The Bent Twig Part 12

"I hadn't noticed them," said Sylvia, her gaze turned on the elegant nonchalance of a handsome, elderly woman ahead of her. Her mother looked at her askance, and thought that children are unaccountable.

There were four of the Chicago days, and such important events marked them that each one had for all time a physiognomy of its own. Years afterwards when their travels had far outrun that first journey, Sylvia and Judith could have told exactly what occurred on any given day of that sojourn, as "on the third day we were in Chicago."

The event of the first day was, of course, the meeting with Aunt Victoria. They went to see her in a wonderful hotel, entering through a cla.s.sic court, with a silver-plashing fountain in the middle, and slim Ionic pillars standing up white and glorious out of ma.s.ses of palms. This dreamlike spot of beauty was occupied by an incessantly restless throng of lean, sallow-faced men in sack-coats, with hats on the backs of their heads and cigars in the corners of their mouths.

The air was full of tobacco smoke and the click of heels on the marble pavement. At one side was a great onyx-and-marble desk, looking like a soda-water fountain without the silver faucets, and it was the thin-cheeked, elegant young-old man behind this structure who gave instructions whereby Mrs. Marshall and her two daughters found their way to Aunt Victoria's immense and luxurious room. She was very glad to see them, shaking hands with her sister-in-law in the respectful manner which that lady always seemed to inspire in her, and embracing her two tall young nieces with a fervor which melted Sylvia's heart back to her old childish adoration.

"What _beautiful_ children you have, Barbara!" cried Mrs.

Marshall-Smith, holding Judith off at arm's length and looking from her to Sylvia; "although I suppose I ought not to tell them that!" She looked at Sylvia with an affectionate laugh. "Will you be spoiled if I tell you you are very pretty?" she asked.

"I can't think of anything but how pretty _you_ are!" said Sylvia, voicing honestly what was in her mind.

This answer caused her aunt to cry out: "Oh! Oh! And tact too! She's meant for social success!" She left this note to vibrate in Sylvia's ears and turned again to her sister-in-law with hospitable remarks about the removing of wraps. As this was being done, she took advantage of the little bustle to remark from the other side of the room, "I rather hoped Elliott would come with you." She spoke lightly, but there was the tremor of feeling in her sweet voice which Sylvia found she remembered as though it had been but yesterday she had heard it last.

"You didn't ask him," said Mrs. Marshall, with her usual directness.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith arched her eyebrows, dropped her eyelids, and shook her head. "No, I didn't ask him," she admitted, and then with a little wry twist of her lips, "But I rather hoped he might feel like coming." She looked down at her hands.

Mrs. Marshall surprised her daughters very much by going across the room and kissing her husband's sister. Mrs. Marshall-Smith took the other's strong, hard hand between her soft fingers. "That's generous in you, Barbara," she said, looking intently into the pitying dark eyes, "I'm human, you know,"

"Yes, I know you're human," said Mrs. Marshall, looking down at her gravely. "So are we all of us. So's Elliott. Don't forget that." With which obscure reference, entirely unintelligible to the two girls, the matter was forever dropped.

The two ladies thereupon embarked upon the difficult business of laying out to the best advantage the few days before them so that every hour might be utilized for the twofold purpose of seeing each other and having the girls see the sights. Judith went to the window during this conversation, and looked down into the crowded street, the first city street she had ever seen. Sylvia sat quietly and imprinted upon her memory every item in the appearance of the two women before her, not the first time she had compared them. Mrs. Marshall was dressed in a dark-blue, well-preserved, ready-made suit, dating from the year before. It was in perfect condition and quite near enough the style of the moment to pa.s.s unnoticed. Sylvia saw nothing to be ashamed of in her mother's unaccented and neutral costume, but there was no denying that she looked exactly like any one else. What was most apparent to the discerning eye was that her garb had been organized in every detail so as to consume as little thought and effort as possible. Whereas Aunt Victoria--Sylvia's earnest and thoughtful efforts at home-dressmaking had fitted her, if for nothing else, for a full appreciation of Mrs. Marshall-Smith's costume. She had struggled with cloth enough to bow her head in respect and awe before the masterly tailoring of the rich, smooth broadcloth dress.

She knew from her own experience that the perfection of those welted seams could not be accomplished by even the most intense temporary concentration of amateur forces. No such trifling fire of twigs lighted the way to that pinnacle. The workman who had achieved that skill had cut down the whole tree of his life and thrown it into the flame.

Like a self-taught fiddler at the concert of a master, Sylvia's failures had taught her the meaning of success. Although her inexperience kept her from making at all a close estimate of the literal cost of the toilet, her shrewdness made her divine the truth, which was that Mrs. Marshall-Smith, in spite of the plainness of her attire, could have clad herself in cloth-of-gold at a scarcely greater expenditure of the efforts and lives of others. Sylvia felt that her aunt was the most entirely enviable person in the world, and would gladly have changed places with her in a moment.

That was, on the whole, the note of the Chicago trip, all the dazzling lights and reflections of which focused, for Sylvia, upon Aunt Victoria's radiant person. At times, the resultant beam was almost too much for the young eyes; as, for example, on the next day when the two made a momentous shopping expedition to the largest and finest department store in the city. "I've a curiosity to see," Aunt Victoria had declared carelessly, "what sort of things are sold in a big Western shop, and besides I've some purchases to make for the Lydford house. Things needs freshening up there. I've thought of wicker and chintz for the living-room. It would be a change from what I've had.

Perhaps it would amuse the children to go along?"

At this, Judith, who had a boy's detestation of shopping, looked so miserable that Aunt Victoria had laughed out, her frank, amused laugh, and said, "Well, Sylvia and I alone, then!"

"Judith and I'll go to Lincoln Park to take a walk by the lake," said Mrs. Marshall. "Our inland young folks have never seen so much water all at once."

Sylvia had been, of course, in the two substantial and well-run department stores of La Chance, when she went with her mother to make their carefully considered purchases. They always went directly to the department in question, where Mrs. Marshall's concise formula ran usually along such lines as, "I would like to look at misses' coats, size 16, blue or brown serge, moderate style, price somewhere between ten and fifteen dollars." And then they looked at misses' coats, size 16, blue or brown serge, of the specified price; and picked out one. Sylvia's mother was under the impression that she allowed her daughters to select their own clothes because, after all these defining and limiting preliminaries, she always, with a very genuine indifference, abandoned them to their own choice between the four or five garments offered.

Even when Sylvia, as she grew older, went by herself to make a small purchase or two, she was so deeply under the influence of her mother's example that she felt it unbecoming to loiter, or to examine anything she knew she could not buy. Besides, nearly all the salespeople, who, for the most part, had been at their posts for many years, knew her from childhood, and if she stopped to look at a show-case of new collars, or jabots, they always came pleasantly to pa.s.s the time of day, and ask how her little brother was, and how she liked studying at home. She was ashamed to show in their presence anything but a casual, dignified interest in the goods they handled.

After these feeble and diluted tipplings, her day with Aunt Victoria was like a huge draught of raw spirits. That much-experienced shopper led her a leisurely course up one dazzling aisle and down another, pausing ruthlessly to look and to handle and to comment, even if she had not the least intention of buying. With an inimitable ease of manner she examined whatever took her fancy, and the languid, fashionably dressed salesladies, all in aristocratic black, showed to these whims a smiling deference, which Sylvia knew could come from nothing but the exquisite tailoring of Aunt Victoria's blue broadcloth. This perception did not in the least lower her opinion of the value of the deference. It heightened her opinion of the value of tailoring.

They stood by gla.s.s tables piled high with filmy and costly underwear, such underwear as Sylvia had never dreamed could exist, and Aunt Victoria looked casually at the cobweb tissues which the saleswoman held up, herself hankering in a hungry adoration of the luxury she would never touch in any other way. Without apology or explanation, other than Aunt Victoria's gracious nod of dismissal, they moved on to the enchanted cave where, under the stare of innumerable electric lights, evening wraps were exhibited. The young woman who served them held the expensive, fragile chiffon of the garments up in front of her black uniform, her eyes wistful and unsatisfied. Her instant of glory was over when Aunt Victoria bought one of these, exclaiming humorously about the quaintness of going from Paris to Chicago to shop. It was of silver tissue over white brocade, with a collar of fur, and the price was a hundred and thirty-seven dollars. Sylvia's allowance for all her personal expenses for a whole year was a hundred and twenty. To reach the furniture, they pa.s.sed by, with an ignoring contempt, huge counters heaped with hundreds and hundreds of shirt-waists, any one of which was better than the one Sylvia had made with so much care and interest before leaving home.

Among the furniture they made a long stay. Aunt Victoria was unexpectedly pleased by the design of the wicker pieces, and bought and bought and bought; till Sylvia turned her head away in bewilderment. She looked down a long perspective of glittering show-cases filled with the minor luxuries of the toilet, the ruffs, the collars, the slipper-rosettes, the embroidered belts, the hair ornaments, the chiffon scarves, all objects diverse, innumerable, perishable as mist in tree-branches, all costly in exact ratio to their fragility. Back of her were the children's dresses, fairy-like, simple with an extravagantly costly simplicity. It occurred to Sylvia as little as to many others of the crowd of half-hypnotized women, wandering about with burning eyes and watering mouths through the shrewdly designed shop, that the great closets back of these adroitly displayed fineries might be full of wearable, firm-textured little dresses, such as she herself had always worn. It required an effort of the will to remember that, and wills weak, or not yet formed, wavered and bent before the l.u.s.t of the eye, so cunningly inflamed. Any sense of values, of proportion, in Sylvia was dumfounded by the lavishness, the enormous quant.i.ties, the immense varieties of the goods displayed.

She ached with covetousness....

When they joined the others at the hotel her mother, after commenting that she looked rather flushed and tired, happened to ask, "Oh, by the way, Sylvia, did you happen to come across anything in serge suits that would be suitable for school-wear?"

Sylvia quivered, cried out explosively, "_No!_" and turned away, feeling a hot pulse beating through her body. But Aunt Victoria happened to divert attention at that moment. She had been reading, with a very serious and somewhat annoyed expression, a long telegram just handed her, and now in answer to Mrs. Marshall's expression of concern, said hastily, "Oh, it's Arnold again.... It's always Arnold!"

She moved to a desk and wrote a brief telegram which she handed to the waiting man-servant. Sylvia noticed it was addressed to Mr. A.H.

Saunders, a name which set dimly ringing in her head recollections now m.u.f.fled and obscured.

Aunt Victoria went on to Mrs. Marshall: "Arnold hates this school so.

He always hates his schools."

"Oh, he is at school now?" asked Mrs. Marshall. "You haven't a tutor for him?"

"Oh yes, Mr. Saunders is still with him--in the summers and during holidays." Mrs. Marshall-Smith explained further: "To keep him up in his _studies_. He doesn't learn anything in his school, you know. They never do. It's only for the atmosphere--the sports; you know, they play cricket where he is now--and the desirable cla.s.s of boys he meets.... _All_ the boys have tutors in vacation times to coach them for the college-entrance examinations."

The face of the college professor's wife continued immovably grave during this brief summary of an educational system. She inquired, "How old is Arnold now?" learned that he was seventeen, remembered that, oh yes, he was a year older than Sylvia, and allowed the subject to drop into one of the abysmal silences for which she alone had the courage.

Her husband's sister was as little proof against it as her husband. As it continued, Mrs. Marshall-Smith went through the manoeuvers which in a less perfectly bred person would have been fidgeting....

No one paid any attention to Sylvia, who sat confronting herself in a long mirror and despising every garment she wore.

CHAPTER XI

ARNOLD'S FUTURE IS CASUALLY DECIDED

The next day was to have been given up to really improving pursuits.

The morning in the Art Inst.i.tute came off as planned. The girls were marshaled through the sculpture and paintings and various art objects with about the result which might have been expected. As blankly inexperienced of painting and sculpture as any Bushmen, they received this sudden enormous dose of those arts with an instant, self-preservatory incapacity to swallow even a small amount of them.

It is true that the very first exhibits they saw, the lions outside the building, the first paintings they encountered, made an appreciable impression on them; but after this they followed their elders through the interminable crowded halls of the museum, their legs aching with the effort to keep their balance on the polished floors, their eyes increasingly glazed and dull. For a time a few eccentric faces or dresses among the other sightseers penetrated through this merciful insensibility, but by noon the capacity for even so much observation as this had left them. They set one foot before the other, they directed their eyes upon the mult.i.tudinous objects exhibited, they nodded their heads to comments made by the others, but if asked suddenly what they had just seen in the room last visited, neither of them could have made the faintest guess.

At half-past twelve, their aunt and mother, highly self-congratulatory over the educational morning, voted that enough was as good as a feast, and led their stunned and stupefied charges away to Aunt Victoria's hotel for lunch.

It was while they were consuming this exceedingly appetizing meal that Sylvia saw, threading his way towards them between the other tables, a tall, weedy, expensively dressed young man, with a pale freckled face and light-brown hair. When he saw her eyes on him he waved his hand, a largely knuckled hand, and grinned. Then she saw that it was not a young man, but a tall boy, and that the boy was Arnold. The quality of the grin reminded her that she had always liked Arnold.

His arrival, though obviously unexpected to the last degree, caused less of a commotion than might have seemed natural. It was as if this were for Aunt Victoria only an unexpected incident in a general development, quite resignedly antic.i.p.ated. After he had shaken hands with everybody, and had sat down and ordered his own luncheon very capably, his stepmother remarked in a tolerant tone, "You didn't get my telegram, then?" He shook his head: "I started an hour or so after I wired you. We'd gone down to the town with one of the masters for a game with Concord. There was a train just pulling out as we went by the station, and I ran and jumped on."

"How'd you know where it was going?" challenged Judith.

"I didn't," he explained lightly. He looked at her with the teasing, provocative look of masculine seventeen for feminine thirteen. "Same old spitfire, I see, Miss Judy," he said, his command of unhackneyed phrases by no means commensurate with his desire to be facetious.

Judith frowned and went on eating her eclair in silence. It was the first eclair she had ever eaten, and she was more concerned with it than with the new arrival.

n.o.body made any comment on Arnold's method of beginning journeys until Mrs. Marshall asked, "What did you do it for?" She put the question with an evident seriousness of inquiry, not at all with the rhetorical reproach usually conveyed in the formula she used.

Arnold looked up from the huge, costly, b.l.o.o.d.y beefsteak he was eating and, after an instant's survey of the grave, kind, face opposite him, answered with a seriousness like her own, "Because I wanted to get away." He added after a moment, laughing and looking again at the younger girl, "I wanted to come out and pull Judy's hair again!" He spoke with his mouth full, and this made him entirely a boy and not at all the young man his well-cut clothes made him appear.

Without speaking, Judith pulled her long, smooth braid around over her shoulder where she could protect the end of it. Her mouth was also full, bulgingly, of the last of her eclair. They might have been brother and sister in a common nursery.

"My! Aren't you pretty, Sylvia!" was Arnold's next remark. "You're a regular peach; do you know it?" He turned to the others: "Say, let's go to a show this afternoon," he proposed. "Tling-Tling's in town. I saw it in the papers as I came in. The original company's singing.

Did you ever hear them?" he asked Sylvia. "They beat the other road companies all hollow."

Sylvia shook her head. She had never heard the name before, the Broadway brand of comic opera being outside her experience to a degree which would have been inconceivable to Arnold.

There was some discussion over the matter, but in the end, apparently because there was nothing else to do with Arnold, they all did go to the "show," Arnold engineering the expedition with a trained expertness in the matter of ticket-sellers, cabs, and ushers which was in odd contrast to his gawky physical immaturity. At all the stages of the process where it was possible, he smoked cigarettes, producing them in rapid succession out of a case studded with little pearls. His stepmother looked on at this, her beautiful manner of wise tolerance tightening up a little, and after dinner, as they sat in a glittering corridor of the hotel to talk, she addressed him suddenly in a quite different tone. "I don't want you to do that so much, Arnold," she said. His hand was fumbling for his case again. "You're too young to smoke at all," she said definitely. He went on with his automatic movements, opening the case, taking out a cigarette and tapping it on the cover. "Oh, all the fellows do," he said rebelliously, and struck a match.