The Bent Twig

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

"But you couldn't realize what losing the money meant to us. You can't know what the absence of money can do to a life."

"I can know," said Page, "what the presence of it cannot do for a life." His accent implied rather sadly that the omissions were considerable.

"Oh, of course, of course," Sylvia agreed. "There's any amount it can't do. After you have it, you must get the other things too."

He brought his eyes down to her from a roving quest among the tops of the trees. "It seems to me you want a great deal," he said quizzically.

"Yes, I do," she admitted. "But I don't see that you have any call to object to my wanting it. You don't have to wish for everything at once. You have it already."

He received this into one of his thoughtful silences, but presently it brought him to a standstill. They were within sight of the Grand Canal again, looking down from the terrace of the Trianon. He leaned against the marble balustrade and thrust his hands deep into his pockets. His clear eyes were clouded. He looked profoundly grave. "I am thirty-two years old," he said, "and never for a moment of that time have I made any sense out of my position in life. If you call that 'having everything'—"

It occurred to Sylvia fleetingly that she had never made any sense out of her position in life either, and had been obliged to do a great many disagreeable things into the bargain, but she kept this thought to herself, and looked conspicuously what she genuinely felt, a sympathetic interest. The note of plain direct sincerity which was Page's hallmark never failed to arrest her attention, a little to arouse her wonder, and occasionally, for a reason that she did not like to dwell upon, somewhat to abash her. The reason was that he never spoke for effect, and she often did. He was not speaking for effect now: he seemed scarcely even to be speaking to her, rather to be musingly formulating something for his own enlightenment. He went on. "The fact is that there is no sense to be made out of my situation in life. I am like a man with a fine voice, who has no ear."

He showed surprise that Sylvia failed to follow this, and explained. "I mean the voice is no good to that kind of a man, it's no good to anybody. It's the craziest, accidental affair anyhow, haven't you ever noticed it?—who draws the fine voices. Half the time—more than half the time, most of the time it seems to me when I've been recently to a lot of concerts, the people who have the voices haven't any other qualifications for being singers. And it's so with coal-mines, with everything else that's inherited. For five years now I've given up what I'd like to do, and I've tried, under the best maestri I could find, to make something out of my voice, so to speak. And it's no go. It's in the nature of things that I can't make a go of it. Over everything I do lies the taint that I'm the 'owner'! They are suspicious of me, always will be—and rightly so. Anybody else not connected with the mediaeval idea of 'possession' could do better than I. The whole relation's artificial. I'm in it for the preposterous reason that my father, operating on Wall Street, made a lucky guess,—as though I should be called upon to run a locomotive because my middle initial is L!"

Sylvia still felt the same slight sense of flatness when this recurring topic thrust itself into a personal talk; but during the last month she had adjusted herself to Page so that this no longer showed on the surface. She was indeed quite capable of taking an interest in the subject, as soon as she could modulate herself into the new key. "Yes, of course," she agreed, "it's like so many other things that are perfectly necessary to go on with, perfectly absurd when you look closely at them. My father nearly lost his position once for saying that all inheritance was wrong. But even he never had the slightest suggestion as to what to do about it, how to get an inheritance into the hands of the people who might make the best use of it." She was used from her childhood to this sort of academic doubt of everything, conducted side by side with a practical acceptance of everything. Professor and Madame La Rue, in actual life devotedly faithful married lovers, staid, stout, habit-ridden elderly people, professed a theoretical belief in the flexibility of relationships sanctioned by the practice of free love. It was perhaps with this recollection in her mind that she suggested, "Don't you suppose it will be like the institution of marriage, very, very gradually altered till it fits conditions better?"

"In the meantime, how about the cases of those who are unhappily married?"