The Bent Twig

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

She was aware that some one stood in front of her, looking into her face, and she recognized one of the ship's officials whom she had noticed from a distance on the ship, an under-officer, somehow connected with the engines, who had sat at table with the second-class passengers. He was a burly, red-faced man, with huge strong hands and a bald head.

He looked at her now for a moment with an intent kindness, and taking her arm led her a step to a packing-case on which he made her sit down. At the break in her immobility, a faintness came over Sylvia. The man bent over her and began to fan her with his cap. A strong smell of stale and cheap tobacco reached Sylvia from all of his obese person, but his vulgar, ugly face expressed a profoundly self-forgetful concern. "There, feelin' better?" he asked, his eyes anxiously on hers. The man looked at the envelope comprehendingly: "Oh—bad news—" he murmured. Sylvia opened her hand and showed him that it had not been opened. "I haven't looked at it yet," she said pitifully.

The man made an inarticulate murmur of pity—put out his thick red fingers, took the message gently from her hand, and opened it. As he read she searched his face with an impassioned scrutiny.

When he raised his eyes from the paper, she saw in them, in that grossly fleshy countenance, such infinite pity that even her swift intuition of its meaning was not so swift as to reach her heart first. The blow did not reach her naked and unprotected in the solitude of her egotism, as it had at Naples. Confusedly, half-resentfully, but irresistibly she knew that she did not—could not—stand alone, was not the first thus to be struck down. This knowledge brought the tonic summons to courage. She held out her hand unflinchingly, and stood up as she read the message, "Mother died this morning at dawn." The telegram was dated three days before. She was now two days from home.

She looked up at the man before her and twice tried to speak before she could command her voice. Then she said quite steadily: "I live in the West. Can you tell me anything about trains to Chicago?"

"I'm going with ye, to th' train," he said, taking her arm and moving forward. Two hours later his vulgar, ugly, compassionate face was the last she saw as the train moved out of the station. He did not seem a stranger to Sylvia. She saw that he was more than middle-aged, he must have lost his mother, there must have been many deaths in his past. He seemed more familiar to her than her dearest friends had seemed before; but from now on she was to feel closer to every human being than before to her most loved. A great breach had been made in the wall of her life—the wall which had hidden her fellows from her. She saw them face the enigma as uncomprehendingly, as helplessly as she, and she felt the instinct of terror to huddle close to others, even though they feel—because they feel—a terror as unrelieved. It was not that she loved her fellow-beings more from this hour, rather that she felt, to the root of her being, her inevitable fellowship with them.

The journey home was almost as wholly a period of suspended animation for Sylvia as the days on the ocean had been. She had read the telegram at last; now she knew what had happened, but she did not yet know what it meant. She felt that she would not know what it meant until she reached home. How could her mother be dead? What did it mean to have her mother dead?

She said the grim words over and over, handling them with heartsick recklessness as a desperate man might handle the black, ugly objects with smoking fuses which he knows carry death. But for Sylvia no explosion came. No ravaging perception of the meaning of the words reached her strained inner ear. She said them over and over, the sound of them was horrifying to her, but in her heart she did not believe them. Her mother, her mother could not die!

There was no one, of course, at the La Chance station to meet her, and she walked out through the crowd and took the street-car without having seen a familiar face. It was five o'clock in the afternoon then, and six when she walked up the dusty country road and turned in through the gate in the hedge. There was home—intimately a part of her in every detail of its unforgotten appearance. The pines stood up strong in their immortal verdure, the thick golden hush of the summer afternoon lay like an enchantment about the low brown house. And something horrible, unspeakably horrible had happened there. Under the forgotten dust and grime of her long railway journey, she was deadly pale as she stepped up on the porch. Judith came to the door, saw her sister, opened her arms with a noble gesture, and clasped Sylvia to her in a strong and close embrace. Not a word was spoken. The two clung to each other silently, Sylvia weeping incessantly, holding fast to the dear human body in her arms, feeling herself dissolved in a very anguish of love and pain. Her wet cheek was pressed against Judith's lips, the tears rained down in a torrent. All the rich, untapped strength of her invincible youth was in that healthful flood of tears.

There were none such in the eyes of Professor Marshall as he came down the stairs to greet his daughter. Sylvia was immeasurably shocked by his aspect. He did not look like her father. She sought in vain in that gray countenance for any trace of her father's expression. He came forward with a slow, dragging step, and kissed his daughter, taking her hand—his, she noticed, felt like a sick man's, parched, the skin like a dry husk. He spoke, in a voice which had no resonance, the first words that had been uttered: "You must be very tired, Sylvia. You would better go and lie down. Your sister will go with you." He himself turned away and walked slowly towards the open door. Sylvia noticed that he shuffled his feet as he walked.