The Bent Twig Part 14

"This is one of the women's wards," said their leader, opening another swinging door, from which rushed forth a fresh blast of iodoform. More rows of white beds, each with its mound of suffering, each with its haggard face of pain. More nurses, bearing basins of curious shape, bandages, hot-water bottles, rubber tubes. There was more restlessness here than in the children's ward, less helpless prostration before the Juggernaut of disease ... fretfulness, moans, tossing heads, wretched eyes which stared at the visitors in a hostile indifference.

"Oh, they are just putting the dressing on such an _interesting_ case!" said Miss Lindstrom's voice coming to Sylvia from a great distance. She spoke with the glow of professional enthusiasm, with that certainty, peculiar to sincere doctors and nurses, that a complicated wound is a fascinating object.

In spite of herself Sylvia had one glimpse of horribly lacerated red tissues.... She gripped her hands together after this and looked fixedly at a b.u.t.ton on her glove, until Miss Lindstrom's voice announced: "It's the Embury st.i.tch that makes that possible: we've just worked out the application of it to skin-graft cases. Two years ago she'd have lost her leg. Isn't it simply splendid!"

She said cordially as they moved forward: "Sister Selma said to treat you as though you were the Queen of Sweden, and I am! You're seeing things that visitors are _never_ allowed to see."

They walked on and on interminably, past innumerable sick souls, each whirling alone in a self-centered storm of suffering; and then, somehow, they were in a laboratory, where an immensely stout and immensely jovial doctor in white linen got down from a high stool to shake hands with them and profess an immense willingness to entertain them. "... but I haven't got anything much today," he said, with a disparaging wave of his hand towards his test-tubes. "Not a single death-warrant. Oh yes, I have too, one brought in yesterday." He brought them a test-tube, stoppered with cotton, and bade them note a tiny bluish patch on the clear gelatine at the bottom. "That means he's a dead one, as much as if he faced the electric chair," he explained. To the nurse he added, "A fellow in the men's ward, Pavilion G. Very interesting culture ... first of that kind I've had since I've been here." As he spoke he was looking at Sylvia with an open admiration, bold, intrusive, flippant.

They were pa.s.sing along another corridor, hot, silent, their footsteps falling dully on a long runner of corrugated rubber, with red borders which drew together in the distance like the rails streaming away from a train. Behind a closed door there suddenly rose, and as quickly died away, a scream of pain. With an effort Sylvia resisted the impulse to clap her hands over her ears.

"Here we are, at the minor operating-room," said Miss Lindstrom, pausing. "It's against the rules, but if you want to look from across the room--just to say you've been there--" She held the door open a little, a suffocating odor of anaesthetics blew out in their faces, like a breath from a dragon's cave. Mrs. Marshall and Judith stepped forward. But Sylvia clutched at her mother's arm and whispered: "Mother! Mother! I don't think I'll go on. I feel--I feel--I'll go back down to the entrance hall to wait."

Mrs. Marshall nodded a preoccupied a.s.sent, and Sylvia fled away down the endless corridor, looking neither to the right nor the left, down repeated flights of scrubbed and sterilized marble stairs, into the entrance hall, and, like a bolt from a bow, out of it on the other side, out into the street, into the suns.h.i.+ne, the heat, the clatter, the blessed, blessed smell of cabbage and dish-water....

After a time she went to sit down on the top step of the hospital entrance to wait. She contemplated with exquisite enjoyment the vigorous, profane, hair-pulling quarrel between two dirty little savages across the street. She could have kissed her hand to the loud-voiced woman who came scuffling to the window to scold them, clutching a dirty kimono together over a Hogarth-like expanse of bosom. They were well, these people, blood ran in their veins, their skin was whole, they breathed air, not iodoform! Her mother had pulled the string too tight, and Sylvia's ears were full of the ugly tw.a.n.g of its snapping.

When, at last, Judith and Mrs. Marshall came out, hand-in-hand, Sylvia sprang up to say: "What an _awful_ place! I hope I'll never have to set foot in one again!" But quick as was her impulse to speech, her perceptions were quicker, and before the pale exaltation of the other two, she fell silent, irritated, rebellious, thoroughly alien. They walked along in silence. Then Judith said, stammering a little with emotion, "M-M-Mother, I want to b-b-b-be a trained n-n-nurse when I grow up."

CHAPTER XIII

AN INSTRUMENT IN TUNE

As they drew near to their boarding-house late that afternoon, very hot, very crumpled, very solemn, and very much out of tune with one another, they were astonished to see a little eager-faced boy dash out of the house and run wildly to meet them, shouting as he came.

"Why, Lawrence _Marshall_!" cried his mother, picking him up in strong arms; "how ever in the world did you get here!"

"Father brungded me," cried the child, clasping her tightly around the neck. "We got so lonesome for Mother we couldn't wait."

And then Sylvia had stamped on her mind a picture which was to come back later--her father's face and eyes as he ran down the steps to meet his wife. For he looked at his daughters only afterwards, as they were all walking along together, much excited, everybody talking at once, and hanging on everybody's arm."... Yes, Buddy's right! We found we missed you so, we decided life wasn't worth it. You don't know, Barbara, what it's like without you--you don't _know_!"

Her father's voice sounded to Sylvia so loud, so gay, so vital, so inexpressibly welcome.... She leaped up at his face like a young dog, for another kiss. "Oh, I'm _awfully_ glad you came!" she cried, wondering a little herself at the immensity of her relief. She thought that she must get him by himself quickly and tell him her side of that hospital story, before her mother and Judith began on any virtuous raptures over it.

But there was no consecutive talk about anything after they all were joyfully gathered in their ugly, commonplace boarding-house bedroom.

They loosened collars and belts, washed their perspiring and dusty faces, and brushed hair, to the tune of a magpie chatter. Sylvia did not realize that she and her father were the main sources of this volubility, she did not realize how she had missed his exuberance, she only knew that she felt a weight lifted from her heart. She had been telling him with great enjoyment of the comic opera they had seen, as she finished putting the hairpins into her freshly smoothed hair, and turned, a pin still in her mouth, in time to be almost abashed by the expression in his eyes as he suddenly drew his wife to him.

"Jove! Barbara!" he cried, half laughing, but with a quiver in his voice, "it's h.e.l.l to be happily married! A separation is--well, never mind about it. I came along anyhow! And now I'm here I'll go to see Vic of course."

"No, you won't," said Judith promptly. "She's gone back. To get Arnold out of a sc.r.a.pe."

Mrs. Marshall explained further, and incidentally touched upon her sister-in-law's views of the relation between expensive boys' schools and private tutors. Her dryly humorous version of this set her husband off in a great mirthful roar, to which Sylvia, after a moment of blankness, suddenly joined a burst of her own clear laughter. At the time she had seen nothing funny in Aunt Victoria's statement, but she was now immensely tickled to remember Aunt Victoria's Olympian certainty of herself and her mother's grave mask of serious consideration of the idea. Long after her father had stopped laughing, she still went on, breaking out into delighted giggles. Her new understanding of the satire back of her mother's quiet eyes, lent to Aunt Victoria's golden calm the quaint touch of caricature which made it self-deceived complacency. At the recollection she sent up rocket after rocket of schoolgirl laughter.

Her mother, absorbed in conscientious anxiety about Sylvia's development, and deeply disappointed by the result of the visit to the hospital, ignored this laughter, nor did Sylvia at all guess that she was laughing away half the spell which Aunt Victoria had cast about her. When they went down to their supper of watery creamed potatoes, and stewed apricots in thick saucers, she was in such good humor that she ate this unappetizing fare with no protest.

"Now, folks," said Professor Marshall, after supper, "we have to go home tomorrow early, so we ought to have one more fling tonight. While I was waiting for you to come back this afternoon, I looked up what Chicago has to offer in the way of flings, and this is what I found.

Here, Barbara," he took a tiny envelope out of his upper waistcoat pocket, "are two tickets for the symphony orchestra. By the greatest of luck they're giving a special concert for some charity or other, a beautiful program; a sort of musical requiem. Sylvia mustn't miss it; you take her. And here," he spun round to face Judith and Lawrence, producing another slim, tiny envelope from the other upper waistcoat pocket, "since symphony concerts are rather solid meat for milk teeth, and since they last till way after bedtime, I have provided another sort of entertainment; to wit: three seats for moving pictures of the only real and authentic Cheyenne Bill's Congress of the World's Frontiersmen. All in favor of going there with me, say 'Aye.'"

"Aye!" screamed Judith and Lawrence. Everybody laughed in pleased excitement and everybody seemed satisfied except Mrs. Marshall, who insisted that she should go to the moving pictures while the Professor took Sylvia to the concert.

Then followed the most amiable, generous wrangle as to which of the parents should enjoy the adult form of amus.e.m.e.nt. But while the Professor grew more and more half-hearted in his protestations that he really didn't care where he went, Mrs. Marshall grew more and more positive that he must not be allowed to miss the music, finally silencing his last weak proffer of self-abnegation by saying peremptorily: "No, no, Elliott; go on in to your debauch of emotion.

I'll take the children. Don't miss your chance. You know it means ten times as much to you as to me. You haven't heard a good orchestra in years."

Sylvia had never been in such a huge hall as the one where they presently sat, high, giddily high in the eyrie of a top gallery. They looked down into yawning s.p.a.ce. The vast size of the auditorium so dwarfed the people now taking their innumerable seats, that even after the immense audience was a.s.sembled the great semicircular enclosure seemed empty and blank. It received those thousands of souls into its maw, and made no sign; awaiting some visitation worthy of its bulk.

The orchestra, an army of ants, straggled out on the stage. Sylvia was astonished at their numbers--sixteen first violins, she saw by the program! She commented to her father on the difficulty of keeping them all in tune. He smiled at her absently, bade her, with an air of suppressed excitement, wait until she had heard them, and fell to biting his nails nervously. She re-read the program and all the advertis.e.m.e.nts, hypnotized, like every one else in the audience, by the sight of printed matter. She noticed that the first number of this memorial concert was the funeral march from the Gotterdammerung, which she knew very well from having heard a good many times a rather thin version of it for four strings and a piano.

The conductor, a solitary ant, made his toilsome way across the great front of the stage, evoking a burst of applause, which resounded hollowly in the inhuman s.p.a.ces of the building. He mounted a step, waved his antennae, there was a great indrawn breath of silence, and then Sylvia, waiting with agreeable curiosity to hear how a big orchestra would really sound, gasped and held her breath. The cup of that vast building suddenly brimmed with a magical flood of pure tone, coming from everywhere, from nowhere, from her own heart as well as from outside her body. The immense hall rang to the glorious quality of this sound as a violin-back vibrates to the drawn bow. It rained down on her, it surged up to her, she could not believe that she really heard it.

She looked quickly at her father. His arms were folded tightly across his chest. He was looking frowningly at the back of the chair in front of him. It was evident that Sylvia did not exist for him. She was detached from her wonder at his pale sternness by the a.s.sault on her nerves made by the first of those barbaric outcries of woe, that sudden, brief clamor of grief, the shouts of despair, the beating upon s.h.i.+elds. Her heart stood still--There rose, singing like an archangel, the mystic call of the Volsung, then the yearning melody of love; such glory, such longing for beauty, for life--and then brusquely, again and again, the screaming, sobbing recollection of the fact of death....

When it was over, Sylvia's breath was still coming pantingly. "Oh, Father! How--how wonderful--how--" she murmured.

He looked at her, as though he were angry with her, and yet scarcely seeming to know her, and spoke in a hard, bitter tone: "And it is _years_ since I have heard one!" He seemed to cry out upon her for the conditions of his life.

She had no key for these words, could not imagine a meaning for them, and, chilled and repelled, wondered if she had heard him rightly.

The funeral march from the Eroica began, and her father's face softened. The swelling volume of tone rose like a flood-tide. The great hall, the thousands of human hearts, all beat solemnly in the grave and hopeless pulsations of the measured chords. The air was thick with sorrow, with quiet despair. No outcries here, no screams--the modern soul advancing somberly with a pale composure to the grave of its love, aware that during all the centuries since the dead Siegfried was lifted high on the shoulders of his warriors not a word of explanation, of consolation has been found; that the modern, barren self-control means only what the barbarian yells out in his open abandonment to sorrow--and yet such beauty, such beauty in that singing thread of melody--"_durch Leiden, Freude!_"

Not even the shadow of death had ever fallen across Sylvia's life, or that of her father, to explain the premonitory emotion which now drew them together like two frightened children. Sylvia felt the inexorable music beating in her own veins, and when she took her father's hand it seemed to her that its strong pulses throbbed to the same rhythm; beauty, and despair ... hope ... life ... death.

At the end, "Oh, Father--oh, Father!" she said under her breath, imploringly, struggling to free herself from the m.u.f.fling, enveloping sense of imminent disaster. He pressed her hand hard and smiled at her. It was his own old smile, the father-look which had been her heart's home all her life--but it was infinitely sweeter to her now than ever before. She had never felt closer to him. There was a pause during which they did not speak, and then there burst upon them the splendid tumult of "Death and Transfiguration," which, like a great wind, swept Sylvia out of herself. She could not follow the music--she had never heard of it before. She was beaten down, overwhelmed, freed, as though the transfiguration were her own, from the pitiful barriers of consciousness....

"Was the concert good?" asked Mrs. Marshall, yawning, and reaching out of bed to kiss Sylvia sleepily. She laughed a little at their faces.

"Oh, music _is_ a madness! To spend a cheerful evening listening to death-music, and then come back looking like Moses before the Burning Bus.h.!.+"

"Say, you ought to have seen the stunt they did with their la.s.sos,"

cried Judith, waking in the bed on the other side of the room, and sitting up with her black hair tousled about her face. "I'm going to try it with the pinto when we get home."

"I _bet_ you'll do it, too," came from Lawrence the loyal, always sure of Judith's strength, Judith's skill.

Sylvia looked at her father over their heads and smiled faintly. It was a good smile, from a full heart.

"Aunt Victoria sent our dresses," said Judith, dropping back on the pillow. "That big box over there. Mine has pink ribbons, and yours are blue."

Mrs. Marshall looked at the big box with disfavor, and then at Sylvia, now sunk in a chair, her hands clasped behind her head, her eyes dreamy and half closed. Across the room the long pasteboard box displayed a frothy ma.s.s of white lace and pale s.h.i.+ning ribbons. Sylvia looked at it absently and made no move to examine it. She closed her eyes again and beat an inaudible rhythm with her raised fingers. All through her was ringing the upward-surging tide of sound at the end of "Death and Transfiguration."

"Oh, go to bed, Sylvia; don't sit there maundering over the concert,"

said her mother, with a good-natured asperity. But there was relief in her voice.

CHAPTER XIV