Читать книгу The Bent Twig - Dorothy Canfield Fisher - Страница 13

A fuller initiation into the kaleidoscopic divergencies of adult standards was given Sylvia during the visits of her Aunt Victoria. These visits were angelic in their extreme rarity, and for Sylvia were always a mixture of the beatific and the distressing. Only to look at Aunt Victoria was a bright revelation of elegance and grace. And yet the talk around table and hearth on the two or three occasions when the beautiful young widow honored their roof with a sojourn was hard on Sylvia's sensitive nerves.

It was not merely that a good deal of what was said was unintelligible. The Marshall children were quite accustomed to incessant conversations between their elders of which they could gather but the vaguest glimmering. They played about, busy in their own absorbing occupations, lending an absent but not wholly unattentive ear to the gabble of their elders, full of odd and ridiculous-sounding words like Single-tax, and contrapuntal development, and root-propagation, and Benthamism, and Byzantine, and nitrogenous fertilizers, and Alexandrine, and chiaroscuro, and surviving archaisms, and diminishing utility—for to keep up such a flood-tide of talk as streamed through the Marshall house required contributions from many diverging rivers. Sylvia was entirely used to this phenomenon and, although it occasionally annoyed her that good attention was wasted on projects so much less vital than those of the children, she bore it no grudge. But on the rare occasions when Aunt Victoria was with them, there was a different and ominous note to the talk which made Sylvia acutely uneasy, although she was quite unable to follow what was said. This uncomfortable note did not at all come from mere difference of opinion, for that too was a familiar element in Sylvia's world. Indeed, it seemed to her that everybody who came to the Marshall house disagreed with everybody else about everything. The young men, students or younger professors, engaged in perpetual discussions, carried on in acrimonious tones which nevertheless seemed not in the least to impair the good feeling between them. When there was nobody else there for Father to disagree with, he disagreed with Mother, occasionally, to his great delight, rousing her from her customary self-contained economy of words to a heat as voluble as his own. Often as the two moved briskly about, preparing a meal together, they shouted out from the dining-room to the kitchen a discussion on some unintelligible topic such as the "anachronism of the competitive system," so loudly voiced and so energetically pursued that when they came to sit down to table, they would be quite red-cheeked and stirred-up, and ate their dinners with as vigorous an appetite as though they had been pursuing each other on foot instead of verbally.

The older habitués of the house were no more peaceable and were equally given to what seemed to childish listeners endless disputes about matters of no importance. Professor La Rue's white mustache and pointed beard quivered with the intensity of his scorn for the modern school of poetry, and Madame La Rue, who might be supposed to be insulated by the vast bulk of her rosy flesh from the currents of passionate conviction flashing through the Marshall house, had fixed ideas on the Franco-Prussian War, on the relative values of American and French bed-making, and the correct method of bringing up girls (she was childless), which needed only to be remotely stirred to burst into showers of fiery sparks. And old Professor Kennedy was nothing less than abusive when started on an altercation about one of the topics vital to him, such as the ignoble idiocy of the leisure-class ideal, or the generally contemptible nature of modern society. No, it was not mere difference of opinion which so charged the air during Aunt Victoria's rare visits with menacing electricity.

As a matter of fact, if she did differ in opinion from her brother and his wife, the children would never have been able to guess it from the invariably restrained tones of her fluent and agreeable speech, so different from the outspoken virulence with which people in that house were accustomed to defend their ideas. But, indefinable though it was to Sylvia's undeveloped powers of analysis, she felt that the advent of her father's beautiful and gracious sister was like a drop of transparent but bitter medicine in a glass of clear water. There was no outward sign of change, but everything was tinctured by it. Especially was her father changed from his usual brilliantly effervescent self. In answer to the most harmless remark of Aunt Victoria, he might reply with a sudden grim sneering note in his voice which made Sylvia look up at him half-afraid. If Aunt Victoria noticed this sardonic accent, she never paid it the tribute of a break in the smooth surface of her own consistent good-will, rebuking her brother's prickly hostility only by the most indulgent tolerance of his queer ways, a tolerance which never had on Professor Marshall's sensibilities the soothing effect which might have seemed its natural result.

The visit which Aunt Victoria paid them when Sylvia was ten years old was more peaceable than the one before it. Perhaps the interval of five years between the two had mellowed the relationship; or more probably the friction was diminished because Aunt Victoria arranged matters so that she was less constantly in the house than usual. On that occasion, in addition to the maid who always accompanied her, she brought her little stepson and his tutor, and with characteristic thoughtfulness refused to impose this considerable train of attendants on a household so primitively organized as that of the Marshalls. They all spent the fortnight of their stay at the main hotel of the town, a large new edifice, the conspicuous costliness of which was one of the most recent sources of civic pride in La Chance. Here in a suite of four much-decorated rooms, which seemed unutterably elegant to Sylvia, the travelers slept, and ate most of their meals, making their trips out to the Marshall house in a small, neat, open carriage, which, although engaged at a livery-stable by Mrs. Marshall-Smith for the period of her stay, was not to be distinguished from a privately owned equipage.

It can be imagined what an event in the pre-eminently stationary life of the Marshall children was this fortnight. To Judith and Lawrence, eight and four respectively, Aunt Victoria's charms and amenities were non-existent. She was for Judith as negligible as all other grown-ups, save the few who had good sense enough to play games and go in swimming. Judith's interest centered in the new boy, whom the Marshalls now saw for the first time, and who was in every way a specimen novel in their limited experience of children. During their first encounter, the well-groomed, white-linen-clad boy with his preternaturally clean face, his light-brown hair brushed till it shone like lacquer, his polished nails and his adult appendage of a tutor, aroused a contempt in Judith's mind which was only equaled by her astonishment. On that occasion he sat upright in a chair between his stepmother and his tutor, looking intently out of very bright blue eyes at the two gipsy-brown little girls in their single-garment linen play-clothes, swinging their tanned bare legs and feet from the railing of the porch. They returned this inspection in silence—on Sylvia's part with the keen and welcoming interest she always felt in new people who were well-dressed and physically attractive, but as for Judith with a frankly hostile curiosity, as at some strange and quite unattractive new animal.

The next morning, a still, oppressive day of brazen heat, it was suggested that the children take their guest off to visit some of their own favorite haunts to "get acquainted." This process began somewhat violently by the instant halt of Arnold as soon as they were out of sight of the house. "I'm going to take off these damn socks and shoes," he announced, sitting down in the edge of a flower-bed.

"Oh, don't! You'll get your clean suit all dirty!" cried Sylvia, springing forward to lift him out of the well-tilled black loam. Arnold thrust her hand away and made a visible effort to increase his specific gravity. "I hope to the Lord I do get it dirty!" he said bitterly.

"Isn't it your best?" asked Sylvia, aghast. "Have you another?" "I haven't anything but!" said the boy savagely. "There's a whole trunk full of them!" He was fumbling with a rough clumsiness at the lacing of his shoes, but made no progress in loosening them, and now began kicking at the grass. "I don't know how to get them off!" he cried, his voice breaking nervously. Judith was down on her knees, inspecting with a competent curiosity the fastenings, which were of a new variety.

"It's easy!" she said. "You just lift this little catch up and turn it back, and that lets you get at the knot." As she spoke, she acted, her rough brown little fingers tugging at the silken laces. "How'd you ever get it fastened," she inquired, "if you don't know how to unfasten it?"

"Oh, Pauline puts my shoes on for me," explained Arnold. "She dresses and undresses me."

Judith stopped and looked up at him. "Who's Pauline?" she asked, disapproving astonishment in her accent.

"Madrina's maid."

Judith pursued him further with her little black look of scorn. "Who's

Madrina?"

"Why—you know—your Aunt Victoria—my stepmother—she married my father when I was a little baby—she doesn't want me to call her 'mother' so I call her Madrina.' That's Italian for—"

Judith had no interest in this phenomenon and no opinion about it. She recalled the conversation to the point at issue with her usual ruthless directness. "And you wouldn't know how to undress yourself if somebody didn't help you!" She went on loosening the laces in a contemptuous silence, during which the boy glowered resentfully at the back of her shining black hair. Sylvia essayed a soothing remark about what pretty shoes he had, but with small success. Already the excursion was beginning to take on the color of its ending—an encounter between the personalities of Judith and Arnold, with Sylvia and Lawrence left out. When the shoes finally came off, they revealed white silk half-hose, which, discarded in their turn, showed a pair of startlingly pale feet, on which the new boy now essayed wincingly to walk. "Ouch! Ouch! OUCH!" he cried, holding up first one and then the other from contact with the hot sharp-edged pebbles of the path, "How do you do it?"

"Oh, it always hurts when you begin in the spring," said Judith carelessly. "You have to get used to it. How old are you?"

"Ten, last May."

"Buddy here began going barefoot last summer and he's only four," she stated briefly, proceeding towards the barn and chicken-house.

After that remark the new boy walked forward with no more articulate complaints, though his face was drawn and he bit his lips. He was shown the chicken-yard—full of gawky, half-grown chickens shedding their down and growing their feathers—and forgot his feet in the fascination of scattering grain to them and watching their fluttering scrambles. He was shown the rabbit-house and allowed to take one of the limp, unresponsive little bunches of fur in his arms, and feed a lettuce-leaf into its twitching pink mouth. He was shown the house-in-the-maple-tree, a rough floor fixed between two large branches, with a canvas roof over it, ensconced in which retreat his eyes shone with happy excitement. He was evidently about to make some comment on it, but glanced at Judith's dark handsome little face, unsmiling and suspicious, and remained silent. He tried the same policy when being shown the children's own garden, but Judith tracked him out of this attempt at self-protection with some direct and searching questions, discovering in him such ignorance of the broadest division-lines of the vegetable kingdom that she gave herself up to open scorn, vainly frowned down by the more naturally civilized Sylvia, who was by no means enjoying herself. The new boy was not in the least what he had looked. She longed to return to the contemplation of Aunt Victoria's perfections. Lawrence was, as usual, deep in an unreal world of his own, where he carried forth some enterprise which had nothing to do with any one about him. He was frowning and waving his arms, and making stabbing gestures with his fingers, and paid no attention to the conversation between Judith and the new boy.

"What can you do? What do you know?" asked the former at last.

"I can ride horseback," said Arnold defiantly.

Judith put him to the test at once, leading the way to the stall which was the abode of the little pinto broncho, left them, she explained, as a trust by one of Father's students from the Far West, who was now graduated and a civil engineer in Chicago, where it cost too much to keep a horse. Arnold emerged from this encounter with the pony with but little more credit than he had earned in the garden, showing an ineptness about equine ways which led Judith through an unsparing cross-examination to the information that the boy's experience of handling a horse consisted in being ready in a riding-costume at a certain hour every afternoon, and mounting a well-broken little pony, all saddled and bridled, which was "brought round" to the porte-cochère.

"What's a porte-cochère?" she asked, with her inimitable air of despising it, whatever it might turn out to be.

Arnold stared with an attempt to copy her own frank scorn for another's ignorance. "Huh! Don't you even know that much? It's the big porch without any floor to it, where carriages drive up so you can get in and out without getting wet if it rains. Every house that's good for anything has one."

So far from being impressed or put down, Judith took her stand as usual on the offensive. "'Fore I'd be afraid of a little rain!" she said severely, an answer which caused Arnold to seem disconcerted, and again to look at her hard with the startled expression of arrested attention which from the first her remarks and strictures seemed to cause in him.

They took the pinto out. Judith rode him bareback at a gallop down to the swimming pool and dived from his back into the yellow water shimmering hotly in the sun. This feat stung Arnold into a final fury. Without an instant's pause he sprang in after her. As he came to the top, swimming strongly with a lusty, regular stroke, and rapidly overhauled the puffing Judith, his face shone brilliantly with relief. He was another child. The petulant boy of a few moments before had vanished. "Beat you to the springboard!" he sputtered joyously, swimming low and spitting water as he slid easily through it at twice Judith's speed. She set her teeth and drove her tough little body with a fierce concentration of all her forces, but Arnold was sitting on the springboard, dangling his red and swollen feet when she arrived.

She clambered out and sat down beside him, silent for an instant. Then she said with a detached air, "You can swim better than any boy I ever saw."

Arnold's open, blond face flushed scarlet at this statement. He looked at the dripping little brown rat beside him, and returned impulsively, "I'd rather play with you than any girl I ever saw."

They were immediately reduced to an awkward silence by these two unpremeditated superlatives. Judith found nothing to say beyond a "huh" in an uncertain accent, and they turned with relief to alarums and excursions from the forgotten and abandoned Sylvia and Lawrence. Sylvia was forcibly restraining her little brother from following Judith into the water. "You mustn't, Buddy! You know we aren't allowed to go in till an hour after eating and you only had your breakfast a little while ago!" She led him away bellowing.

Arnold, surprised, asked Judith, "'Cept for that, are you allowed to go in whenever you want?"

"Sure! We're not to stay in more than ten minutes at a time, and then get out and run around for half an hour in the sun. There's a clock under a little roof-thing, nailed up to a tree over there, so's we can tell."

"And don't you get what-for, if you go in with all your clothes on this way?"

"I haven't any clothes on but my rompers," said Judith. "They're just the same as a bathing suit." She snatched back her prerogative of asking questions. "Where did you learn to swim so?"

"At the seashore! I get taken there a month every summer. It's the most fun of any of the places I get taken. I've had lessons there from the professor of swimming ever since I was six. Madrina doesn't know what to do with me but have me take lessons. I like the swimming ones the best. I hate dancing—and going to museums."

"What else can you do?" asked Judith with a noticeable abatement of her previous disesteem.

Arnold hesitated, his own self-confidence as evidently dashed. "Well—I can fence a little—and talk French; we are in Paris winters, you know. We don't stay in Lydford for the winter. Nobody does."

"Everybody goes away?" queried Judith. "What a funny town!"

"Oh, except the people who live there—the Vermonters."

Judith was more and more at a loss. "Don't you live there?"

"No, we don't live anywhere. We just stay places for a while. Nobody that we know lives anywhere." He interrupted a further question from the astonished Judith to ask, "How'd you happen to have such a dandy swimming-pool out of such a little brook?"

Judith, switched off upon a topic of recent and absorbing interest, was diverted from investigation into the odd ways of people who lived nowhere. "Isn't it great!" she said ardently. "It's new this summer—that's why I don't swim so very well yet. Why, it was this way. The creek ran through a corner of our land, and a lot of Father's students that are engineers or something, wanted to do something for Father when they graduated—lots of students do, you know—and everybody said the creek didn't have water enough and they bet each other it did, and after Commencement we had a kind of camp for a week—tents and things all round here—and Mother cooked for them—camp fires—oh, lots of fun!—and they let us children tag around as much as we pleased—and they and Father dug, and fixed concrete—say, did you ever get let to stir up concrete? It's great!"

Seeing in the boy's face a blankness as great as her own during his chance revelations of life on another planet, she exclaimed, "Here, come on, down to the other end, and I'll show you how they made the dam and all—they began over there with—" The two pattered along the edge hand-in-hand, talking incessantly on a common topic at last, interrupting each other, squatting down, peering into the water, pointing, discussing, arguing, squeezing the deliciously soft mud up and down between their toes, their heads close together—they might for the moment have been brother and sister who had grown up together.

They were interrupted by voices, and turning flushed and candid faces of animation towards the path, beheld Aunt Victoria, wonderful and queen-like in a white dress, a parasol, like a great rose, over her stately blond head, attended by Sylvia adoring; Mrs. Marshall quiet and observant; Mr. Rollins, the tutor, thin, agitated, and unhappily responsible; and Professor Marshall smiling delightedly at the children.

"Why, Arnold Smith!" cried his tutor, too much overcome by the situation to express himself more forcibly than by a repetition of the boy's name. "Why, Arnold! Come here!"

The cloud descended upon the boy's face. "I will not!" he said insolently.

"But we were just looking for you to start back to the hotel," argued Mr. Rollins.

"I don't care if you were!" said the boy in a sullen accent.

Sylvia and Judith looked on in amazement at this scene of insubordination, as new to them as all the rest of the boy's actions. He was standing still now, submitting in a gloomy silence to the various comments on his appearance, which was incredibly different from that with which he had started on his travels. The starch remaining in a few places in his suit, now partly dried in the hot sun, caused the linen to stand out grotesquely in peaks and mud-streaked humps, his hair, still wet, hung in wisps about his very dirty face, his bare, red feet and legs protruded from shapeless knickerbockers. His stepmother looked at him with her usual good-natured amused gaze. "It is customary, before going in swimming, isn't it, Arnold, to take your watch out of your pocket and put your cuff-links in a safe-place?" she suggested casually.

"Good Heavens! His watch!" cried Mr. Rollins, clutching at his own sandy hair.

Professor Marshall clapped the boy encouragingly on the shoulder. "Well, sir, you look more like a human being," he said heartily, addressing himself, with defiance in his tone, to his sister.

She replied with a smile, "That rather depends, doesn't it, Elliott, upon one's idea of what constitutes a human being?"

Something in her sweet voice roused Judith to an ugly wrath. She came forward and took her place protectingly beside her new playmate, scowling at her aunt. "We were having a lovely time!" she said challengingly.

Mrs. Marshall-Smith looked down at the grotesque little figure and touched the brown cheek indulgently with her forefinger. "That too rather depends upon one's definition of a lovely time," she replied, turning away, leaving with the indifference of long practice the unfortunate Mr. Rollins to the task of converting Arnold into a product possible to transport through the streets of a civilized town.

Before they went away that day, Arnold managed to seek Judith out alone, and with shamefaced clumsiness to slip his knife, quite new and three-bladed, into her hand. She looked at it uncomprehendingly. "For you—to keep," he said, flushing again, and looking hard into her dark eyes, which in return lightened suddenly from their usual rather somber seriousness into a smile, a real smile. Judith's smiles were far from frequent, but the recipient of one did not forget it.