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The Bent Twig by Dorothy Canfield

D >> Dorothy Canfield >> The Bent Twig




After he had eaten a few mouthfuls and laid down the knife and fork,
she did not insist further, but rose to lead him to the couch in the
living-room. She dared not risk his own room, the bed on which her
mother had died.

"Now you must lie down and rest, Father," she said, loosening his
clothes and unlacing his shoes as though he had been a sick child.
He let her do what she would, and as she pushed him gently back, he
yielded and lay down at full length. Sylvia sat down beside him,
feeling her strength ebbing. Her father lay on his back, his eyes wide
open. On the ceiling above him a circular flicker of light danced and
shimmered, reflected from a glass of water on the table. His eyes
fastened upon this, at first unwinkingly, with a fixed intensity,
and later with dropped lids and half-upturned eyeballs. He was quite
quiet, and finally seemed asleep, although the line of white between
his eyelids made Sylvia shudder.

With the disappearance of the instant need for self-control and
firmness, she felt an immense fatigue. It had cost her dearly, this
victory, slight as it was. She drooped in her chair, exhausted and
undone. She looked down at the ash-gray, haggard face on the pillow,
trying to find in those ravaged features her splendidly life-loving
father. It was so quiet that she could hear the big clock in the
dining-room ticking loudly, and half-consciously she began to
count the swings of the pendulum: One--two--three--four--five--six--
seven--eight--nine--ten--eleven--twelve--thirteen--fourteen--

She awoke to darkness and the sound of her mother's name loudly
screamed. She started up, not remembering where she was, astonished to
find herself sitting in a chair. As she stood bewildered in the
dark, the clock in the dining-room struck two. At once from a little
distance, outside the window apparently, she heard the same wild
cry ringing in her ears--"_Bar-ba-ra!_" All the blood in her body
congealed and the hair on her head seemed to stir itself, in the
instant before she recognized her father's voice.

The great impulse of devotion which had entered her heart in the
garden still governed her. Now she was not afraid. She did not think
of running away. She only knew that she must find her father quickly
and take care of him. Outside on the porch, the glimmering light from
the stars showed her his figure, standing by one of the pillars,
leaning forward, one hand to his ear. As she came out of the door, he
dropped his hand, threw back his head, and again sent out an agonizing
cry--"_Bar-ba-ra!_ Where are you?" It was not the broken wail of
despair; it was the strong, searching cry of a lost child who thinks
trustingly that if he but screams loudly enough his mother must hear
him and come--and yet who is horribly frightened because she does not
answer. But this was a man in his full strength who called! It seemed
the sound must reach beyond the stars. Sylvia felt her very bones
ringing with it. She went along the porch to her father, and laid
her hand on his arm. Through his sleeve she could feel how tense and
knotted were the muscles. "Oh, Father, _don't!_" she said in a low
tone. He shook her off roughly, but did not turn his head or look at
her. Sylvia hesitated, not daring to leave him and not daring to try
to draw him away; and again was shaken by that terrible cry.

The intensity of his listening attitude seemed to hush into
breathlessness the very night about him, as it did Sylvia. There was
not a sound from the trees. They stood motionless, as though carved in
wood; not a bird fluttered a wing; not a night-insect shrilled; the
brook, dried by the summer heat to a thread, crept by noiselessly. As
once more the frantic cry resounded, it seemed to pierce this opaque
silence like a palpable missile, and to wing its way without hindrance
up to the stars. Not the faintest murmur came in answer. The silence
shut down again, stifling. Sylvia and her father stood as though
in the vacuum of a great bell-glass which shut them away from the
rustling, breathing, living world. Sylvia said again, imploringly,
"Oh, _Father_!" He looked at her angrily, sprang from the porch, and
walked rapidly towards the road, stumbling and tripping over the laces
of his shoes, which Sylvia had loosened when she had persuaded him to
lie down. Sylvia ran after him, her long bounds bringing her up to
his side in a moment. The motion sent the blood racing through her
stiffened limbs again. She drew a long breath of liberation. As she
stepped along beside her father, peering in the starlight at his
dreadful face, half expecting him to turn and strike her at any
moment, she felt an immense relief. The noise of their feet on the
path was like a sane voice of reality. Anything was more endurable
than to stand silent and motionless and hear that screaming call lose
itself in the grimly unanswering distance.

They were on the main road now, walking so swiftly that, in the hot
summer night, Sylvia felt her forehead beaded and her light dress
cling to her moist body. She took her father's hand. It was parched
like a sick man's, the skin like a dry husk. After this, they walked
hand-in-hand. Professor Marshall continued to walk rapidly, scuffling
in his loose, unlaced shoes. They passed barns and farmhouses, the
latter sleeping, black in the starlight, with darkened windows. In
one, a poor little shack of two rooms, there was a lighted pane, and
as they passed, Sylvia heard the sick wail of a little child. The
sound pierced her heart. She longed to go in and put her arms about
the mother. Now she understood. She tightened her hold on her father's
hand and lifted it to her lips.

He suffered this with no appearance of his former anger, and soon
after Sylvia was aware that his gait was slackening. She looked at him
searchingly, and saw that he had swung from unnatural tension to spent
exhaustion. His head was hanging and as he walked he wavered. She put
her hand under his elbow and turned him about on the road. "Now we
will go home," she said, drawing his arm through hers. He made no
resistance, not seeming to know what she had done, and shuffled along
wearily, leaning all his weight on her arm. She braced herself against
this drag, and led him slowly back, wiping her face from time to time
with her sleeve. There were moments when she thought she must let him
sink on the road, but she fought through these, and as the sky was
turning faintly gray over their heads, and the implacably silent stars
were disappearing in this pale light, the two stumbled up the walk to
the porch.

Professor Marshall let himself be lowered into the steamer chair.
Sylvia stood by him until she was sure he would not stir, and then
hurried into the kitchen. In a few moments she brought him a cup of
hot coffee and a piece of bread. He drank the one and ate the other
without protest She set the tray down and put a pillow under her
father's head, raising the foot-rest. He did not resist her. His head
fell back on the pillow, but his eyes did not close. They were fixed
on a distant point in the sky.

Sylvia tiptoed away into the house and sank down shivering into a
chair. A great fit of trembling and nausea came over her. She rose,
walked into the kitchen, her footsteps sounding in her ears like her
mother's. There was some coffee left, which she drank resolutely, and
she cooked an egg and forced it down, her mother's precepts loud in
her ears. Whatever else happened, she must have her body in condition
to be of use.

After this she went out to the porch again and lay down in the hammock
near her father. The dawn had brightened into gold, and the sun was
showing on the distant, level, green horizon-line.

* * * * *

It was almost the first moment of physical relaxation she had known,
and to her immense, her awed astonishment it was instantly filled with
a pure, clear brilliance, the knowledge that Austin Page lived and
loved her. It was the first, it was the only time she thought of
anything but her father, and this was not a thought, it was a vision.
In the chaos about her, a great sunlit rock had emerged. She laid hold
on it and knew that she would not sink.

* * * * *

But now, _now_ she must think of nothing but her father! There was no
one else who could help her father. Could she? Could any one?

She herself, since her prayer among the roses, cherished in her
darkened heart a hope of dawn. But how could she tell her father of
that? Even if she had been able to force him to listen to her, she had
nothing that words could say, nothing but the recollection of that
burning hour in the garden to set against the teachings of a lifetime.
That had changed life for her ... but what could it mean to her
father? How could she tell him of what was only a wordless radiance?
Her father had taught her that death meant the return of the spirit to
the great, impersonal river of life. If the spirit had been superb and
splendid, like her mother's, the river of life was the brighter for
it, but that was all. Her mother had lived, and now lived no more.
That was what they had tried to teach her to believe. That was what
her father had taught her--without, it now appeared, believing it
himself.

And yet she divined that it was not that he would not, but that he
could not now believe it. He was like a man set in a vacuum fighting
for the air without which life is impossible. And she knew no way
to break the imprisoning wall and let in air for him. _Was_ there,
indeed, any air outside? There must be, or the race could not live
from one generation to the next. Every one whose love had encountered
death must have found an air to breathe or have died.

Constantly through all these thoughts, that day and for many days and
months to come, there rang the sound of her mother's name, screamed
aloud. She heard it as though she were again standing by her father
under the stars. And there had been no answer.

She felt the tears stinging at her eyelids and sat up, terrified at
the idea that her weakness was about to overtake her. She would go
again out to the garden where she had found strength before. The
morning sun was now hot and glaring in the eastern sky.




CHAPTER XLIV

"_A bruised reed will He not break, and a dimly burning wick will He
not quench_,"--ISAIAH.


As she stepped down the path, she saw a battered black straw hat on
the other side of the hedge. Cousin Parnelia's worn old face and
dim eyes looked at her through the gate. Under her arm she held
planchette. Sylvia stepped through the gate and drew it inhospitably
shut back of her. "What is it, Cousin Parnelia?" she said
challengingly, determined to protect her father.

The older woman's face was all aglow. "Oh, my dear; I've had such a
wonderful message from your dear mother. Last night--"

Sylvia recoiled from the mad old creature. She could not bear to have
her sane, calm, strong mother's name on those lips. Cousin Parnelia
went on, full of confidence: "I was sound asleep last night when I
was awakened by the clock's striking two. It sounded so loud that I
thought somebody had called to me. I sat up in bed and said, 'What is
it?' and then I felt a great longing to have planchette write. I got
out of bed in my nightgown and sat down in the dark at the table.
Planchette wrote so fast that I could hardly keep up with it. And when
it stopped, I lighted a match and see ... here ... in your mother's
very handwriting"--fervently she held the bit of paper up for Sylvia
to see. The girl cast a hostile look at the paper and saw that the
writing on it was the usual scrawl produced by Cousin Parnelia, hardly
legible, and resembling anything rather than her mother's handwriting.

"Read it--read it--it is too beautiful!" quivered the other, "and then
let me show it to your father. It was meant for him--"

Sylvia shook like a roughly plucked fiddle-string. She seized the
wrinkled old hand fiercely. "Cousin Parnelia, I forbid you going
anywhere near my father! You know as well as I do how intensely he
has always detested spiritualism. To see you might be the thing that
would--"

The old woman broke in, protesting, her hat falling to one side, her
brown false front sliding with it and showing the thin, gray hairs
beneath. "But, Sylvia, this is the very thing that would save
him--such a beautiful, beautiful message from your mother,--_see_! In
her own handwriting!"

Sylvia snatched the sheet of yellow paper. "_That's_ not my mother's
handwriting! Do you think I am as crazy as _you_ are!" She tore the
paper into shreds and scattered them from her, feeling a relief in the
violence of her action. The next moment she remembered how patient her
mother had always been with her daft kinswoman and seeing tears in the
blurred old eyes, went to put placating arms about the other's neck.
"Never mind, Cousin Parnelia," she said with a vague kindness, "I know
you mean to do what's right--only we don't believe as you do, and
Father _must_ not be excited!" She turned sick as she spoke and shrank
away from the hedge, carrying her small old cousin with her. Above the
hedge appeared her father's gray face and burning eyes.

He was not looking at her, but at Cousin Parnelia, who now sprang
forward, crying that she had had a beautiful, beautiful message from
Cousin Barbara. "_It_ came last night at two o'clock ... just after
the clock struck two--"

Professor Marshall looked quickly at his daughter, and she saw that he
too had heard the clock striking in the dreadful night, and that he
noted the coincidence.

"Just after the clock struck two she wrote the loveliest message for
you with planchette. Sylvia tore it up. But I'm sure that if we try
with faith, she will repeat it ..."

Professor Marshall's eyes were fixed on his wife's old cousin. "Come
in," he said in a hoarse voice. They were almost the first words
Sylvia had heard him say.

Cousin Parnelia hastened up the path to the house. Sylvia followed
with her father, at the last extremity of agitation and perplexity.

When Cousin Parnelia reached the dining-room table, she sat down by
it, pushed the cloth to one side, and produced a fresh sheet of yellow
paper from her shabby bag. "Put yourselves in a receptive frame of
mind," she said in a glib, professional manner. Sylvia stiffened and
tried to draw her father away, but he continued to stand by the table,
staring at the blank sheet of paper with a strange, wild expression on
his white face. He did not take his eyes from the paper. In a moment,
he sat down suddenly, as though his knees had failed him.

There was a long silence, in which Sylvia could hear the roaring of
the blood in her arteries. Cousin Parnelia put one deeply veined,
shrunken old hand on planchette and the other over her eyes and
waited, her wrinkled, commonplace old face assuming a solemn
expression of importance. The clock ticked loudly.

Planchette began to write--at first in meaningless flourishes, then
with occasional words, and finally Sylvia saw streaming away from the
pencil the usual loose, scrawling handwriting. Several lines were
written and then the pencil stopped abruptly. Sylvia standing near her
father heard his breathing grow loud and saw in a panic that the veins
on his temples were swollen.

Cousin Parnelia took her hand off planchette, put on her spectacles,
read over what had been written, and gave it to Professor Marshall.
Sylvia was in such a state of bewilderment that nothing her father
could have done would have surprised her. She half expected to see him
dash the paper in the old woman's face, half thought that any moment
he would fall, choking with apoplexy.

What he did was to take the paper and try to hold it steadily enough
to read. But his hand shook terribly.

"I will read it to you," said Cousin Parnelia, and she read aloud
in her monotonous, illiterate voice: "'I am well and happy, dearest
Elliott, and never far from you. When you call to me, I hear you.
All is not yet clear, but I wish I could tell you more of the whole
meaning. I am near you this moment. I wish that--' The message stopped
there," explained Cousin Parnelia, laying down the paper.

Professor Marshall leaned over it, straining his eyes to the rude
scrawls, passing his hand over his forehead as though to brush away a
web. He broke out in a loud, high voice. "That is her handwriting....
Good God, her very handwriting--the way she writes Elliott--it is from
_her!_" He snatched the paper up and took it to the window, stumbling
over the chairs blindly as he went. As he held it up to the light,
poring over it again, he began to weep, crying out his wife's name
softly, the tears streaming down his unshaven cheeks. He came back to
the table, and sank down before it, still sobbing, still murmuring
incessantly, "Oh, Barbara--Barbara!" and laid his head on his
outstretched arms.

"Let him cry!" whispered Cousin Parnelia sentimentally to Sylvia,
drawing her away into the hall. A few moments later when they looked
in, he had fallen asleep, his head turned to one side so that Sylvia
saw his face, tear-stained and exhausted, but utterly relaxed and at
peace, like that of a little child in sleep. Crushed in one hand was
the yellow sheet of paper covered with coarse, wavering marks.




CHAPTER XLV

"_That our soul may swim
We sink our heart down, bubbling, under wave_"


The two sisters, their pale faces grave in the shadow of their wide
hats, were on their knees with trowels in a border of their mother's
garden. Judith had been giving a report of Lawrence's condition, and
Sylvia was just finishing an account of what had happened at home,
when the gate in the osage-orange hedge clicked, and a blue-uniformed
boy came whistling up the path. He made an inquiry as to names, and
handed Sylvia an envelope. She opened it, read silently, "Am starting
for America and you at once. Felix." She stood looking at the paper
for a moment, her face quite unmoved from its quiet sadness. The boy
asked, "Any answer?"

"No," she said decisively, shaking her head. "No answer."

As he lingered, lighting a cigarette, she put a question in her turn,
"Anything to pay?"

"No," said the boy, putting the cigarette-box back in his pocket,
"Nothing to pay." He produced a worn and greasy book, "Sign on this
line," he said, and after she had signed, he went away down the path,
whistling. The transaction was complete.

Sylvia looked after the retreating figure and then turned to Judith
as though there had been no interruption. "... and you can see for
yourself how little use I am to him now. Since he got Cousin Parnelia
in the house, there's nothing anybody else could do for him. Even you
couldn't, if you could leave Lawrence. Not for a while, anyhow. I
suppose he'll come slowly out of this to be himself again ... but I'm
not sure that he will. And for now, I actually believe that he'd be
easier in his mind if we were both away. I never breathe a word of
criticism about planchette, of course. But he knows. There's that much
left of his old self. He knows how I must feel. He's really ever so
much better too, you know. He's taken up his classes in the Summer
School again. He said he had 'a message' from Mother that he was to go
back to his work bravely; and the very next day he went over to the
campus, and taught all his classes as though nothing had happened.
Isn't it awfully, terribly touching to see how even such a poor,
incoherent make-believe of a 'message' from Mother has more power to
calm him than anything we could do with our whole hearts? But how
_can_ he! I can't understand it! I can't bear it, to come in on him
and Cousin Parnelia, in their evenings, and see them bent over that
grotesque planchette and have him look up at me so defiantly, as
though he were just setting his teeth and saying he wouldn't care what
I thought of him. He doesn't really care either. He doesn't think of
anything but of having evening come when he can get another 'message'
from Mother ... from Mother! Mother!"

"Well, perhaps it would be as well for us not to be here for a while,"
murmured Judith. There were deep dark rings under her eyes, as though
she had slept badly for a long time. "Perhaps it may be better later
on. I can take Lawrence back with me when I go to the hospital. I want
to keep him near me of course, dear little Lawrence. My little boy!
He'll be my life now. He'll be what I have to live for."

Something in the quality of her quiet voice sent a chill to Sylvia's
heart. "Why, Judy dear, after you are married of course you and Arnold
can keep Lawrence with you. That'll be the best for him, a real home,
with you. Oh, Judy dear," she laid down her trowel, fighting hard
against a curious sickness which rose within her. She tried to speak
lightly. "Oh, Judy dear, when _are_ you going to be married? Or don't
you want to speak about it now, for a while? You never write long
letters, I know--but your late ones haven't had _any_ news in them!
You positively haven't so much as mentioned Arnold's name lately."

As she spoke, she knew that she was voicing an uneasiness which had
been an unacknowledged occupant of her mind for a long time. But she
looked confidently to see one of Judith's concise, comprehensive
statements make her dim apprehensions seem fantastic and far-fetched,
as Judith always made any flight of the imagination appear. But
nothing which Sylvia's imagination might have been able to conceive
would have struck her such a blow as the fact which Judith now
produced, in a dry, curt phrase: "I'm not going to be married."

Sylvia did not believe her ears. She looked up wildly as Judith rose
from the ground, and advanced upon her sister with a stern, white
face. Before she had finished speaking, she had said more than Sylvia
had ever heard her say about a matter personal to her; but even so,
her iron words were few. "Sylvia, I want to tell you about it, of
course. I've got to. But I won't say a word, unless you can keep
quiet, and not make a fuss. I couldn't stand that. I've got all I can
stand as it is."

She stood by an apple-tree and now broke from it a small, leafy
branch, which she held as she spoke. There was something shocking in
the contrast between the steady rigor of her voice and the fury of her
fingers as they tore and stripped and shredded the leaves. "Arnold is
an incurable alcoholic," she said; "Dr. Rivedal has pronounced him
hopeless. Dr. Charton and Dr. Pansard (they're the best specialists in
that line) have had him under observation and they say the same thing.
He's had three dreadful attacks lately. We ... none of their treatment
does any good. It's been going on too long--from the time he was
first sent away to school, at fourteen, alone! There was an inherited
tendency, anyhow. Nobody took it seriously, that and--and the other
things boys with too much money do. Apparently everybody thought it
was just the way boys are--if anybody thought anything about it,
except that it was a bother. He never had anybody, you know--_never,
never_ anybody who ..." her voice rose, threatened to break. She
stopped, swallowed hard, and began again: "The trouble is he has
no constitution left--nothing for a doctor to work with. It's not
Arnold's fault. If he had come out to us, that time in Chicago when he
wanted to--we--he could--with Mother to--" Her steady voice gave way
abruptly. She cast the ravaged, leafless branch violently to the
ground and stood looking down at it. There was not a fleck of color in
her beautiful, stony face.

Sylvia concentrated all her will-power on an effort to speak as Judith
would have her, quietly, without heroics; but when she broke her
silence she found that she had no control of her voice. She tried to
say, "But, Judith dear, if Arnold is like that--doesn't he need you
more than ever? You are a nurse. How can you abandon him now!" But
she could produce only a few, broken, inarticulate words in a choking
voice before she was obliged to stop short, lest she burst out in the
flood of horror which Judith had forbidden.

Broken and inarticulate as they were, Judith knew what was the meaning
of those words. The corners of her mouth twitched uncontrollably. She
bit her marble lower lip repeatedly before she could bring out the few
short phrases which fell like clods on a coffin. "If I--if we--Arnold
and I are in love with each other." She stopped, drew a painful
breath, and said again: "Arnold and I are in love with each other. Do
you know what that means? He is the only man I could not take care
of--Arnold! If I should try, we would soon be married, or lovers. If
we were married or lovers, we would soon have--" She had overestimated
her strength. Even she was not strong enough to go on.

She sat down on the ground, put her long arms around her knees, and
buried her face in them. She was not weeping. She sat as still as
though carved in stone.

Sylvia herself was beyond tears. She sat looking down at the moist
earth on the trowel she held, drying visibly in the hot sun, turning
to dust, and falling away in a crumbling, impalpable powder. It was
like seeing a picture of her heart. She thought of Arnold with an
indignant, passionate pity--how could Judith--? But she was so close
to Judith's suffering that she felt the dreadful rigidity of her body.
The flat, dead tones of the man in the Pantheon were in her ears. It
seemed to her that Life was an adventure perilous and awful beyond
imagination. There was no force to cope with it, save absolute
integrity. Everything else was a vain and foolish delusion, a
two-edged sword which wounded the wielding hand.