The Bent Twig Part 10

"No, I didn't have time to go so far. I just went down through Randolph Street to the bank and there was a boat there tied to a tree, and I got in and pushed it out as far as the rope would go and dropped the things in from the other end."

Sylvia caught her breath in terror at this recital. The Piquota river ran swift and turbid and deep between high banks at that point.

"Weren't you afraid to venture out in a boat all by yourself?" asked the man, looking at Judith's diminutive person.

"Yes, I was," said Judith unexpectedly.

Mr. Bristol said "Oh--" and stood in thought for a moment. Some one knocked on the door, and he turned to open it. At the sight of the tall figure standing there in his pepper-and-salt suit, Sylvia's heart gave a great bound of incredulous rapture. The appearance of a merciful mediator on the Day of Judgment could not have given her keener or more poignant relief. She and Judith both ran headlong to their father, catching his hands in theirs, clinging to his arms and pressing their little bodies against his. The comfort Sylvia felt in his mere physical presence was inexpressible. It is one of the pure golden emotions of childhood, which no adult can ever recover, save perhaps a mystic in a moment of ecstatic contemplation of the power and loving-kindness of his G.o.d.

Professor Marshall put out his hand to the Princ.i.p.al, introducing himself, and explained that he and his wife had been a little uneasy when the children had not returned from school. Mr. Bristol shook the other's hand, saying that he knew of him through mutual acquaintances and a.s.suring him that he could not have come at a more opportune moment. "Your little daughter has given me a hard nut to crack. I need advice."

Both men sat down, Sylvia and Judith still close to their father's side, and Mr. Bristol told what had happened in a concise, colorless narration, ending with Judith's exploit with the boat. "Now what would _you_ do in _my_ place?" he said, like one proposing an insoluble riddle.

Sylvia, seeing the discussion going on in such a quiet, conversational tone, ventured in a small voice the suggestion that Judith had done well to confess, since that had saved others from suspicion. "The girls were sure that Jimmy Weaver had done it."

"Was that why you came back and told?" asked Professor Marshall.

"No," said Judith bluntly, "I never thought of that. I wanted to be sure they knew why it happened."

The two men exchanged glances. Professor Marshall said: "Didn't you understand me when I told you at noon that even if you could make the girls let Camilla go to the picnic, she wouldn't have a good time? You couldn't make them like to have her?"

"Yes, I understood all right," said Judith, looking straight at her father, "but if she couldn't have a good time--and no fault of hers--I wasn't going to let _them_ have a good time either. I wasn't trying to make them want her. I was trying to get even with them!"

Professor Marshall looked stern. "That is just what I feared, Judith, and that hateful spirit is the bad thing about the whole business." He turned to the Princ.i.p.al: "How many girls were going to the picnic?"

The other, with a wide gesture, disavowed any knowledge of the matter.

"Good Heavens! how should I know?"

Sylvia counted rapidly. "Fourteen," she said.

"Well, Mr. Bristol, how would this do for a punishment? Judith has worked in various ways, digging up dandelions from the lawn, weeding flower-beds, running errands--you know--all the things children do--and she has a little more than five dollars in her iron savings-bank, that she has been saving for more than a year to buy a collie puppy. Would you be satisfied if she took that money, divided it into fourteen parts, and took it herself in person to each of the girls?"

During this proposal Judith's face had taken on an expression of utter dismay. She looked more childlike, more like her years than at any moment during the interview. "Oh, _Father_!" she implored him, with a deep note of entreaty.

He did not look at her, but over her head at the Princ.i.p.al, who was rising from his chair with every indication of relief on his face."

Nothing could be better," he said. "That will be just right--every one will be satisfied. And I'll just say for the sake of discipline that little Judith shan't come back to school till she has done her penance. Of course she can get it all done before supper-time tonight.

All our families live in the vicinity of the school." He was shaking Professor Marshall's hand again and edging him towards the door, his mind once more on his paper, hoping that he might really finish it before night--if only there were no more interruptions!

His achievement in divining the mental processes of two children hysterical with excitement, his magnetic taming of those fluttering little hearts, his inspired avoidance of a fatal false step at a critical point in the moral life of two human beings in the making--all this seemed as nothing to him--an incident of the day's routine already forgotten. He conceived that his real usefulness to society lay in the reform of arithmetic-teaching in the seventh grade, and he turned back to his arguments with the ardor of the great landscape painter who aspires to be a champion at billiards.

Professor Marshall walked home in silence with his two daughters, explained the matter to his wife, and said that he and Sylvia would go with Judith on her uncomfortable errand. Mrs. Marshall listened in silence and went herself to get the little bank stuffed full of painfully earned pennies and nickels. Then she bade them into the kitchen and gave Judith and Sylvia each a cookie and a gla.s.s of milk.

She made no comment whatever on the story, or on her husband's sentence for the culprit, but just as the three, were going out of the door, she ran after them, caught Judith in her arms, and gave her a pa.s.sionate kiss.

The next day was Sat.u.r.day, and it was suggested that Judith and Sylvia carry on their campaign by going to see the Fingals and spending the morning playing with them as though nothing had happened.

As they approached the house, somewhat perturbed by the prospect, they saw with surprise that the windows were bare of the heavy yellow lace curtains which had hung in the parlor, darkening that handsomely furnished room to a rich twilight. They went up on the porch, and Judith rang the bell resolutely, while Sylvia hung a little back of her. From this position she could see into the parlor, and exclaimed, "Why, Judy, this isn't the right house--n.o.body lives here!" The big room was quite empty, the floors bare of the large soft rugs, and as the children pressed their faces to the pane, they could see through an open door into a bedroom also dismantled and deserted.

They ran around the house to the back door and knocked on it. There was no answer. Judith turned the k.n.o.b, the door opened, and they stood in what had been unmistakably the Fingals' kitchen. Evidence of wild haste and confusion was everywhere about them--the floor was littered with excelsior, the shelves half cleared and half occupied still with cooking supplies, a packing-box partly filled with kitchenware which at the last moment the fugitives had evidently decided to abandon.

The little girls stood in this silent desolation, looking about them with startled eyes. A lean mother-cat came and rubbed her thin, pendent flanks against their legs, purring and whining. Three kittens skirmished joyfully in the excelsior, waylaying one another in ambush and springing out with bits of the yellow fibers clinging to their woolly soft fur.

"They've _gone_!" breathed Sylvia. "They've gone away for good!"

Judith nodded, even her bold and unimaginative spirit somewhat daunted by the ghostly silence of the house. Sylvia tiptoed to the swinging-door and pushed it open. Yes, there was the pantry, like the kitchen, in chaotic disorder, tissue paper and excelsior thick on the floor, and entangled with it the indescribable jumble of worthless, disconnected objects always tumbled together by a domestic crisis like a fire or a removal--old gloves, whisk-brooms, hat-forms, lamps, magazines, tarnished desk-fittings. The sight was so eloquent of panic haste that Sylvia let the door swing shut, and ran back into the kitchen.

Judith was pointing silently to a big paper bag on the shelf. It had been tossed there with some violence evidently, for the paper had burst and the contents had cascaded out on the shelf and on the floor--the rich, be-raisined cookies which Camilla was to have taken to the picnic. Sylvia felt the tears stinging her eyelids, and pulled Judith out of the tragic house. They stood for a moment in the yard, beside a bed of flowering crocuses, brilliant in the sun. The forsaken house looked down severely at them from its blank windows. Judith was almost instantly relieved of mental tension by the outdoor air, and stooped down unconcernedly to tie her shoe. She broke the lacing and had to sit down, take it out of the shoe, tie it, and put it back again. The operation took some time, during which Sylvia stood still, her mind whirling.

For the first time in her steadily forward-going life there was a sharp, irrevocable break. Something which had been yesterday was now no more. She would never see Camilla again, she who recalled Camilla's look of anguish as though they still stood side by side. Her heart filled with unspeakable thankfulness that she had put her arms around Camilla's neck at that supreme last moment. That had not been Judith's doing. That had come from her own heart. Unconsciously she had laid the first stone in the wall of self-respect which might in the future fortify her against her weaknesses.

She stood looking up blindly at the house, shivering again at the recollection of its echoing, empty silence. The moment was one she never forgot. Standing there in that commonplace backyard, staring up at a house like any one of forty near her, she felt her heart grow larger. In that moment, tragedy, mystery, awe, and pity laid their shadowy fingers on her shining head.

CHAPTER IX

THE END OF CHILDHOOD

That afternoon a couple of children who came to play in the Marshall orchard brought news that public opinion, after the fashion of that unstable weatherc.o.c.k, was veering rapidly, and blowing from a wholly unexpected quarter. "My papa says," reported Gretchen Schmidt, who never could keep anything to herself, even though it might be by no means to her advantage to proclaim it--"my papa says that he thinks the way American people treats colored peoples is just fierce; and he says if he'd ha' known about our not letting Camilla go to the picnic, he'd ha' taken the trouble to me '_mit der flachen Hand schlagen._'

That means he'd have spanked me good and plenty."

Maria Perkins, from the limb where she hung by her knees, responded, "Yup, my Uncle Eben says he likes Judy's s.p.u.n.k."

"I guess he wouldn't have, if it'd ha' been his pickles!" Gretchen made a last stand against the notorious injustice of fickle adult prejudices.

But the tide had begun to turn. On Monday morning Sylvia and Judith found themselves far from ostracized, rather the center of much respectful finger-pointing on the part of children from the other grades who had never paid the least attention to them before. And finally when the Princ.i.p.al, pa.s.sing majestically from room to room in his daily tour of inspection, paused in his awful progress and spoke to Judith by name, asking her quite familiarly and condescendingly what cities you would pa.s.s through if you went from Chicago to New Orleans, the current set once and for all in the other direction. No mention was ever made of the disappearance of the Fingals, and the Marshall children found their old places waiting for them.

It was not long before Judith had all but forgotten the episode; but Sylvia, older and infinitely more impressionable, found it burned irrevocably into her memory. For many and many a week, she did not fall asleep without seeing Camilla's ashy face of wretchedness. And it was years before she could walk past the house where the Fingals had lived, without feeling sick.

Her life was, however, br.i.m.m.i.n.g with active interests which occupied her, mind and body. There was rarely a day when a troop of children did not swarm over the Marshall house and barn, playing and playing and playing with that indomitable zest in life which is the birthright of humanity before the fevers and chills of adolescence begin. Sylvia and Judith, moreover, were required to a.s.sume more and more of the responsibility of the housework, while their mother extracted from the Marshall five acres an ever increasing largesse of succulent food.

Sylvia's seances with old Reinhardt and the piano were becoming serious affairs: for it was now tentatively decided that she was to earn her living by teaching music. There were many expeditions on foot with their mother, for Mrs. Marshall had become, little by little, chief nurse and adviser to all the families of the neighborhood; and on her errands of service one of her daughters was needed to carry supplies and act as a.s.sistant. And finally, as the children grew older, and the family tradition of bookishness took hold of them, there were shelves and shelves to be devoured, a strange mixture--Thackeray, Maeterlinck, Fielding, Hakluyt, Ibsen, d.i.c.kens, Ruskin, Shaw, Austen, Moliere, Defoe, Cervantes, Shakespeare,--the children dipped, or tasted or swallowed whole, according to their temperaments and the books they happened on.

When Sylvia was thirteen, almost fourteen years old, she "graduated"

from the eighth grade of the public schools and was ready to enter the High School. But after a good many family councils, in most of which, after the unreticent Marshall manner, she herself was allowed to be present, it was decided not to send her to the huge new Central High School, which had cost La Chance such a big slice of its taxes, but to prepare her at home for her course at the State University. She had been growing very fast, was a little thin and white, and had been outgrowing her strength. This at least was the reason given out to inquirers. In reality her father's prejudice against High School life for adolescents was the determining cause. In the course of his University work he was obliged to visit a good many High Schools, and had acquired a violent prejudice against the stirring social life characteristic of those inst.i.tutions.

Sylvia's feelings about this step aside from the beaten track were, like many of Sylvia's feelings, decidedly mixed. She was drawn towards the High School by the suction of the customary. A large number of her cla.s.smates expected as a matter of course to pa.s.s on in the usual way; but, with an uneasy qualm, half pride and half apprehension, Sylvia was beginning to feel her difference from ordinary children. She was not altogether sorry to say good-bye to her playmates, with whom she no longer had much in common. She would miss the fun of cla.s.s-life, of course; but there was a certain distinction involved in being educated "differently." She might be queer, but since she was apparently fated to be queer, she might as well not be "common" as well. Finally, because she was still, at fourteen, very much of a child, the scale was tipped by her thinking what fun it would be to go down-town on errands in school hours. Charles Lamb, lost in painful wonder at his own leisure after thirty-six years of incessant office-hours, could savor no more acutely than an American school-child the exquisite flavor of freedom at an hour formerly dedicated to imprisonment.

As a matter of fact, during the next three years Sylvia's time was more constantly occupied than when there was a fixed time-limit to her studies. Her teachers were always about her, and lightly as the new yoke pressed, she wore it practically without intermission. Her immersion in the ideals, the standards, the concepts of her parents was complete, engulfing. Somebody was nearly always teaching her something. She studied history and Latin with her father; mathematics with her mother. She learned to swim, to play tennis, to ride in the summer-time, and to skate on the frozen swimming-pool in winter, all without stirring from home. Old Reinhardt was supposed to come twice a week to give her a piano-lesson, but actually he dropped in almost every day to smoke meditatively and keep a watchful ear on her practising.

Although during those years she was almost literally rooted to the Marshall soil, watered by Marshall convictions, and fed by Marshall information, the usual miracle of irresistibly individual growth went silently and unconsciously forward in her. She was growing up to be herself, and not her mother or her father, little as any one in her world suspected the presence of this unceasingly recurrent phenomenon of growth. She was alive to all the impressions reflected so insistently upon her, but she trans.m.u.ted them into products which would immensely have surprised her parents, they being under the usual parental delusion that they knew every corner of her heart. Her budding aversions, convictions, ambitions were not in the least the aversions, convictions, and ambitions so loudly voiced about her; and a good deal of her energy was taken up in a more or less conscious reaction from the family catchwords, with especial emphasis laid on an objection to the family habit of taking their convictions with great seriousness.

Her father would have been aghast if he could have felt the slightest reflection from the heat of her detestation of his favorite, Emersonian motto, which, now that he had reached five and forty, he was apt to repeat with the iteration natural to his age, rousing in Sylvia the rebellious exasperation felt by _her_ age for over-emphatic moralizings.

On the occasion of one of the annual gatherings at the Marshall house of the Seniors in her father's cla.s.ses, she remarked fiercely to Judith, "If Father gets off that old Emerson, 'What will you have, quoth G.o.d. Take it and pay for it,' again tonight in his speech, I'm going to get right up and scream."

Judith stared. The girls were in the kitchen, large ap.r.o.ns over their best dresses, setting out rows of plates for the chicken salad which was to come after the music. "I don't see anything to scream about in that!" said Judith with a wondering contempt for Sylvia's notions.