his shoes, but made no progress in loosening them, and now began kicking at the grass. "I don't know how to get them off!" he cried, his voice breaking nervously. Judith was down on her knees, inspecting with a competent curiosity the fastenings, which were of a new variety.

"Oh, Pauline puts my shoes on for me," explained Arnold. "She dresses and undresses me."

Judith stopped and looked up at him. "Who's Pauline?" she asked, disapproving astonishment in her accent.

"Madrina's maid."

Judith pursued him further with her little black look of scorn. "Who's Madrina?"

"Why--you know--your Aunt Victoria--my stepmother--she married my father when I was a little baby--she doesn't want me to call her 'mother' so I call her Madrina.' That's Italian for--"

"Oh, it always hurts when you begin in the spring," said Judith carelessly. "You have to get used to it. How old are you?"

"Ten, last May."

"Buddy here began going barefoot last summer and he's only four," she stated briefly, proceeding towards the barn and chicken-house.

After that remark the new boy walked forward with no more articulate complaints, though his face was drawn and he bit his lips. He was shown the chicken-yard--full of gawky, half-grown chickens shedding their down and growing their feathers--and forgot his feet in the fascination of scattering grain to them and watching their fluttering scrambles. He was shown the rabbit-house and allowed to take one of the limp, unresponsive little bunches of fur in his arms, and feed a lettuce-leaf into its twitching pink mouth. He was shown the house-in-the-maple-tree, a rough floor fixed between two large branches, with a canvas roof over it, ensconced in which retreat his eyes shone with happy excitement. He was evidently about to make some comment on it, but glanced at Judith's dark handsome little face, unsmiling and suspicious, and remained silent. He tried the same policy when being shown the children's own garden, but Judith tracked him out of this attempt at self-protection with some direct and searching questions, discovering in him such ignorance of the broadest division-lines of the vegetable kingdom that she gave herself up to open scorn, vainly frowned down by the more naturally civilized Sylvia, who was by no means enjoying herself. The new boy was not in the least what he had looked. She longed to return to the contemplation of Aunt Victoria's perfections. Lawrence was, as usual, deep in an unreal world of his own, where he carried forth some enterprise which had nothing to do with any one about him. He was frowning and waving his arms, and making stabbing gestures with his fingers, and paid no attention to the conversation between Judith and the new boy.

"I can ride horseback," said Arnold defiantly.

Judith put him to the test at once, leading the way to the stall which was the abode of the little pinto broncho, left them, she explained, as a trust by one of Father's students from the Far West, who was now graduated and a civil engineer in Chicago, where it cost too much to keep a horse. Arnold emerged from this encounter with the pony with but little more credit than he had earned in the garden, showing an ineptness about equine ways which led Judith through an unsparing cross-examination to the information that the boy's experience of handling a horse consisted in being ready in a riding-costume at a certain hour every afternoon, and mounting a well-broken little pony, all saddled and bridled, which was "brought round" to the porte-coch?re.

"What's a porte-coch?re?" she asked, with her inimitable air of despising it, whatever it might turn out to be.

Arnold stared with an attempt to copy her own frank scorn for another's ignorance. "Huh! Don't you even know that much? It's the big porch without any floor to it, where carriages drive up so you can get in and out without getting wet if it rains. Every house that's good for anything has one."

So far from being impressed or put down, Judith took her stand as usual on the offensive. "'Fore I'd be afraid of a little rain!" she said severely, an answer which caused Arnold to seem disconcerted, and again to look at her hard with the startled expression of arrested attention which from the first her remarks and strictures seemed to cause in him.

They took the pinto out. Judith rode him bareback at a gallop down to the swimming pool and dived from his back into the yellow water shimmering hotly in the sun. This feat stung Arnold into a final fury. Without an instant's pause he sprang in after her. As he came to the top, swimming strongly with a lusty, regular stroke, and rapidly overhauled the puffing Judith, his face shone brilliantly with relief. He was another child. The petulant boy of a few moments before had vanished. "Beat you to the springboard!" he sputtered joyously, swimming low and spitting water as he slid easily through it at twice Judith's speed. She set her teeth and drove her tough little body with a fierce concentration of all her forces, but Arnold was sitting on the springboard, dangling his red and swollen feet when she arrived.

She clambered out and sat down beside him, silent for an instant. Then she said with a detached air, "You can swim better than any boy I ever saw."

Arnold's open, blond face flushed scarlet at this statement. He looked at the dripping little brown rat beside him, and returned impulsively, "I'd rather play with you than any girl I ever saw."

Arnold, surprised, asked Judith, "'Cept for that, are you allowed to go in whenever you want?"

"Sure! We're not to stay in more than ten minutes at a time, and then get out and run around for half an hour in the sun. There's a clock under a little roof-thing, nailed up to a tree over there, so's we can tell."

"And don't you get what-for, if you go in with all your clothes on this way?"

"At the seashore! I get taken there a month every summer. It's the most fun of any of the places I get taken. I've had lessons there from the professor of swimming ever since I was six. Madrina doesn't know what to do with me but have me take lessons. I like the swimming ones the best. I hate dancing--and going to museums."

"What else can you do?" asked Judith with a noticeable abatement of her previous disesteem.

Arnold hesitated, his own self-confidence as evidently dashed. "Well--I can fence a little--and talk French; we are in Paris winters, you know. We don't stay in Lydford for the winter. Nobody does."

Judith, switched off upon a topic of recent and absorbing interest, was diverted from investigation into the odd ways of people who lived nowhere. "Isn't it great!" she said ardently. "It's new this summer--that's why I don't swim so very well yet. Why, it was this way. The creek ran through a corner of our land, and a lot of Father's students that are engineers or something, wanted to do something for Father when they graduated--lots of students do, you know--and everybody said the creek didn't have water enough and they bet each other it did, and after Commencement we had a kind of camp for a week--tents and things all round here--and Mother cooked for them--camp fires--oh, lots of fun!--and they let us children tag around as much as we pleased--and they and Father dug, and fixed concrete--say, did you ever get let to stir up concrete? It's great!"

They were interrupted by voices, and turning flushed and candid faces of animation towards the path, beheld Aunt Victoria, wonderful and queen-like in a white dress, a parasol, like a great rose, over her stately blond head, attended by Sylvia adoring; Mrs. Marshall quiet and observant; Mr. Rollins, the tutor, thin, agitated, and unhappily responsible; and Professor Marshall smiling delightedly at the children.

"I don't care if you were!" said the boy in a sullen accent.

Sylvia and Judith looked on in amazement at this scene of insubordination, as new to them as all the rest of the boy's actions. He was standing still now, submitting in a gloomy silence to the various comments on his appearance, which was incredibly different from that with which he had started on his travels. The starch remaining in a few places in his suit, now partly dried in the hot sun, caused the linen to stand out grotesquely in peaks and mud-streaked humps, his hair, still wet, hung in wisps about his very dirty face, his bare, red feet and legs protruded from shapeless knickerbockers. His stepmother looked at him with her usual good-natured amused gaze. "It is customary, before going in swimming, isn't it, Arnold, to take your watch out of your pocket and put your cuff-links in a safe-place?" she suggested casually.

"Good Heavens! His watch!" cried Mr. Rollins, clutching at his own sandy hair.

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