The Bent Twig

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

He looked at her long, and turned away. "Oh yes, you're in love with him, all right!" he murmured finally, "and I don't believe that the Colorado business or any of the rest of what you're saying has much to do with anything. Austin's a live man and you're in love with him; and that's all there is to it. You're lucky!" He took out his handkerchief, and wiped his forehead and the back of his neck. Sylvia, looking at him more closely, was shocked to see how thin and haggard was his face. He asked now, "Did you ever think that maybe what Austin was thinking about when he chucked the money was what you'd say, how you'd take it? I should imagine," he added with a faint smile,' "that he is hard to please if he's not pretty well satisfied."

Sylvia was startled. "No. Why no," she said, "I thought I'd looked at every single side of it, but I never dreamed of that."

"Oh, I don't mean he did it for that! Lord, no! I suppose it's been in his mind for years. But afterwards, don't you suppose he thought … he'd been run after for his money such a terrible lot, you know … don't you suppose he thought he'd be sure of you one way or the other, about a million times surer than he could have been any other way; if you stuck by him, don't you see, with old Felix there with all his fascinations, plus Molly's money." He turned on her with a sudden confused wonder in his face. "God! What a time he took to do it! I hadn't realized all his nerve till this minute. He must have known what it meant, to leave you there with Felix … to risk losing you as well as—Any other man would have tried to marry you first and then—! Well, what a dead-game sport he was! And all for a lot of dirty Polacks who'd never laid eyes on him!"

He took his riding-cap from his head and tossed it on the dried pine-needles. Sylvia noticed that his dry, thin hair was already receding from his parchment-like forehead. There were innumerable fine lines about his eyes. One eyelid twitched spasmodically at intervals. He looked ten years older than his age. He looked like a man who would fall like a rotten tree at the first breath of sickness.

He now faced around to her with a return to everyday matters. "See here, Sylvia, I've just got it through my head. Are you waiting here for that five-fifteen train to West Lydford and then are you planning to walk out to the Austin Farm? Great Scott! don't do that, in this heat. I'll just run back to the village and get a car and take you there in half an hour." He rose to his feet, but Sylvia sprang up quickly, catching at his arm in a panic. "No! no! Arnold, you don't understand. I haven't written Austin a word—he doesn't know I'm coming. At first in Paris I couldn't—I was so despicable—and then afterwards I couldn't either,—though it was all right then. There aren't any words. It's all too big, too deep to talk about. I didn't want to, either. I wanted to see him—to see if he still, if he wants me now. He could write anything. He'd feel he'd have to. How would I ever know but that it was only because he thought he ought to? I thought I would just go to him all by myself, without his knowing I was coming. I can tell—the first moment he looks at me I can tell—for all my life, I'll be sure, one way or the other. That first look, what's in him will show! He can't hide anything then, not even to be kind. I'll know! I'll know!"

Arnold sat down again with no comment. Evidently he understood. He leaned his head back against the rough bark of the pine, and closed his eyes. There was a painful look of excessive fatigue about his whole person. He glanced up and caught Sylvia's compassionate gaze on him. "I haven't been sleeping very well lately," he said very dryly. "It breaks a fellow up to lose sleep." Sylvia nodded. Evidently he was not minded to speak of his own troubles. He had not mentioned Judith.

She looked up thoughtfully at the well-remembered high line of the mountain against the sky. Her mother's girlhood eyes had looked at that high line. She fell into a brooding meditation, and presently, obeying one of her sure instincts, she sat down by Arnold, and began to talk to him about what she divined for the moment would most touch and move him; she began to talk about her mother. He was silent, his worn, sallow face impassive, but she knew he was listening.

She told one incident after another of her mother's life, incidents which, she told him, she had not noted at the time, incidents which were now windows in her own life, letting in the sunlight her mother loved so well. "All the time I was growing up, I was blind, I didn't see anything. I don't feel remorseful, I suppose that is the way children have to be. But I didn't see her. There were so many minor differences between us … tastes, interests. I always said hatefully to myself that Mother didn't understand me. And it was true too. As if it matters! What if she didn't! She never talked morality to us, anyhow. She never talked much at all. She didn't need to. She was herself. No words would express that. She lived her life. And there it is now, there it always will be for me, food for me to live on. I thought she had died. But she has never been so living for me. She's part of me now, for always. And just because I see the meaning of her life, why, there's the meaning of mine as clear as morning. How can poor Father crave those 'messages' from her! Everything is a message from her. We've lived with her. We have her in our hearts. It's all brightness when I think of her. And I see by that brightness what's in my heart, and that's Austin … Austin!" On the name, her voice rose, expanded, soared, wonderfully rang in the ensuing silence….

Arnold said slowly, without opening his eyes: "Yes, yes, I see. I see how it is all right with you and Austin. He's big enough for you, all of you. And Felix—he's not so bad either—but he has, after all, a yellow streak. Poor Felix!"

This brought up to Sylvia the recollection of the day, so short a time ago when she had sat on the ground thus, much as she now sat next to Arnold, and had felt Judith's body rigid and tense. There was nothing rigid about Arnold. He was relaxed in an exhausted passivity, a beaten man. Let what would, befall. He seemed beyond feeling. She knew that probably never again, so life goes, could they speak together thus, like disembodied spirits, freed for once from the blinding, entangling tragic web of self-consciousness. She wondered again if he would find it in his heart to speak to her of Judith. She remembered something else she had meant to ask him, if she could ever find words for her question; and she found that, in that hour of high seriousness, they came quite without effort. "Arnold, when I was in Paris, I met Professor Saunders. I ran across him by accident. He told me some dreadful things. I thought they couldn't all be true. But I wondered—"