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Bent Twig

<h2 id="id00064" style="margin-top: 4em">CHAPTER II</h2> <h5 id="id00065">THE MARSHALLS' FRIENDS</h5> Any one of the more sophisticated members of the faculty of the State University at La Chance would have stated without hesitation that the Marshalls had not the slightest part in the social activities of the University; but no one could have called their life either isolated or solitary. Sylvia, in her memories of childhood, always heard the low, brown house ringing with music or echoing to the laughter and talk of many voices. To begin with, a good many of Professor Marshall's students came and went familiarly through the plainly furnished rooms, although there was, of course, in each year's class, a little circle of young people with a taste for social distinctions who held aloof from the very unselect and heterogeneous gatherings at the Marshall house. These young aristocrats were, for the most part, students from the town itself, from La Chance's "best families," who through parental tyranny or temporary financial depression were not allowed to go East to a well-known college with a sizable matriculation fee, but were forced to endure four years of the promiscuous, swarming, gratuitous education of the State University. All these august victims of family despotism associated as little as possible with the common rabble of their fellow-students, and accepted invitations only from such faculty families as were recognized by the inner circle of the town society. The Marshalls were not among this select circle. Indeed, no faculty family was farther from it. Every detail of the Marshalls' life was in contradiction not only to the standards and ideals of the exclusive "town set," but to those of their own colleagues. They did not live in the right part of town. They did not live in the right sort of a house. They did not live in the right sort of a way. And consequently, although no family had more visitors, they were not the right sort of visitors. This was, of course, not apparent to the children for a good many years. Home was home, as it is to children. It did not seem strange to them that instead of living in a small rented house on a closely built-up street near the campus in the section of the city occupied by the other faculty families, they lived in a rambling, large-roomed old farmhouse with five acres of land around it, on the edge of the West Side. They did not know how heartily this land-owning stability was condemned as folly by the rent-paying professors, perching on the bough with calculated impermanence so that they might be free to accept at any moment the always anticipated call to a larger salary. They did not know, not even Sylvia, for many years, that the West Side was the quite unfashionable part of town. It did not seem strange to them to see their father sweeping his third-floor study with his own hands, and they were quite used to a family routine which included housework for every one of them. Indeed, a certain amount of this was part of the family fun. "Come on, folks!" Professor Marshall would call, rising up from the breakfast table, "Tuesday—day to clean the living-room—all hands turn to!" In a gay helter-skelter all hands turned to. The lighter furniture was put out on the porch. Professor Marshall, joking and laughing, donned a loose linen overall suit to protect his "University clothes," and cleaned the bare floor with a big oiled mop; Mrs. Marshall, silent and swift, looked after mirrors, windows, the tops of bookcases, things hard for children to reach; Sylvia flourished a duster; and Judith and Lawrence out on the porch, each armed with a whisk-broom, brushed and whacked at the chairs and sofas. There were no rugs to shake, and it took but an instant to set things back in their places in the clean-smelling, dustless room. This daily drill, coming as it did early in the morning, usually escaped the observation of any but passing farmers, who saw nothing amiss in it; but facetiously exaggerated reports of its humors reached the campus, and a certain set considered it very clever to lay bets as to whether the Professor of Political Economy would pull out of his pocket a handkerchief, or a duster, or a child's shirt, for it was notorious that the children never had nursemaids and that their father took as much care of them as their mother. The question of clothes, usually such a sorely insoluble problem for academic people of small means, was solved by the Marshalls in an eccentric, easy-going manner which was considered by the other faculty families as nothing less than treasonable to their caste. Professor Marshall, it is true, having to make a public appearance on the campus every day, was generally, like every other professor, undistinguishable from a commercial traveler. But Mrs. Marshall, who often let a good many days pass without a trip to town, had adopted early in her married life a sort of home uniform, which year after year she wore in one form or another. It varied according to the season, and according to the occasion on which she wore it, but it had certain unchanging characteristics. It was always very plain as to line, and simple as to cut, having a skirt neither full nor scant, a waist crossed in front with a white fichu, and sleeves reaching just below the elbow with white turn-back cuffs. As Mrs. Marshall, though not at all pretty, was a tall, upright, powerfully built woman, with a dark, shapely head gallantly poised on her shoulders, this garb, whether short-skirted, of blue serge in the morning, or trailing, of ruby-colored cashmere in the evening, was very becoming to her. But there is no denying that it was always startlingly and outrageously unfashionable. At a time when every woman and female child in the United States had more cloth in her sleeves than in all the rest of her dress, the rounded muscles of Mrs. Marshall's arm, showing through the fabric of her sleeves, smote shockingly upon the eye of the ordinary observer, trained to the American habit of sheep-like uniformity of appearance. And at the time when the front of every woman's waist fell far below her belt in a copiously blousing sag, Mrs. Marshall's trim tautness had in it something horrifying. It must be said for her that she did not go out of her way to inflict these concussions upon the brains of spectators, since she always had in her closet one evening dress and one street dress, sufficiently approximating the prevailing style to pass unnoticed. These costumes lasted long, and they took in the long run but little from the Marshall exchequer: for she wore them seldom, only assuming what her husband called, with a laugh, her "disguise" when going into town. For a long time, until Sylvia's individuality began to assert itself, the question of dress for the children was solved, with similar ease, by the typical Marshall expedient, most heartily resented by their faculty acquaintances, the mean-spirited expedient of getting along comfortably on inadequate means by not attempting to associate with people to whose society their brains and cultivation gave them the right—that is to say, those families of La Chance whose incomes were from three to five times that of college professors. The Marshall children played, for the most part, with the children of their neighbors, farmers, or small merchants, and continued this humble connection after they went into the public schools, where their parents sent them, instead of to "the" exclusive private school of town. Consequently the plainest, simplest clothes made them indistinguishable from their fellows. Sylvia and Judith also enjoyed the unfair advantage of being quite unusually pretty little girls (Judith being nothing less than a beauty), so that even on the few occasions when they were invited to a children's party in the faculty circle their burnished, abundant hair, bright eyes, and fresh, alert faces made up for the plainness of their white dresses and thick shoes. It was, moreover, not only in externals like clothes that the childhood of Sylvia and Judith and Lawrence differed from that of the other faculty children. Their lives were untouched by the ominous black cloud familiar to academic households, the fear for the future, the fear which comes of living from hand to mouth, the dread of "being obliged to hand in one's resignation," a truly academic periphasis which is as dismally familiar to most faculty children as its blunt Anglo-Saxon equivalent of "losing your job" is to children of plainer workpeople. Once, it is true, this possibility had loomed up large before the Marshalls, when a high-protection legislature objected loudly to the professor's unreverent attitude towards the tariff. But although the Marshall children knew all about this crisis, as they knew all about everything that happened to the family, they had had no experience of the anxious talks and heartsick consultations which would have gone on in any other faculty household. Their father had been angry, and their mother resolute—but there was nothing new in that. There had been, on Professor Marshall's part, belligerent, vociferous talk about "freedom of speech," and on Mrs. Marshall's a quiet estimate that, with her early training on a Vermont farm, and with the high state of cultivation under which she had brought their five acres, they could successfully go into the truck-farming business like their neighbors. Besides this, they had the resource, extraordinary among University families, of an account in the savings-bank on which to fall back. They had always been able to pay their debts and have a small surplus by the expedient of refusing to acknowledge a tenth part of the social obligations under which the rest of the faculty groaned and sweated with martyr's pride. Perfidiously refusing to do their share in the heart-breaking struggle to "keep up the dignity" of the academic profession, they were not overwhelmed by the super-human difficulties of that undertaking. So it happened that the Marshall children heard no forebodings about the future, but only heated statements of what seemed to their father the right of a teacher to say what he believed. Professor Marshall had gone of his own initiative to face the legislative committee which was "investigating" him, had quite lost his temper (never very securely held in leash), had told them his highly spiced opinion of their strictures on his teaching and of the worth of any teacher they could find who would submit to them. Then he had gone home and put on his overalls. This last was rather a rhetorical flourish; for his cosmopolitan, urban youth had left him ineradicably ignorant of the processes of agriculture. But like all Professor Marshall's flourishes it was a perfectly sincere one. He was quite cheerfully prepared to submit himself to his wife's instruction in the new way of life. All these picturesque facts, as was inevitable in America, had instantly reached the newspapers, which, lacking more exciting news for the moment, took that matter up with headlined characterizations of Professor Marshall as a "martyr of the cause of academic freedom," and other rather cheap phrases about "persecution" and "America, the land of free speech." The legislative committee, alarmed, retreated from its position. Professor Marshall had not "been obliged to hand in his resignation," but quite the contrary, had become the hero of the hour and was warmly complimented by his colleagues, who hoped to profit by an action which none of them would have dared to imitate. It had been an exciting drama to the Marshall children as long as it lasted. They had looked with pride at an abominable reproduction of their father's photograph in the evening paper of La Chance, and they had added an acquaintance with the manners of newspaper reporters to their already very heterogeneous experience with callers of every variety; but of real anxiety the episode had brought them nothing. As to that same extraordinary assortment of visitors at the Marshall house, one of the University co-eds had said facetiously that you met there every sort of person in the world, from spiritualists to atheists—everybody except swells. The atheist of her dictum was the distinguished and misanthropic old Professor Kennedy, head of the Department of Mathematics, whose ample means and high social connections with the leading family of La Chance made his misanthropy a source of much chagrin to the faculty ladies, and who professed for the Marshalls, for Mrs. Marshall in particular, a wrong-headed admiration which was inexplicable to the wives of the other professors. The faculty circle saw little to admire in the Marshalls. The spiritualist of the co-ed's remark was, of course, poor foolish Cousin Parnelia, the children's pet detestation, whose rusty clothes and incoherent speech they were prevented from ridiculing only by stern pressure from their mother. She always wore a black straw hat, summer and winter, always carried a faded green shopping bag, with a supply of yellow writing paper, and always had tucked under one arm the curious, heart-shaped bit of wood, with the pencil attached, which spiritualists call "planchette." The Marshall children thought this the most laughable name imaginable, and were not always successful in restraining the cruel giggles of childhood when she spoke of planchette's writing such beautiful messages from her long-since-dead husband and children. Although he had a dramatic sympathy for her sorrow, Professor Marshall's greater vivacity of temperament made it harder for him than for his wife to keep a straight face when Cousin Parnelia proposed to be the medium whereby he might converse with Milton or Homer. Indeed, his fatigued tolerance for her had been a positive distaste ever since the day when he found her showing Sylvia, aged ten, how to write with planchette. With an outbreak of temper, for which he had afterwards apologized to his wife, he had forbidden her ever to mention her damn unseemly nonsense to his children again. He himself was a stout unbeliever in individual immortality, teaching his children that the craving for it was one of the egotistic impulses of the unregenerate human heart. Between the two extremes represented by shabby, crack-brained Cousin Parnelia and elegant, sardonic old Professor Kennedy, there were many other habitual visitors at the house—raw, earnest, graceless students of both sexes, touchingly grateful for the home atmosphere they were allowed to enter; a bushy-haired Single-tax fanatic named Hecht, who worked in the iron-foundries by day, and wrote political pamphlets by night; Miss Lindström, the elderly Swedish woman laboring among the poor negroes of Flytown; a constant sprinkling from the Scandinavian-Americans whose well-kept truck-farms filled the region near the Marshall home; one-armed Mr. Howell, the editor of a luridly radical Socialist weekly paper, whom Judith called in private the "old puss-cat" on account of his soft, rather weak voice and mild, ingratiating ways. Yes, the co-ed had been right, one met at the Marshalls' every variety of person except the exclusive. These habitués of the house came and went with the greatest familiarity. As they all knew there was no servant to answer the doorbell, they seldom bothered to ring, but opened the door, stepped into the hall, hung up their wraps on the long line of hooks, and went into the big, low-ceilinged living-room. If nobody was there, they usually took a book from one of the shelves lining the room and sat down before the fire to wait. Sometimes they stayed to the next meal and helped wash up the dishes afterwards. Sometimes they had a satisfactory visit with each other, two or three callers happening to meet together before the fire, and went away without having seen any of the Marshalls. Informality could go no further. The only occurrence in the Marshall life remotely approaching the regularity and formality of a real social event was the weekly meeting of the string quartet which Professor Marshall had founded soon after his arrival in La Chance. It was on Sunday evening that the quartet met regularly for their seance. Old Reinhardt, the violin teacher, was first violin and leader; Mr. Bauermeister (in everyday life a well-to-do wholesale plumber) was second violin; Professor Marshall played the viola, and old Professor Kennedy bent his fine, melancholy face over the 'cello. Any one who chose might go to the Marshall house on Sunday evenings, on condition that he should not talk during the music, and did not expect any attention. The music began at seven promptly and ended at ten. A little before that time, Mrs. Marshall, followed by any one who felt like helping, went out into the kitchen and made hot coffee and sandwiches, and when the last chord had stopped vibrating, the company adjourned into the dining-room and partook of this simple fare. During the evening no talk was allowed except the occasional wranglings of the musicians over tempo and shading, but afterwards, every one's tongue, chastened by the long silence, was loosened into loud and cheerful loquacity. Professor Marshall, sitting at the head of the table, talked faster and louder than any one else, throwing the ball to his especial favorite, brilliant young Professor Saunders, who tossed it back with a sureness and felicity of phrase which he had learned nowhere but in this give-and-take. Mrs. Marshall poured the coffee, saw that every one was served with sandwiches, and occasionally when the talk, running over every known topic, grew too noisy, or the discussion too hot, cast in one of the pregnant and occasionally caustic remarks of which she held the secret. They were never brilliant, Mrs. Marshall's remarks—but they were apt to have a dry humor, and almost always when she had said her brief say? there loomed out of the rainbow mist of her husband's flashing, controversial talk the outlines of the true proportions of the case. After the homely feast was eaten, each guest rose and carried his own cup and saucer and plate into the kitchen in a gay procession, and since it was well known that, for the most part, the Marshalls "did their own work," several of the younger ones helped wash the dishes, while the musicians put away the music-racks and music, and the rest put on their wraps. Then Professor Marshall stood at the door holding up a lamp while the company trooped down the long front walk to the gate in the hedge, and turned along the country road to the cross-roads where the big Interurban cars whizzed by. All this happened with that unbroken continuity which was the characteristic of the Marshall life, most marking them as different from the other faculty families. Week after week, and month after month, this program was followed with little variation, except for the music which was played, and the slight picturesque uncertainty as to whether old Reinhardt would or would not arrive mildly under the influence of long Sunday imbibings. Not that this factor interfered at all with the music. One of Sylvia's most vivid childhood recollections was the dramatic contrast between old Reinhardt with, and without, his violin. Partly from age, and partly from a too convivial life, the old, heavily veined hands trembled so that he could scarcely unbutton his overcoat, or handle his cup of hot coffee. His head shook too, and his kind, rheumy eyes, in their endeavor to focus themselves, seemed to flicker back and forth in their sockets. The child used to watch him, fascinated, as he fumbled endlessly at the fastenings of his violin-case, and put back the top with uncertain fingers. She was waiting for the thrilling moment when he should tuck the instrument away under his pendulous double chin and draw his bow across the strings in the long sonorous singing chord, which ran up and down Sylvia's back like forked lightning. This was while all the others were tuning and scraping and tugging at their pegs, a pleasant bustle of discord which became so much a part of Sylvia's brain that she could never in after years hear the strumming and sawing of an orchestra preparing to play, without seeing the big living-room of her father's house, with its low whitewashed ceiling, its bare, dully shining floor, its walls lined with books, its shabby, comfortable furniture, the whole quickened by the Promethean glow from the blaze in the grate and glorified by the chastened passion of the singing strings. The two Anglo-Saxon, professors were but able amateurs of their instruments. Bauermeister, huge, red, and impassive, was by virtue of his blood, a lifelong training, and a musical ancestry, considerably more than an amateur; and old Reinhardt was the master of them all. His was a history which would have been tragic if it had happened to any but Reinhardt, who cared for nothing but an easy life, beer, and the divine tones which he alone could draw from his violin. He had offered, fifty years ago in Vienna, the most brilliant promise of a most brilliant career, a promise which had come to naught because of his monstrous lack of ambition, and his endless yielding to circumstance, which had finally, by a series of inconceivable migrations, landed him in the German colony of La Chance, impecunious and obscure and invincibly convinced that he had everything worth having in life. "Of vat use?" he would say, even now, when asked to play in public—"de moosic ist all—and dat is eben so goodt here mit friends." Or, "Dere goes a thousand peoples to a goncert—maybe fife from dat thousand lofes de moosic—let dose fife gome to me—and I play dem all day for noding!" or again, more iconoclastically still,—when told of golden harvests to be reaped, "And for vat den? I can't play on more dan von fioleen at a time—is it? I got a good one now. And if I drink more beer dan now, I might make myself seeck!" This with a prodigiously sly wink of one heavy eyelid. 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. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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