The Bent Twig Part 6

Mrs. Marshall-Smith gave her favorite a penetrating look. "What's the matter with you, Sylvia?" she asked in the peremptory note which her sweet voice of many modulations could startlingly a.s.sume on occasion.

Sylvia had none of Judith's instant pugnacious antagonism to any peremptory note. She answered in one imploring rush of a question, "Aunt Victoria, why should _Father_ be so very mad at Pauline?"

Mrs. Marshall-Smith looked a little startled at this direct reference to the veiled storm-center of the day, but not at all displeased. "Oh, your mother told him? Was he so very angry?" she asked with a slight smile.

"Oh, dreadfully!" returned Sylvia. "I didn't _mean_ to listen, but I couldn't help it. Buddy wouldn't go to sleep and Father's voice was so loud--and he got madder and madder at her." She went on with another question, "Auntie, who was Ephraim Smith?"

Aunt Victoria turned upon her in astonishment, and did not, for a moment, answer; then: "Why, that was the name of my husband, Sylvia.

What has that to do with anything?"

"Why didn't Pauline like him?" asked Sylvia.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith replied with a vivacity of surprise which carried her out of her usual delicate leisure in speech. "_Pauline?_ Why, she never saw him in her life! _What_ are you talking about, child?"

"But, Father said--I thought--he seemed to mean--" Sylvia halted, not able to remember in her bewilderment what it had been that Father had said. In a blur of doubt and clouded perceptions she lost all definite impression of what she had heard. Evidently, as so often happened, she had grown-ups' affairs all twisted up in her mind. Aunt Victoria was touched with kindly amus.e.m.e.nt at the little girl's face of perplexity, and told her, dismissing the subject: "Never mind, dear, you evidently misunderstood something. But I wonder what your father could have said to give you such a funny idea."

Sylvia gave it up, shaking her head. They turned into the main street of La Chance, and Aunt Victoria directed the coachman to drive them to "the" drug store of town, and offered Sylvia her choice of any soda water confection she might select. This completed the "about-face" of the mobile little mind. After several moments of blissful anguish of indecision, Sylvia decided on a peach ice-cream soda, and thereafter was nothing but sense of taste as she ecstatically drew through a straw the syrupy, foamy draught of nectar. She took small sips at a time and held them in the back of her mouth till every minute bubble of gas had rendered up its delicious p.r.i.c.kle to her tongue. Her consciousness was filled to its uttermost limits with a voluptuous sense of present physical delight.

And yet it was precisely at this moment that from her subconscious mind, retracing with unaided travail a half-forgotten clue, there sprang into her memory a complete phrase of what her father had said.

She gave one more suck to the straw and laid it aside for a moment to say in quite a comfortable accent to her aunt: "Oh yes, now I remember. He said she didn't care for him any more than for the first man she might have solicited in the street." For an instant the words came back as clearly as though they had just been uttered, and she repeated them fluently, returning thereupon at once to the charms of the tall, foam-filled frosted gla.s.s.

Evidently Aunt Victoria did not follow this sudden change of subject, for she asked blankly, "_Who_? Who didn't care for who?"

"Why, I supposed, Pauline for Ephraim Smith. It was that that made Father so mad," explained Sylvia, sucking dreamily, her eyes on the little maelstrom created in the foaming liquid by the straw, forgetting everything else. The luxurious leisure in which she consumed her potation made it last a long time, and it was not until her suction made only a sterile rattling in the straw that she looked up at her aunt to thank her.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith's face was averted and she did not turn it back as she said, "Just run along into the shop and leave your gla.s.s, Sylvia--here is the money."

After Sylvia took her seat again in the carriage, the coachman turned the horse's head back up the Main Street. "Aren't you going to the campus?" asked Sylvia in surprise.

"No, we are going to the hotel," said Aunt Victoria. She spoke quietly, and seemed to look as usual, but Sylvia's inner barometer fell fast with a conviction of a change in the emotional atmosphere.

She sat as still as possible, and only once glanced up timidly at her aunt's face. There was no answering glance. Aunt Victoria gazed straight in front of her. Her face looked as it did when it was being ma.s.saged--all smooth and empty. There was, however, one change. For the first time that day, she looked a little pale.

As the carriage stopped in front of the onyx-lined, palm-decorated, plate-gla.s.s-mirrored "entrance hall" of the expensive hotel, Aunt Victoria descended, motioning to Sylvia not to follow her. "I haven't time to drive any more this afternoon," she said. "Peter will take you home. And have him bring Arnold back at once." She turned away and, as Sylvia sat watching her, entered the squirrel-cage revolving door of gla.s.s, which a little boy in livery spun about for her.

But after she was inside the entrance hall, she signified to him that she had forgotten something, and came immediately out again. What she had forgotten surprised Sylvia as much as it touched her. Aunt Victoria came rapidly to the side of the carriage and put out her arms. "Come here, dear," she said in a voice Sylvia had never heard her use. It trembled a little, and broke. With her quick responsiveness, Sylvia sprang into the outstretched arms, overcome by the other's emotion. She hid her face against the soft, perfumed laces and silk, and heard from beneath them the painful throb of a quickly beating heart.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith held her niece for a long moment and then turned the quivering little face up to her own grave eyes, in which Sylvia, for all her inexperience, read a real suffering. Aunt Victoria looked as though somebody were hurting her--hurting her awfully--Sylvia pressed her cheek hard against her aunt's, and Mrs. Marshall-Smith felt, soft and Warm and ardent on her lips, the indescribably fresh kiss of a child's mouth. "Oh, little Sylvia!" she cried, in that new, strange, uncertain voice which trembled and broke, "Oh, little Sylvia!" She seemed to be about to say something more, said in fact in a half-whisper,

"I hope--I hope--" but then shook her head, kissed Sylvia gently, put her back in the carriage, and again disappeared through the revolving door.

This time she did not turn back. She did not even look back. After a moment's wait, Peter gathered up the reins and Sylvia, vaguely uneasy, and much moved, drove home in a solitary state, which she forgot to enjoy.

The next morning there was no arrival, even tardy, of the visitors from the hotel. Instead came a letter, breaking the startling news that Aunt Victoria had been called unexpectedly to the East, and had left on the midnight train, taking Arnold with her, of course. Judith burst into angry expressions of wrath over the incompleteness of the cave which she and Arnold had been excavating together. The next day was the beginning of school, she reminded her auditors, and she'd have no time to get it done! Never! She characterized Aunt Victoria as a mean old thing, an epithet for which she was not reproved, her mother sitting quite absent and absorbed in the letter. She read it over twice, with a very puzzled air, which gave an odd look to her usually crystal-clear countenance. She asked her husband one question as he went out of the door. "You didn't see Victoria yesterday--or say anything to her?" to which he answered, with apparently uncalled-for heat, "I did _not_! I thought it rather more to the purpose to try to look up Pauline."

Mrs. Marshall sprang up and approached him with an anxious face. He shook his head: "Too late. Disappeared. No trace."

She sat down again, looking sad and stern.

Professor Marshall put on his hat with violence, and went away.

When he came home to luncheon there was a fresh sensation, and again a disagreeable one. He brought the astounding news that, at the very beginning of the semester's work, he had been deserted by his most valuable a.s.sistant, and abandoned, apparently forever, by his most-loved disciple. Saunders had left word, a mere laconic note, that he had accepted the position left vacant by the dismissal of Arnold's tutor, and had entered at once upon the duties of his new position.

Professor Marshall detailed this information in a hard, level voice, and without further comment handed his wife Saunders' note. She read it rapidly, this time with no perplexity, and laid it down, saying to her husband, briefly, "Will you kindly remember that the children are here?"

Judith looked at Sylvia in astonishment, this being the first time that that well-worn phrase, so familiar to most children, had ever been heard in the Marshall house. Why shouldn't Father remember they were there? Couldn't he _see_ them? Judith almost found the idea funny enough to laugh at, although she had not at all in general Sylvia's helpless response to the ridiculous. Sylvia did not laugh now. She looked anxiously at her father's face, and was relieved when he only answered her mother's exhortation by saying in a low tone: "Oh, I have nothing to say. It's beyond words!"

Luncheon went on as usual, with much chatter among the children. Some time later--in the midst of a long story from Lawrence, Mrs. Marshall herself brought up the subject again. Buddy was beginning to struggle with the narrative form of self-expression, and to trip his tongue desperately over the tenses. He had just said, "And the rabbit _was_ naughty, didn't he was?" when his mother exclaimed, addressing her husband's grim face, "Good Heavens, don't take it so hard, Elliott."

He raised an eyebrow, but did not look up from the pear he was eating. "To be responsible, as I feel I am, for the pitching into a _cul-de-sac_ of the most promising young--"

His wife broke in, "_Responsible_! How in the world are _you_ responsible!" she added quickly, as if at random, to prevent the reply which her husband was evidently about to cast at her. "Besides, how do _you_ know?--one never knows how things will turn out--she may--she may marry him, and he may have a life which will give him more leisure for investigation than if--"

Professor Marshall wiped his lips violently on his napkin and stood up. "Nothing would induce her to marry him--or any one else. She's extracted from marriage all she wants of it. No, she'll just keep him trailing along, in an ambiguous position, sickened and tantalized and fevered, till all the temper is drawn out of him--and then h.e.l.l be dropped,"

He turned away with an impatient fling of his head. His wife stood up now and looked at him anxiously. "Go play us something on the piano,"

she urged. This was not a common exhortation from her. She cared very little for music, and with her usual honesty she showed, as a rule, a very pa.s.sive att.i.tude towards it.

Professor Marshall glanced at her with a flash of anger. "Sometimes you count too much on my childishness, Barbara," he said resentfully, and went out of the door without further words.

Decidedly the discomposing effect of Aunt Victoria's visit lasted even after she had gone away. But the next day was the beginning of the school term, the busy, regular routine was taken up, Sylvia was promoted to the 5A grade, and at home Father let her begin to learn the Pilgrim's Chorus, from Tannhauser.

Life for the eager little girl moved quickly forward at its usual brisk pace, through several years to come.

CHAPTER VII

"WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT ..."

The public school to which the Marshall children went as soon as they were old enough was like any one of ten thousand public schools--a large, square, many-windowed, extravagantly ugly building, once red brick, but long ago darkened almost to black by soft-coal smoke. About it, shaded by three or four big cottonwood-trees, was an inclosed s.p.a.ce of perhaps two acres of ground, beaten perfectly smooth by hundreds of trampling little feet, a hard, bare earthen floor, so entirely subdued to its fate that even in the long summer vacation no spear of gra.s.s could penetrate its crust to remind it that it was made of common stuff with fields and meadows.

School began at nine o'clock in the morning and, as a rule, three-fourths of the children had pa.s.sed through the front gate twenty or thirty minutes earlier. n.o.body knew why it should be considered such a hideous crime to be "tardy," but the fact was that not the most reckless and insubordinate of the older boys cared to risk it. Any one of the four hundred children in any public school in the city preferred infinitely to be absent a day than to have the ghastly experience of walking through deserted streets (that is, with no children on them), across the empty playground frighteningly unlike itself, into the long, desolate halls which, walk as cat-like as one might, resounded to the guilty footsteps with accusing echoes. And then the narrow cloakroom, haunted with limp, hanging coats and caps and hats, and finally the entry into the schoolroom, seated rank on rank with priggishly complacent schoolmates, looking up from their books with unfriendly eyes of blame at the figure of the late-comer.

AH over that section of La Chance, during the hour between half-past seven and half-past eight in the morning, the families of school children were undergoing a most rigorous discipline in regularity and promptness. No child was too small or too timid to refrain from embittering his mother's life with clamorous upbraidings if breakfast were late, or his school-outfit of clothes were not ready to the last b.u.t.ton, so that he could join the procession of schoolward-bound children, already streaming past his door at a quarter past eight. The most easy-going and self-indulgent mother learned to have at least one meal a day on time; and the children themselves during those eight years of their lives had imbedded in the tissue of their brains and the marrow of their bones that unrebelling habit of bending their backs daily to a regular burden of work not selected by themselves--which, according to one's point of view, is either the bane or the salvation of our modern industrial society.

The region where the school stood was inhabited, for the most part, by American families or German and Irish ones so long established as to be virtually American; a condition which was then not infrequent in moderate-sized towns of the Middle West and which is still by no means unknown there. The cla.s.s-rolls were full of Taylors and Aliens and Robinsons and Jacksons and Websters and Rawsons and Putnams, with a scattering of Morrisseys and Crimminses and O'Hearns, and some Schultzes and Brubackers and Helmeyers. There was not a Jew in the school, because there were almost none in that quarter of town, and, for quite another reason, not a single negro child. There were plenty of them in the immediate neighborhood, swarming around the collection of huts and shanties near the railroad tracks given over to negroes, and known as Flytown. But they had their own school, which looked externally quite like all the others in town, and their playground, beaten bare like that of the Washington Street School, was filled with laughing, shouting children, ranging from shoe-black through coffee-color to those occasional tragic ones with white skin and blue eyes, but with the telltale kink in the fair hair and the bluish half-moon at the base of the finger-nails.

The four hundred children in the Washington Street School were, therefore, a ma.s.s more h.o.m.ogeneous than alarmists would have us believe it possible to find in this country. They were, for all practical purposes, all American, and they were all roughly of one cla.s.s. Their families were neither rich nor poor (at least so far as the children's standards went). Their fathers were grocers, small clerks, merchants, two or three were truck-farmers, plumbers, carpenters, accountants, employees of various big businesses in town.

It was into this undistinguished and plebeian mediocrity that the Marshall children were introduced when they began going to school.

The interior of the school-building resembled the outside in being precisely like that of ten thousand other graded schools in this country. The halls were long and dark and dusty, and because the building had been put up under contract at a period when public contract-work was not so scrupulously honest as it notably is in our present cleanly muck-raked era, the steps of the badly built staircase creaked and groaned and sagged and gave forth clouds of dust under the weight of the myriads of little feet which climbed up and clown those steep ascents every day. Everything was of wood. The interior looked like the realized dream of a professional incendiary.

The cla.s.srooms were high and well-lighted, with many large windows, never either very clean or very dirty, which let in a flood of our uncompromisingly brilliant American daylight upon the rows of little seats and desks screwed, like those of an ocean liner, immovably to the floor, as though at any moment the building was likely to embark upon a cruise in stormy waters.

Outwardly the rows of clean-faced, comfortably dressed, well-shod American children, sitting in chairs, bore no resemblance to shaven-headed, barefooted little Arabian students, squatting on the floor, gabbling loud uncomprehended texts from the Koran; but the sight of Sylvia's companions bending over their school-books with glazed, vacant eyes, rocking back and forth as a rhythmical aid to memorizing, their lips moving silently as they repeated over and over, gabblingly, the phrases of the printed page, might have inclined a hypothetical visitor from Mars to share the bewildered amus.e.m.e.nt of the American visitors to Moslem schools. Sylvia rocked and twisted a favorite b.u.t.ton, gabbled silently, and recited fluently with the rest, being what was known as an apt and satisfactory pupil. In company with the other children she thus learned to say, in answer to questions, that seven times seven is forty-nine; that the climate of Brazil is hot and moist; that the capital of Arkansas is Little Rock; and that "through" is spelled with three misleading and superfluous letters.