The Bent Twig

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

He gave enough music lessons to pay his small expenses, although after one or two stormy passages in which he treated with outrageous and unjustifiable violence the dawdling pupils coming from well-to-do families, he made it a rule to take no pupils whose parents employed a servant, and confined himself to children of the poorer classes, among whom he kept up a small orchestra which played together twice a week and never gave any concerts. And almost since the arrival of the Marshalls in La Chance and his unceremonious entrance into the house as, walking across the fields on a Sunday afternoon, he had heard Professor Marshall playing the Doric Toccata on the newly installed piano, he had spent his every Sunday evening in their big living-room.

He had seen the children appear and grow older, and adored them with Teutonic sentimentality, especially Sylvia, whom he called his "Moonbeam brincess," his "little ellfen fairy," and whom, when she was still tiny, he used to take up on his greasy old knees and, resting his violin on her head, play his wildest fantasies, that she might feel how it "talked to her bones."

In early childhood Sylvia was so used to him that, like the others of her circle, she accepted, indeed hardly noticed, his somewhat startling eccentricities, his dirty linen, his face and hands to match, his shapeless garments hanging loosely over the flabby corpulence of his uncomely old body, his beery breath. To her, old Reinhardt was but the queer external symbol of a never-failing enchantment. Through the pleasant harmonious give-and-take of the other instruments, the voice of his violin vibrated with the throbbing passion of a living thing. His dirty old hand might shake and quaver, but once the neck of the fiddle rested between thumb and forefinger, the seraph who made his odd abiding-place in old Reinhardt's soul sang out in swelling tones and spoke of heavenly things, and of the Paradise where we might live, if we were but willing.

Even when they were quite little children, Sylvia and Judith, and later, Lawrence, were allowed to sit up on Sunday evenings to listen to the music. Judith nearly always slept, steadily; and not infrequently after a long day of outdoor fun, stupefied with fresh air and exercise, Lawrence, and Sylvia too, could not keep their eyes open, and dozed and woke and dozed again, coiled like so many little kittens among the cushions of the big divan. In all the intensely enjoyed personal pleasures of her later youth, and these were many for Sylvia, she was never to know a more utter sweetness than thus to fall asleep, the music a far-off murmur in her ears, and to wake again to the restrained, clarified ecstasy of the four concerted voices.

And yet it was in connection with this very quartet that she had her first shocked vision of how her home-life appeared to other people. She once chanced, when she was about eight years old, to go with her father on a Saturday to his office at the University, where he had forgotten some papers necessary for his seminar. There, sitting on the front steps of the Main Building, waiting for her father, she had encountered the wife of the professor of European History with her beautiful young-lady sister from New York and her two daughters, exquisite little girls in white serge, whose tailored, immaculate perfection made Sylvia's heart heavy with a sense of the plebeian inelegance of her own Saturday-morning play-clothes. Mrs. Hubert, obeying an impulse of curiosity, stopped to speak to the little Marshall girl, about whose queer upbringing there were so many stories current, and was struck with the decorative possibilities of the pretty child, apparent to her practised eye. As she made the kindly intended, vague remarks customarily served out to unknown children, she was thinking: "How can any woman with a vestige of a woman's instinct dress that lovely child in ready-made, commonplace, dark-colored clothes? She would repay any amount of care and "thought." So you take music-lessons too, besides your school?" she asked mechanically. She explained to her sister, a stranger in La Chance: "Music is one of the things I starve for, out here! We never hear it unless we go clear to Chicago—and such prices! Here, there is simply no musical feeling!" She glanced again at Sylvia, who was now answering her questions, fluttered with pleasure at having the beautiful lady speak to her. The beautiful lady had but an inattentive ear for Sylvia's statement that, yes, lately Father had begun to give her lessons on the piano. With the smoothly working imagination coming from a lifetime of devotion to the subject, Mrs. Hubert was stripping off Sylvia's trite little blue coat and uninteresting dark hat, and was arraying her in scarlet serge with a green velvet collar—"with those eyes and that coloring she could carry off striking 'color combinations—and a big white felt hat with a soft pompon of silk on one side—no, a long, stiff, scarlet quill would suit her style better. Then, with white stockings and shoes and gloves—or perhaps pearl-gray would be better. Yes, with low-cut suede shoes, fastening with two big smoked-pearl buttons." She looked down with pitying eyes at Sylvia's sturdy, heavy-soled shoes which could not conceal the slender, shapely feet within them—"but, what on earth was the child saying?—"

"—every Sunday evening—it's beautiful, and now I'm getting so big I can help some. I can turn over the pages for them in hard places, and when old Mr. Reinhardt has had too much to drink and his hands tremble, he lets me unfasten his violin-case and tighten up his bow and—"

Mrs. Hubert cried out, "Your parents don't let you have anything to do with that old, drunken Reinhardt!"

Sylvia was smitten into silence by the other's horrified tone and hung her head miserably, only murmuring, after a pause, in damning extenuation, "He's never so very drunk!"

"Well, upon my word!" exclaimed Mrs. Hubert, in a widely spaced, emphatic phrase of condemnation. To her sister she added, "It's really not exaggeration then, what one hears about their home life." One of her daughters, a child about Sylvia's age, turned a candid, blank little face up to hers, "Mother, what is a drunken reinhardt?" she asked in a thin little pipe.

Mrs. Hubert frowned, shook her head, and said in a tone of dark mystery: "Never mind, darling, don't think about it. It's something that nice little girls shouldn't know anything about. Come, Margery; come, Eleanor." She took their hands and began to draw them away without another look at Sylvia, who remained behind, drooping, ostracised, pierced momentarily with her first blighting misgiving about the order of things she had always known.