The Bent Twig

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

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."