The Bent Twig

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Mrs. Marshall-Smith said, as if in answer, "Just sit down here and wait for me a minute, will you, Sylvia?" moving thereupon up the steps and disappearing through the wide front door. Sylvia relapsed into her day-dreams and, motionless in a pool of sunlight, waited, quite unconscious of the passage of time.

This long reverie was at last broken by the return of Mrs. Marshall-Smith. She was not alone, but the radiant young man who walked beside her was not her brother, and nothing could have differed more from the brilliantly hard gaze which Professor Marshall habitually bent on his sister, than the soft intentness with which young Mr. Saunders regarded the ripely beautiful woman. The dazzled expression of his eyes was one of the remembered factors of the day for Sylvia.

The two walked down the shaded steps, Sylvia watching them admiringly, the scene forever printed on her memory, and emerged into the pool of sunshine where she sat, swinging her legs from the bench. They stood there for some minutes, talking together in low tones. Sylvia, absorbed in watching the play of light on Aunt Victoria's smooth cheek, heard but a few words of what passed between them. She had a vague impression that Professor Saunders continually began sentences starting firmly with "But" and ending somehow on quite another note. She felt dimly that Aunt Victoria was less calmly passive than usual in a conversation, that it was not only the enchanting rising and falling inflections of her voice which talked, but her eyes, her arms, her whole self. Once she laid her hand for an instant on Professor Saunders' arm.

More than that Sylvia could not remember, even when she was asked later to repeat as much as she could of what she had heard. She was resolving when she was grown-up to have a ruffle of creamy lace falling away from her neck and wrists as Aunt Victoria did. She had not only forgotten Arnold's story, she had forgotten that such a boy existed. She was living in a world all made up of radiance and bloom, lace and sunshine and velvet, and bright hair and gleaming cloth and smooth voices and the smell of violets.

After a time she was aware that Professor Saunders shook hands and turned back up the steps. Aunt Victoria began to move with her slow grace along the road towards home, and Sylvia to follow, soaking herself in an impression of supreme suavity.

When, after the walk through the beech-woods, they reached the edge of the Marshall field, they saw a stiff plume of blue smoke stand up over the shack by the garden and, as they approached, heard a murmur of voices. Mrs. Marshall-Smith stopped, furled her parasol, and surveyed the scene within. Her sister-in-law, enveloped in a large blue apron, by no means fresh, sat beside a roughly built table, peeling tomatoes, her brown stained fingers moving with the rapidity of a prestidigitator's. Judith stood beside her, also attacking the pile of crimson fruit, endeavoring in vain to emulate her mother's speed. Over the hot, rusty stove hung Arnold, red-faced and bright-eyed, armed with a long, wooden spatula which he continually dug into the steaming contents of an enormous white-lined kettle. As, at the arrival of the new-comers, Mrs. Marshall's voice stopped, he looked around and frowned impatiently at his stepmother. "She's just got to the excitin' part," he said severely, and to the raconteur eagerly, "'N'en what?"

Mrs. Marshall looked up at her husband's sister, smiled, and went on,—Sylvia recognized the story as one of her own old favorites. "Well, it was very early dawn when she had to go over to the neighbor's to borrow some medicine for her father, who kept getting sicker all the time. As she hurried along across the meadow towards the stile, she kept wondering, in spite of herself, if there was any truth in what Nat had said about having seen bear tracks near the house the day before. When she got to the stile she ran up the steps—and on the top one she stood still, for there—" She made a dramatic pause and reached for another tray of tomatoes. Arnold stopped stirring the pot and stood motionless, his eyes fixed on the narrator, the spatula dripping tomato-juice all along his white trousers. "There on the other side, looking up at her, was a bear—a big black bear."

Arnold's mouth dropped open and his eyes widened.

"My grandmother was dreadfully frightened. She was only seventeen, and she hadn't any kind of a weapon, not so much as a little stick with her. Her first idea was to turn and run as fast as she could, back home. But she remembered how sick her father was, and how much he needed the medicine; and then besides, she used to say, all of a sudden it made her angry, all over, to have that great stupid animal get in her way. She always said that nothing 'got her mad up' like feeling afraid. So what do you suppose she did?"

Arnold could only shake his head silently in an ecstasy of impatience for the story to continue. Judith and Sylvia smiled at each other with the insufferable complacence of auditors who know the end by heart.