The Bent Twig Part 13

Mrs. Marshall-Smith aroused herself to a sudden, low-toned, iron masterfulness of voice and manner which, for all its quietness, had the quality of a pistol shot in the family group. She said only, "Put away that cigarette"; but by one effort of her will she ma.s.sed against the rebellion of his disorganized adolescence her mature, well-ripened capacity to get her own way. She held him with her eyes as an animal-trainer is supposed to cow his snarling, yellow-fanged captives, and in a moment Arnold, with a pettish gesture, blew out the match and shut the cigarette case with a snap. Mrs. Marshall-Smith forbore to over-emphasize her victory by a feather-weight of gloating, and turned to her sister-in-law with a whimsical remark about the preposterousness of one of the costumes pa.s.sing. Arnold sulked in silence until Judith, emerging from her usual self-contained reticence, made her first advance to him. "Let's us all go there by the railing where we can look down into the central court," she suggested, and having a nodded permission from their elders, the three children walked away.

They looked down into the great marble court, far below them, now fairy-like with carefully arranged electric lights, gleaming through the palms. The busily trampling cohorts in sack-coats and derby hats were, from here, subdued by distance to an aesthetic inoffensiveness of mere ant-like comings and goings.

"Not so bad," said Arnold, with a kindly willingness to be pleased, looking about him discriminatingly at one detail after another of the interior, the heavy velvet and gold bullion of the curtains, the polished marble of the paneling, the silk brocade of the upholstery, the heavy gilding of the chairs.... Everything in sight exhaled an intense consciousness of high cost, which was heavy on the air like a musky odor, suggesting to a sensitive nose, as does the odor of musk, another smell, obscured but rancidly perceptible--the unwashed smell, floating up from the paupers' cellars which support Aladdin's palaces of luxury.

But the three adolescents, hanging over the well-designed solid mahogany railing, had not noses sensitive to this peculiar, very common blending of odors. Judith, in fact, was entirely unconscious even of the more obvious of the two. She was as insensitive to all about her as to the too-abundant pictures of the morning. She might have been leaning over a picket fence. "I wouldn't give in to Her!"

she said to Arnold, staring squarely at him.

Arnold looked nettled. "Oh, I don't! I don't pay any attention to what she says, except when she's around where I am, and that's not so often you could notice it much! _Saunders_ isn't that kind! Saunders is a gay old bird, I tell you! We have some times together when we get going!"

It dawned on Sylvia that he was speaking of the man who, five years before, had been their young Professor Saunders. She found that she remembered vividly his keen, handsome face, softened by music to quiet peace. She wondered what Arnold meant by saying he was a gay old bird.

Arnold went on, shaking his head sagely: "But it's my belief that Saunders is beginning to take to dope ... bad business! Bad business!

He's in love with Madrina, you know, and has to drown his sorrows some way."

Even Judith, for all her Sioux desire to avoid seeming surprised or impressed, could not restrain a rather startled look at this lordly knowledge of the world. Sylvia, although she had scarcely taken in the significance of Arnold's words, dropped her eyes and blushed. Arnold surveyed them with the indulgent look of a rakish but good-hearted man of the world patting two pretty children on the head.

Judith upset his pose by bringing the talk abruptly back to where she had begun it. "But you _did_ give in to her! You pretend you didn't because you are ashamed. She just looked you down. I wouldn't let _any_body look me down; I wouldn't give in to anybody!"

Under this attack, the man of the world collapsed into an awkward overgrown boy, ill at ease, with red lids to his eyes and premature yellow stains on two fingers of his left hand. He shifted his feet and said defensively: "Aw, she's a woman. A fellow can't knock her down. I wouldn't let a man do it." He retreated still further, through another phase, and became a little boy, heated and recriminatory: "I'd like to know who _you_ are to talk! You give in to _your_ mother all the time!"

"I don't give in to my mother; I _mind_ her," said Judith, drawing a distinction which Arnold could not follow but which he was not acute enough to attack other than by a jeering, "Oh, what a crawl! What's the diff?"

"And I mind her whether she's there or not! _I_ do!" continued Judith, pressing what she seemed, inexplicably to Arnold, to consider her advantage.

Sylvia was vexed with them for talking so loudly and getting so red-faced and being so generally out of key with the booming note of luxury resounding about them. "Hush! hush!" she said; "don't be so silly. We ought to be going back."

Arnold took her rebuke without protest. Either something in this pa.s.sage-at-arms had perversely brought a sudden impulse to his mind, or he had all along a purpose in his fantastic trip West. As they reached the two ladies, he burst out, "Say, Madrina, why couldn't I go on to La Chance and go to school there, and live with the Marshalls?"

Four amazed faces were turned on him. His stepmother evidently thought him stricken with sudden insanity and strove distractedly to select, from the heaped pile of her reasons for so thinking, some few which might be cited without too great offense to her brother's mode of life: "Why, what a strange idea, Arnold! What ever made you think of such a thing? _You_ wouldn't like it!" She was going on, as in decency bound, to add that it would be also rather a large order for the Marshalls to adopt a notably "difficult" boy, when Judith broke in with a blunt divination of what was in her aunt's mind. "You'd have to wash dishes if you came to our house," she said, "and help peel potatoes, and weed the celery bed."

"I'd like it!" declared Arnold. "We'd have lots of fun."

"I _bet_ we would!" said Judith, with an unexpected a.s.sent.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith laughed gently. "You don't know what you're talking about, you silly boy. You never did an hour's work in your life!"

Arnold sat down by Mrs. Marshall. "I wouldn't be in the way, _would_ I?" he said, with a clumsy pleading. He hesitated obviously over the "Mother" which had risen to his lips, the name he had had for her during the momentous visit of five years before, and finally, blushing, could not bring it out. "I'd like it like anything! _I_ wouldn't be ... I'd be _different_! Sylvie and Judy seem like little sisters to me." The red on his face deepened. "It's--it's good for a fellow to have sisters, and a home," he said in a low tone not audible to his stepmother's ears.

Mrs. Marshall put out a large, strong hand and took his slack, big-knuckled fingers into a tight clasp. Mrs. Marshall-Smith evidently thought a light tone best now, as always, to take. "I tell you, Barbara"--she suggested laughingly, "we'll exchange. You give me Sylvia, and take Arnold."

Mrs. Marshall ignored this as pure facetiousness, and said seriously: "Why really, Victoria, it might not be a bad thing for Arnold to come to us. I know Elliott would be glad to have him, and so would I."

For an instant Arnold's life hung in the balance. Mrs. Marshall-Smith, gleaming gold and ivory in her evening-dress of amber satin, sat silent, startled by the suddenness with which the whole astonishing question had come up. There was in her face more than one hint that the proposition opened a welcome door of escape to her....

And then Arnold himself, with the tragic haste of youth, sent one end of the scales down, weighted so heavily that the sight of his stepmother's eyes and mouth told him it could never rise again. In the little, pregnant pause, he cried out joyfully, "Oh, Mother! Mother!"

and flung his arms around Mrs. Marshall's neck. It was the only time he had shown the slightest emotion over anything. It burst from him with surprising effect.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith was, as she had said, only human, and at this she rose, her delicate face quiet and impa.s.sive, and shook out the shimmering folds of her beautiful dress. She said casually, picking up her fan and evidently preparing for some sort of adjournment: "Oh, Arnold, don't be so absurd. Of course you can't foist yourself off on a family that's no relation to you, that way. And in any case, it wouldn't do for you to graduate from a co-educational State University. Not a person you know would have heard of it. You know you're due at Harvard next fall." With adroit fingers, she plucked the string sure to vibrate in Arnold's nature. "Do go and order a table for us in the Rose-Room, there's a good boy. And be sure to have the waiter give you one where we can see the dancing."

The matter was settled.

CHAPTER XII

ONE MAN'S MEAT ...

That night after the Marshalls had gone back to their somewhat shabby boarding-house, "things" happened to the two people they had left in the great hotel. Sylvia and Judith never knew the details, but it was apparent that something portentous had occurred, from the number of telegrams Aunt Victoria had managed to receive and send between the hour when they left her in the evening, and eleven o'clock the next morning, when they found her, hatted and veiled, with an array of strapped baggage around her.

"It's Arnold again!" she told them, with a resigned gesture. She laid down the time-table she had been consulting and drew Mrs. Marshall to the window for a low-voiced explanation. When she came back, "I'm so sorry, dears, to cut short even by a single day this charming time together," she told the girls. "But the news I've been getting from Arnold's school--there's nothing for me to do but to stop everything and take him back there to see what can be done to patch things up." She spoke with the patient air of one inured to the sacrifices involved in the upbringing of children. "We leave on the eleven-forty--oh, I _am_ so sorry! But it would have been only one day more. I meant to get you both a dress--I've 'phoned to have them sent to you."

The rest was only the dreary, bustling futility of the last moments before train-time--kisses, remarks about writing more often; a promise from Aunt Victoria to send Sylvia from time to time a box of old dresses and fineries as material for her niece's dressmaking skill;--from Arnold, appearing at the last minute, a good deal of rather flat, well-meant chaffing, proffered with the most entire unconcern as to the expressed purpose of their journey; and then the descent through long, mirrored, softly carpeted corridors to the cla.s.sic beauty of the Grecian temple where the busy men, with tired eyes, came and went hurriedly, treading heavily on their heels.

Outside was the cab, Arnold extremely efficient in browbeating the driver as to the stowing away of bags, more kisses, in the general cloud of which Arnold pecked shyly at Sylvia's ear and Judith's chin; then the retreating vehicle with Arnold standing up, a tall, ungainly figure, waving a much-jointed hand.

After it was out of sight the three watchers looked at each other in a stale moment of anticlimax.

"Arnold's horrid, isn't he?" said Judith thoughtfully.

"Why, I _like_ him!" opposed Sylvia.

"Oh, I _like_ him, all right," said Judith.

Then both girls looked at their mother. What next ...? They were not to have gone back to La Chance until the next night. Would this change of plans alter their schedule? Mrs. Marshall saw no reason why it should. She proposed a sightseeing expedition to a hospital. Miss Lindstrom, the elderly Swedish woman who worked among the dest.i.tute negroes of La Chance, had a sister who was head-nurse in the biggest and newest hospital in Chicago, and she had written very cordially that if her sister's friends cared to inspect such an inst.i.tution, she was at their service. Neither of the girls having the slightest idea of what a hospital was like, nor of any other of the sights in the city which they might see instead, no objection was made to this plan.

They made inquiries of a near-by policeman and found that they could reach it by the elevated. Their encounter with this metropolitan facility for transportation turned out to be among the most memorable bits of sightseeing of their trip. Neither of the girls had ever imagined anything so lurid as the Sat.u.r.day noon jam, the dense, packed throngs waiting on the platforms and bursting out through the opened doors like beans from a split bag, their places instantly taken by an even greater crowd, perspiring, fighting grimly for foot-room and expecting and receiving no other kind. Judith was fired contagiously with the spirit about her, set her teeth, thrust out her elbows, shoved, pushed, grunted, fought, all with a fresh zest in the performance which gave her an immense advantage over the fatigued city-dwellers, who a.s.saulted their fellow-citizens with only a preoccupied desire for an approach to a breathing s.p.a.ce, and, that attained, subsided into lurching, strap-hanging quiescence. Judith secured with ease, on all the public vehicles they utilized that day, a place on the outside edge of a platform, where she had fresh air in abundance and could hang over the grating to watch with extreme interest the intimate bits of tenement-house life which flashed jerkily by.

But Sylvia, a shuddering chip on the torrent, always found herself in the exact middle of the most crowded spot, feeling her body horrifyingly pressed upon by various invisible ones behind her and several only too visible ones in front, breathing down the back of somebody's neck, often a dirty and sweaty one, with somebody breathing hotly down the back of her own. Once as a very fat and perspiring German-American began to fight the crowd in the endeavor to turn around and leave the car, his slowly revolving bulbous bulk pushed her so smotheringly into the broad back of a negro ahead of her that she felt faint. As they left the car, she said vehemently: "Oh, Mother, this makes me sick! Why couldn't we have taken a cab? Aunt Victoria always does!"

Her mother laughed. "You little country girl! A cab for as far as this would cost almost as much as the ticket back to La Chance."

"I don't see why we came, then!" cried Sylvia. "It's simply awful! And this is a _horrid_ part of town!" She suddenly observed that they were walking through a very poor, thickly inhabited street, such as she had never seen before. As she looked about her, her mother stopped laughing and watched her face with a painful attention. Sylvia looked at the tall, dingy houses, the frowzy little shops, the swarms of dirty-nosed children, shrill-voiced, with matted hair, running and whooping in the street, at the slatternly women yelling un.o.beyed orders to them out of half-glimpsed, cheerless interiors, smelling of cabbage and dishwater. It was Sylvia's first sight of the life of city poor, and upon her face of disgust and revulsion her mother bent a stern and anxious eye.

"See here, Sylvia!" she said abruptly, "do you know what _I_ was thinking about back there in the crowd on the elevated? I was thinking that lots of girls, no older than _my_ girl, have to stand that twice a day, going to earn their livings."

Sylvia chafed under the obviously admonitory tone of this. "I don't see that that makes it any easier for us if they _do!_" she said in a recalcitrant voice. She stepped wide to avoid a pile of filth on the sidewalk, and clutched at her skirt. She had a sudden vision of the white-tiled, velvet-carpeted florist's shop in a corner of Aunt Victoria's hotel where, behind spotless panes of shining plate-gla.s.s, the great cl.u.s.ters of cut-flowers dreamed away an enchanted life--roses, violets, lilies of the valley, orchids....

"Here we are at the hospital," said Mrs. Marshall, a perplexed line of worry between her brows. But at once she was swept out of herself, forgot her seriously taken responsibility of being the mother of a girl like Sylvia. She was only Barbara Marshall, thrilled by a n.o.ble spectacle. She looked up at the great, clean, many-windowed facade above them, towering, even above the huge bulk of the gas-tanks across the street, and her dark eyes kindled. "A hospital is one of the most wonderful places in the world!" she cried, in a voice of emotion. "All this--to help people get well!"

They pa.s.sed into a wide, bare hall, where a busy young woman at a desk nodded on hearing their names, and spoke into a telephone. There was an odd smell in the air, not exactly disagreeable, yet rather uncomfortably pungent. "Oh, iodoform," remarked the young woman at the desk, hearing them comment on it. "Do you get it? We don't notice it _here_ at all."

Then came Miss Lindstrom's sister, powerfully built, gaunt, gray, with a professional, impersonal cheerfulness. The expedition began. "I'll take you to the children's ward first," said Miss Lindstrom; "that always interests visitors so much...."

Rows on rows of little white beds and white, bloodless faces with an awful patience on them, and little white hands lying in unchildlike quiet on the white spreads; rows on rows of hollow eyes turned in listless interest on the visitors; nurses in white, stepping briskly about, bending over the beds, lifting a little emaciated form, deftly unrolling a bandage; heat; a stifling smell of iodoform; a sharp sudden cry of pain from a distant corner; somewhere a dully beating pulse of low, suppressed sobs....

They were out of the children's ward now, walking along a clean bare corridor. Sylvia swallowed hard. Her eyes felt burning. Judith held her mother's hand tightly. Miss Lindstrom was explaining to Mrs.

Marshall a new system of ventilation.