Back Aa

Bent Twig

<h2 id="id00486" style="margin-top: 4em">CHAPTER IX</h2> <h5 id="id00487">THE END OF CHILDHOOD</h5> That afternoon a couple of children who came to play in the Marshall orchard brought news that public opinion, after the fashion of that unstable weathercock, was veering rapidly, and blowing from a wholly unexpected quarter. "My papa says," reported Gretchen Schmidt, who never could keep anything to herself, even though it might be by no means to her advantage to proclaim it—"my papa says that he thinks the way American people treats colored peoples is just fierce; and he says if he'd ha' known about our not letting Camilla go to the picnic, he'd ha' taken the trouble to me 'mit der flachen Hand schlagen.' That means he'd have spanked me good and plenty." Maria Perkins, from the limb where she hung by her knees, responded, "Yup, my Uncle Eben says he likes Judy's spunk." "I guess he wouldn't have, if it'd ha' been his pickles!" Gretchen made a last stand against the notorious injustice of fickle adult prejudices. But the tide had begun to turn. On Monday morning Sylvia and Judith found themselves far from ostracized, rather the center of much respectful finger-pointing on the part of children from the other grades who had never paid the least attention to them before. And finally when the Principal, passing majestically from room to room in his daily tour of inspection, paused in his awful progress and spoke to Judith by name, asking her quite familiarly and condescendingly what cities you would pass through if you went from Chicago to New Orleans, the current set once and for all in the other direction. No mention was ever made of the disappearance of the Fingáls, and the Marshall children found their old places waiting for them. It was not long before Judith had all but forgotten the episode; but Sylvia, older and infinitely more impressionable, found it burned irrevocably into her memory. For many and many a week, she did not fall asleep without seeing Camilla's ashy face of wretchedness. And it was years before she could walk past the house where the Fingáls had lived, without feeling sick. Her life was, however, brimming with active interests which occupied her, mind and body. There was rarely a day when a troop of children did not swarm over the Marshall house and barn, playing and playing and playing with that indomitable zest in life which is the birthright of humanity before the fevers and chills of adolescence begin. Sylvia and Judith, moreover, were required to assume more and more of the responsibility of the housework, while their mother extracted from the Marshall five acres an ever increasing largesse of succulent food. Sylvia's séances with old Reinhardt and the piano were becoming serious affairs: for it was now tentatively decided that she was to earn her living by teaching music. There were many expeditions on foot with their mother, for Mrs. Marshall had become, little by little, chief nurse and adviser to all the families of the neighborhood; and on her errands of service one of her daughters was needed to carry supplies and act as assistant. And finally, as the children grew older, and the family tradition of bookishness took hold of them, there were shelves and shelves to be devoured, a strange mixture—Thackeray, Maeterlinck, Fielding, Hakluyt, Ibsen, Dickens, Ruskin, Shaw, Austen, Molière, Defoe, Cervantes, Shakespeare,—the children dipped, or tasted or swallowed whole, according to their temperaments and the books they happened on. When Sylvia was thirteen, almost fourteen years old, she "graduated" from the eighth grade of the public schools and was ready to enter the High School. But after a good many family councils, in most of which, after the unreticent Marshall manner, she herself was allowed to be present, it was decided not to send her to the huge new Central High School, which had cost La Chance such a big slice of its taxes, but to prepare her at home for her course at the State University. She had been growing very fast, was a little thin and white, and had been outgrowing her strength. This at least was the reason given out to inquirers. In reality her father's prejudice against High School life for adolescents was the determining cause. In the course of his University work he was obliged to visit a good many High Schools, and had acquired a violent prejudice against the stirring social life characteristic of those institutions. Sylvia's feelings about this step aside from the beaten track were, like many of Sylvia's feelings, decidedly mixed. She was drawn towards the High School by the suction of the customary. A large number of her classmates expected as a matter of course to pass on in the usual way; but, with an uneasy qualm, half pride and half apprehension, Sylvia was beginning to feel her difference from ordinary children. She was not altogether sorry to say good-bye to her playmates, with whom she no longer had much in common. She would miss the fun of class-life, of course; but there was a certain distinction involved in being educated "differently." She might be queer, but since she was apparently fated to be queer, she might as well not be "common" as well. Finally, because she was still, at fourteen, very much of a child, the scale was tipped by her thinking what fun it would be to go down-town on errands in school hours. Charles Lamb, lost in painful wonder at his own leisure after thirty-six years of incessant office-hours, could savor no more acutely than an American school-child the exquisite flavor of freedom at an hour formerly dedicated to imprisonment. As a matter of fact, during the next three years Sylvia's time was more constantly occupied than when there was a fixed time-limit to her studies. Her teachers were always about her, and lightly as the new yoke pressed, she wore it practically without intermission. Her immersion in the ideals, the standards, the concepts of her parents was complete, engulfing. Somebody was nearly always teaching her something. She studied history and Latin with her father; mathematics with her mother. She learned to swim, to play tennis, to ride in the summer-time, and to skate on the frozen swimming-pool in winter, all without stirring from home. Old Reinhardt was supposed to come twice a week to give her a piano-lesson, but actually he dropped in almost every day to smoke meditatively and keep a watchful ear on her practising. Although during those years she was almost literally rooted to the Marshall soil, watered by Marshall convictions, and fed by Marshall information, the usual miracle of irresistibly individual growth went silently and unconsciously forward in her. She was growing up to be herself, and not her mother or her father, little as any one in her world suspected the presence of this unceasingly recurrent phenomenon of growth. She was alive to all the impressions reflected so insistently upon her, but she transmuted them into products which would immensely have surprised her parents, they being under the usual parental delusion that they knew every corner of her heart. Her budding aversions, convictions, ambitions were not in the least the aversions, convictions, and ambitions so loudly voiced about her; and a good deal of her energy was taken up in a more or less conscious reaction from the family catchwords, with especial emphasis laid on an objection to the family habit of taking their convictions with great seriousness. Her father would have been aghast if he could have felt the slightest reflection from the heat of her detestation of his favorite, Emersonian motto, which, now that he had reached five and forty, he was apt to repeat with the iteration natural to his age, rousing in Sylvia the rebellious exasperation felt by her age for over-emphatic moralizings. On the occasion of one of the annual gatherings at the Marshall house of the Seniors in her father's classes, she remarked fiercely to Judith, "If Father gets off that old Emerson, 'What will you have, quoth God. Take it and pay for it,' again tonight in his speech, I'm going to get right up and scream." Judith stared. The girls were in the kitchen, large aprons over their best dresses, setting out rows of plates for the chicken salad which was to come after the music. "I don't see anything to scream about in that!" said Judith with a wondering contempt for Sylvia's notions. "I'm so sick of it!" cried Sylvia, tearing the lettuce-leaves apart with venom. "Father never gets through any sort of a speech that he doesn't work it in—and I hate it, anyhow! It makes me feel as though somebody had banged a big door in my face and shut me up in prison." "Well, for goodness' sakes!" cried Judith, who, at this period of their lives, had remained rather more than her three years behind Sylvia's intelligence. "How do you get all that out of that!" "You haven't sense enough to know what it means, that's all!" retorted Sylvia. "It means something perfectly hateful, the way Father uses it. It means you've got to pay for every single thing you do or get in this world! It's somebody tagging you round with an account-book, seeing how big a bill you're running up. It's the perfectly horrid way Father and Mother make us do, of always washing up the dishes we dirty, and always picking up the things we drop. Seems as though I'd die happy, if I could just step out of my nightgown in the morning and leave it there, and know that it would get hung up without my doing it." "Well, if that's all you want, to die happy," said Judith, the literal-minded, "I will do that much for you!" "Oh gracious, no! That wouldn't do any good! You know I couldn't take any satisfaction letting you do that!" objected Sylvia, peevishly, fuming and fumbling helplessly before the baffling quality of her desires. "I don't want just somebody to pick it up for me. I want it picked up by somebody that I don't care about, that I don't see, that I'd just as soon have do the tiresome things as not. I want somebody to do it, and me to feel all right about having them do it!" "Well, for goodness' sakes!" Judith was reduced again to mere wonder. Professor and Mrs. Marshall stepped into the kitchen for a moment to see that everything was progressing smoothly. The professor had his viola in his hand and was plucking softly at the strings, a pleasant, tranquil anticipation of harmony on his face. He looked affectionately at his daughters and thought what dear good children they were. Judith appealed to her parents: "Sylvia's as crazy as a loon. She says she wants somebody to do her work for her, and yet she wants to feel all right about shirking it!" Mrs. Marshall did not follow, and did not care. "What?" she said indifferently, tasting the chicken-salad in the big yellow bowl, and, with an expression of serious consideration, adding a little more salt to it. But Sylvia's father understood, "What you want to remember, daughter," he said, addressing himself to his oldest child with a fond certainty of her quick apprehension, "is that fine saying of Emerson, 'What will you have, quoth—'" A raw-boned assistant appeared in the doorway. "Everybody here, I guess, Perfesser," he said. When the girls were alone again, Sylvia stole a look at Judith and broke into noiseless giggles. She laughed till the tears ran down her cheeks and she had to stop work and go to the kitchen sink to wash her face and take a drink of water. "You never do what you say you're going to," said Judith, as gravely alien to this mood as to the other. "I thought you said you'd scream." "I am screaming," said Sylvia, wiping her eyes again. They were very familiar with the work of preparing the simple "refreshments" for University gatherings. Their mother always provided exactly the same viands, and long practice had made them letter-perfect in the moves to be made. When they had finished portioning off the lettuce-leaves and salad on the plates, they swiftly set each one on a fresh crêpe-paper napkin. Sylvia professed an undying hatred for paper napkins. "I don't see why," said Judith. "They're so much less bother than the other kind when you're only going to use them once, this way." "That's it," asserted Sylvia; "that's the very stingy, economical thing about them I hate, their not being a bother! I'd like to use big, fine-damask ones, all shiny, that somebody had ironed twenty minutes, every one, like those we had at Eleanor Hubert's birthday party. And then I'd scrunch them up and throw them in the laundry if there was the least speck on them." "I wouldn't like the job of doing them up," said Judith. "Neither would I. I'd hate it! And I wouldn't," continued Sylvia, roaming at will in her enchanted garden; "I'd hire somebody to take all the bother of buying them and hemming them and doing them up and putting them on the table. All I'd do, would be to shake them out and lay them across my lap," she went through a dainty-fingered pantomime, "and never think a thing about how they got there. That's all I want to do with napkins. But I do love 'em big and glossy. I could kiss them!" Judith was almost alarmed at the wildness of Sylvia's imaginings. "Why, you talk as though you didn't have good sense tonight, Sylvie. It's the party. You always get so excited over parties." Judith considered it a "come-down" to get excited over anything. "Great Scotland! I guess I don't get excited over one of these student parties!" Sylvia repudiated the idea. "All Father's 'favorite students' are such rough-necks. And it makes me tired to have all our freaks come out of their holes when we have company—Miss Lindström and Mr. Hecht and Cousin Parnelia and all." "The President comes," advanced Judith. Sylvia was sweeping in her iconoclasm. "What if he does—old fish-mouth! He's nobody—he's a rough-neck himself. He used to be a Baptist minister. He's only President because he can talk the hayseeds in the Legislature into giving the University big appropriations. And anyhow, he only comes here because he has to—part of his job. He doesn't like the freaks any better than I do. The last time he was here, I heard Cousin Parnelia trying to persuade him to have planchette write him a message from Abraham Lincoln. Isn't she the limit, anyhow!" The girls put off their aprons and slipped into the big, low-ceilinged living-room, singing like a great sea-shell with thrilling violin-tones. Old Reinhardt was playing the Kreutzer, with Professor Marshall at the piano. Judith went quietly to sit near Professor Kennedy, and Sylvia sat down near a window, leaning her head against the pane as she listened, her eyes fixed on the blackness outside. Her face cleared and brightened, like a cloudy liquor settling to limpidity in a crystal vase. Her lips parted a little, her eyes were fixed on a point incalculably distant. Her mind emptied itself of everything but her joy in the glorious cadences…. If she had been asked what she and Judith had been talking of, she could not have told; but when, after the second movement was finished, old Reinhardt put down his violin and began to loosen his bow (he never played the presto finale), it all came back to the girl as she looked around her at her father's guests. She hated the way the young men's Adam's apples showed through their too-widely opened collars, and she loathed the way the thin brown hair of one of the co-eds was strained back from her temples. She received the President's condescending, oleaginous hand-shake with a qualm at his loud oratorical voice and plebeian accent, and she headed Cousin Parnelia off from a second mediumistic attack, hating her badly adjusted false-front of hair as intensely as ever Loyola hated a heretic. And this, although uncontrollably driven by her desire to please, to please even a roomful of such mediocrities, she bore to the outward eyes the most gracious aspect of friendly, smiling courtesy. Professor Marshall looked at her several times, as she moved with her slim young grace among his students and friends, and thought how fortunate he was in his children. After the chicken-salad and coffee had been successfully served and eaten, one of the Seniors stepped forward with an awkward crudeness and presented Professor Marshall with a silver-mounted blotting-pad. The house was littered with such testimonials to the influence of the Professor on the young minds under his care, testimonials which his children took as absolutely for granted as they did everything else in the home life. On this occasion Sylvia was so afflicted because the young rustic appointed to make the presentation speech, forgot most of what he had planned to say, that she felt nothing but the liveliest impatience with the whole proceeding. But her father's quick heart was touched, and more than half of his usual little speech of farewell to his Seniors was an expression of thanks to them. Before he had finished the last part, which consisted of eloquent exhortations to the higher life, none the less sincerely heartfelt for being remarkably like similar speeches he had made during the last twenty years, he had quoted his favorite saying from Emerson. Judith looked apprehensively at Sylvia; but she was not laughing. She evidently was not hearing a word her father said, being lost in the contemplation of the perfect evening costume of the newest assistant in Professor Marshall's department. He was a young man from Massachusetts, fresh from Harvard, who had come West to begin his teaching that year. His was certainly the most modern dress-suit in the University faculty; and he wore it with a supercilious disregard for its perfections which greatly impressed Sylvia. After these usual formalities were thus safely past, some one suggested a game of charades to end the evening. Amid great laughter and joking from the few professors present and delighted response from the students who found it immensely entertaining to be on such familiar terms with their instructors, two leaders began to "choose sides." The young assistant from Harvard said in a low tone to his friend, not noticing Professor Marshall's young daughter near them: "They won't really go on and do this fool, undignified, backwoods stunt, will they? They don't expect us to join in!" "Oh yes, they will," answered his friend, catching up his tone of sophisticated scorn. He too was from Harvard, from an earlier class. "You'll be lucky if they don't have a spelling-down match, later on." "Good Lord!" groaned the first young man. "Oh, you mustn't think all of the University society is like this!" protested the second. "And anyhow, we can slope now, without being noticed," Sylvia understood the accent and tone of this passage more than the exact words, but it summed up and brought home to her in a cruelly clarified form her own groping impressions. The moment was a terribly painful one for her. Her heart swelled, the tears came to her eyes, she clenched her fists. Her fine, lovely, and sensitive face darkened to a tragic intensity of resolve. She might have been the young Hannibal, vowing to avenge Carthage. What she was saying to herself passionately was, "When I get into the University, I will not be a jay!" It was under these conditions that Sylvia passed from childhood, and emerged into the pains and delights and responsibilities of self-consciousness. <h2 id="id00528" style="margin-top: 4em">BOOK II</h2> <h5 id="id00529">A FALSE START TO ATHENS</h5> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.