A president is born

By Fannie Hurst

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Title: A president is born

Author: Fannie Hurst


        
Release date: April 28, 2026 [eBook #78566]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PRESIDENT IS BORN ***
  Italic represented by underscores surrounding the _italic text_.
  Bold represented by equals signs surrounding the =bold text=.
  Small capitals have been converted to ALL CAPS.




                          A PRESIDENT IS BORN


                                  _by_
                              FANNIE HURST

                    [Illustration: Decorative Image]

                     _Harper & Brothers Publishers_
                           NEW YORK AND LONDON
                                  1928




                                    A
                            PRESIDENT IS BORN
                    COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY FANNIE HURST
                          PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

                                   A-C

                    FIRST PRINTING, DECEMBER, 1927
                    SECOND PRINTING, DECEMBER, 1927
                    THIRD PRINTING, DECEMBER, 1927
                    FOURTH PRINTING, DECEMBER, 1927
                    FIFTH PRINTING, DECEMBER, 1927
                    SIXTH PRINTING, DECEMBER, 1927
                    SEVENTH PRINTING, DECEMBER, 1927
                    EIGHTH PRINTING, DECEMBER, 1927




                                   TO
                              THE MEMORY OF
                         HENRY STEPHEN SCHUYLER

[Illustration: Decorative Image]




[Illustration: Decorative Image]


_The author takes occasion to make grateful acknowledgment to
the Schuyler family, and to Senator Bettina Schuyler Sterling in
particular, for the privilege of access to the diaries of the late
Rebekka Schuyler Renchler._

_It has been a task requiring the utmost delicacy to step lightly
through the aisles of her pages; and only because of the great interest
that centers around even the minutiæ of the life of David Schuyler,
has the author ventured to quote from so precious and so private a
family-document._

_By virtue of this handsome grant of access to the diaries, the public
again becomes beneficiary of the Schuyler family._




                                    A
                                PRESIDENT
                                 IS BORN

[Illustration: Decorative Image]


  _All footnotes herein appended are excerpts from the private
  diaries of the late Rebekka Schuyler Renchler and are quoted with
  the permission of her granddaughter, United States Senator Bettina
  Schuyler Sterling, in whose possession they are._

[Illustration: Decorative Image]




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




                          A PRESIDENT IS BORN


Twenty-two sat down to dinner on a Thanksgiving afternoon at four,
1903, in the House on Sycamore Street.

It might have been the house in Downing Street so far as its
centrifugal significance was ground into the consciousness of the men,
women and children gathered about its board.

For thirty years it had stood on the outskirts of a town that lapped
out toward it like a constantly encroaching tide. It was then virtually
the last house in Centralia. Always had been. As you drove into town,
the two-story wooden structure of tower, ell, bulge and gable, marked
the beginning of the principal residential street. As you left town,
a half mile or so beyond the Schuyler fifteen acres of homestead, a
city-limits sign was painted against a whitewashed slab of stone.
Later, a large sign the shape of an open book announced:

  YOU ARE NOW LEAVING CENTRALIA. THIS SPOT MARKS THE SITE WHERE
  CELERON DE BIENVILLE IN 1749 PLANTED A LEADEN PLATE AND TOOK FORMAL
  POSSESSION.

  CENTRALIA OFFERS UNPARALLELED FACTORY AND FOUNDRY SITES AND PEERLESS
  WATER POWER ADVANTAGES. SEE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE. WRITE FOR BOOKLET.

Six children and several of the grandchildren had been born in the
House on Sycamore Street. The second-story front, a deep room with a
bay window formed by a tower that was filled with an indoor vine of
myrtle that grew in a flower box, held in its timbers the first squalls
of Mathilda (deceased at two weeks of age), Rebekka, Clara, Henry, Phil
and Emma Schuyler.

Two of Rebekka’s children had been born in that front room. Clara had
come from St. Louis for the purpose of having her first-born see its
first light of day in that room of double walnut wardrobe that reached
to ceiling, hand-painted window shades, washstand with a pink-and-white
bowl and pitcher, toothbrush-mug, and grooved soap-dish that had stood
dry since the cedar closet had been made into a bathroom.

To open your eyes upon that room was to greet the retinas with a pair
of china spittoons on the white hearth; oval portraits of Austrian
Schuylers, in oval brooches or square-cut spades of beard; a pair of
steel-engravings of “Washington Crossing the Delaware” and “Signing the
Declaration”; a horsehair and walnut-backed armchair, in which the Old
Gentleman always sat, and that by its shape was to suggest to Henry
Schuyler, as long as he lived, the figure of his father crouched into
it for his annual cold, a gray-striped blanket across his shoulders,
and his feet immersed in steaming foot tub the shape of a kidney and
with a tin bottom that plunked.

The solemn double bed with pillow shams the pallor and shape of
headstones, was covered with a patchwork quilt of tulip-and-leaf design
that Mathilda Schuyler had brought as dowry to Heinie Schuyler when
she married him in an Austrian village called Holdstein. On holidays
it was piled with the mufflers, the top-coats, the tippets, muffs,
baby-leggings, small-boy sweaters, and the little-girl cloaks of the
homecoming clan.

It was as if the walls of this house, which had been outgrown
practically the first year of its occupancy, would burst its sides for
need of expansion, on that Thanksgiving afternoon, for instance, when
the Schuylers, twenty-two strong, sat down to dinner at four.

That meant that Schuylers from as far as Springfield and as wide as
St. Louis, with their wives, husbands and children, were home for the
holiday.

For two days the rich sweetness of mincemeat stewing in its sluggish
juices had wound aromatically through the house. To even stir the
colloid mass required Mathilda to grasp the long iron spoon as you
would a broom, with both hands, and haul it around and around the pot.
Sometimes Trina, who had come to the Schuylers a slim chip of a hired
girl and, now twenty-five years later, weighed two hundred and forty
pounds, helped. But at the period of this Thanksgiving, Trina was
already entering the last seven years of her life, and varicose veins
had set in, rendering her chair-ridden the greater part of the time.

And so Mathilda, who had weighed ninety pounds when she was married and
now weighed one hundred and one, swung her heavy chores practically
alone, importunings of the Old Gentleman and his children to the
contrary notwithstanding. As a matter of fact, Henry often said of her
that she seemed to take a sort of sadistic pleasure in flaying her
endurance; in pulling her muscles at the dragging of heavy objects
until she could feel the bones of her arms leave their sockets; in
straining the wires of her tough little body at doing the lifting of a
strong man. When Mathilda was forty-eight she was shriveled in the way
that women no longer allow themselves to grow old. But she could carry
a galvanized washtub of hot water or a one-hundred-and-ten pound sheep
across a meadow and glory with fierce, straining eyeballs, as her very
heart seemed to leave its moorings.

There were two hundred and eighty cookies this Thanksgiving, baked by
Mathilda by lamplight before dawn. Pepper drops and cinnamon squares
(especially baked because they were Leslie’s favorites) and aniseed.
The sunshine cake was of a specially-prepared flour, and saccharine
instead of sugar (son-in-law Sam Holly was overweight and obliged to
reduce when his heart began to flutter), which everyone declared,
for purposes of cheering Sam, was even better than if prepared with
Mathilda’s usual and wickedly-rich ingredients. There were candied
yams, candied apples on sticks, sweetbreads in individual ramekins,
turkey dressing of citron, chestnuts and walnut meats. Cranberry sauce
that had jellied the star-shape of the mold. Cider that stung like all
of an autumn outdoors. A pitcher of eggnog with a fine peppering of
cinnamon. Hot biscuit, the size of a silver dollar, that went into the
mouth at one plop (the Old Gentleman smothered his in maple syrup).
Kale boiled with bacon rind. There were six pumpkin and six mince pies
alternating, standing in rows on the pantry sill.

Mathilda naturally alternated them that way. She liked making little
patterns of her days and her quiltings and her procedures.

Rebekka Schuyler Renchler had sent over, from her farm, a gallon pail
of apple-butter, a batch of _zimmtkuchen_ the shape of soldiers, camels,
and stars for the children’s table, and five bushels of winesap apples,
the yield of her own orchards that had come to be known locally as
“Rebekka Wines.”

The Phil Schuylers, as usual, brought down a hamper of Mullane’s Taffy;
Phil’s annual contribution to his father of a quart bottle of Kümmel,
and more cookies, his wife’s specialty. Sugar ones with jam hearts.

There was a story abroad in Centralia that one Thanksgiving, Mathilda
had sent these jam-hearted cookies to Annie Milliken, who in turn,
with a Thanksgiving Day superabundance of her own, had sent them over
to a school-teacher friend who had innocently completed the circle by
sending them around to the Schuylers as a Thanksgiving Day offering.

Be that as it may, the circle of giving in Centralia was anything
but a vicious one. Henry Schuyler used to say, in the dry fashion he
had, that more glasses of jelly changed hands in Centralia during a
holiday-week; more pies and tarts under snowy napkins; more batches of
cookies and mincemeats in Mason jars, than there were stocks bandied
back and forth on a busy day on the New York Stock Exchange.

Centralia loved to bite with careful front teeth down on its neighbors’
cookies, mince them finely until taste squirted along the tongue. And
appraise.

One of Emma’s hazelnut tortes, tried and true to occasions of birthday,
anniversary, and that chilled moment when the newly-bereaved family
returns from the cemetery, stood on the sideboard beside the silver
ice-water pitcher with sweating sides, that was mounted like a patent
rocker and tilted in its frame for pouring.

Emma had baked it that morning in her white-enamel range, the first
in Centralia, that had just been installed in her fine new red-brick
Georgian house, that stood on exactly the opposite end of Sycamore
Street from her parents. It was made out of double cream, that torte,
and seemed ready to burst its steep sides and melt into a viscous pool
of its own richness.

There was the kind of superabundance of food that palls before it
tempts. That was why Henry Schuyler, who abhorred waste, never came
downstairs on these holiday fêtes until after the mumbled grace, the
fruit cocktail, the chicken soup, and the creamed oysters in pâté cases.

Just before the fowl was brought in, usually one of Rebekka’s
eighteen-pound gobblers, with protruding legs in jolly white-paper
caps, Mathilda rapped against her water-tumbler three times with her
fork.

That was the signal for Henry, whose room was directly above the
dining-room, to put down his _Leatherstocking Tales_, Carlyle’s _French
Revolution_, or Fiske’s _American History_, knock his pipe empty into
the coal bucket, remove his feet from the nickel-plated rim of the
base-runner, and go downstairs to mid-afternoon dinner.

They hung on his digestion like leaden weights, these post-convivial
afternoons, causing him to fall asleep later with a newspaper over
his face, noxious dreams and the goose-fleshing memory of the sound
of steel carving knife and fork, criss-crossing, crawling across his
befogged doze.

At the coming of the fowl, the Old Gentleman began his invariable
sharpening of the hartshorn knife against the rod, curdling the air in
a fashion that gave Henry nervous shudders, and, ever since she was old
enough to remember, had sent the goose-flesh flashing along Rebekka.

“Father, please!”

“Puppa, you know how Bek and Henry hate it. Trina sharpened them out in
the kitchen.”

That was the signal for the Old Gentleman to wield the wicked knife,
jerking a turkey leg backward and slithering into the soft flesh, with
a rush of juices.

“Here, Mother, you want the part that goes over the fence last.”

The family was pretty well reconciled to this moss-grown overture. All
except Emma, who would invariably pucker her pretty blonde brows and
come out in no uncertain terms.

“Father, that’s not one bit funny! It’s disgusting! Besides, Mother
doesn’t really like it. That’s her way of denying herself white meat.”

The small, bewildered face of Mathilda Schuyler, there in the midst of
her five progeny of unusual heft, would begin to pale and wilt under
the dicker. Their vitality sapped hers. Her daughters, with their heavy
shoulders and strong legs and strong neck-columns. Phil, who in his
late twenties was already so rotund as to know his watch pocket by
touch rather than sight. Henry of brown brawn, but no fat.

It was a fluttery old face, that of Mathilda Schuyler. Like a curtain
in a breeze.

It was a face which the Old Gentleman, sly, wry, bold, and humorous
behind his own square trim of white beard, usually regarded with
precisely the expression with which he now regarded his grandchildren.

Only, this day, there screwed itself into the old man’s eyes, as
he observed her from his place opposite her end of the long table,
something sly. The old man became a little faunal. A naughty old faun.

“Emma’s right, Mathilda! From now on I’ll serve you only with white
meat. It’s good for what ails you.”

“Why?” said Phil, who made rapid, cracking noises up the stalk of a
celery stick. “Isn’t Mother well?”

“I’ve never seen her look better,” said Rebekka into the flash of quick
anxiety that went around the table. “Mother has gained pounds!”

Rebekka was five-feet-ten, weighed one hundred and seventy, and had no
fat. Level of eye, level of strong, firm bosom. Level of brow, from
which she wore the enormously thick brown hair coiled unstylishly on
the top of the back of her head. Level of voice, too. One of those low,
middle-register people. Without being masculine, there was something
rather Socratic about the head of Rebekka Renchler. A brow that jutted
firmly over the deeply-molded roofs of eye sockets. A fine, strong,
fierce nose. Mouth brackets.

It was characteristic of the family to discuss any one of its
members as if the individual under scrutiny were not present. It was
particularly a family habit to discuss Mathilda over her head.

“Father!” said Rebekka suddenly, and then again sharply, “Father—what?”

There was no denying it. Above the square white beard that hung like
a muslin curtain from the Old Gentleman’s chin, were two round dots
of color. A shrewd, old, sly face, trying not to look abashed, and
humorous eyes, twenty years too young for their weather-beaten setting
that kept radiating lines.

That was the Old Gentleman’s method of laughter. Behind the beard, that
was slightly yellow about the mouth, the lips, heavy and of a raspberry
red, remained mobile. It was the sunburst of lines at the ends of his
eyes that kept radiating a sort of heat lightning of laughter.

“Once a good strong woman,” said the Old Gentleman, letting his naughty
old gaze spray over his wife, “always a good strong woman.”

“Not at all, Father!” said Rebekka. “Mother’s endurance at fifty-three
is simply amazing, and see how frail she looks. Every one of us is big
enough to carry her off single-handed, and yet she goes on from break
of dawn until bedtime, slaving, slaving away as if things were no
different now than when we were children growing up.”

“Ah, she’s a good one!” said the Old Gentleman, winking his two eyes
simultaneously at his wife, who fluttered. “She’s a good one all
right!” And, incredibly enough, made a screwing noise with his tongue
and slid his naughty, bright-blue, humorous, twinkling eyes.

“Puppa, don’t do that!”

“Don’t do what, Mathilda?”

“That! That!” echoed Emma, who could cry from being made nervous by
what she considered her father’s none-too-subtle sense of low comedy.
“With your eyes, Father! It’s—it’s horrid! What is it, dear, makes you
do it?”

“Your Mother’s a good one, Daughter! That’s all! Don’t we sit down to
table, twenty-odd of us—Thanksgiving?”

“Yes, Father!” said Emma faintly, and regarded her mother for the
moment as if she were going to cry now.

“Pass Mother the gravy,” said Rebekka, in her low, rather hoarse voice.
It was her way of sparring off for the group of them a moment that
threatened to become sentimental.

“No, serve the boys, Puppa.”

“No, the Mama comes first!”

“Please—the boys——”

There was something about the mere idea of her brood assembled, that
could send the tremulous wavering along Mathilda’s voice. Probably the
unbelievable precariousness of it. Six children into the world with
perfect sequence except for the infant mortality of the first-born,
Mathilda. Nine grandchildren without a casualty. Except perhaps Leslie.
And yet Mathilda sometimes wondered, regarding the boy’s pale head and
his eyes that looked tranced as if with enchantment at what they saw,
if he could be classed a casualty.

Rebekka, though, who had borne him, must have thought so. Her eyes,
when they looked at this boy of hers, seemed to pour inward, leaving
them staring, like empty lake-beds.

Leslie, who was twelve, sat at the younger children’s improvised table
under the stairway.

At the oval-topped table in the sitting-room, which ordinarily
held the four-pound family Testament and a pair of brown porcelain
pug-dogs, chipped from being hidden by this or that one of the Schuyler
girls, only to be unearthed again by Mathilda, were Rebekka’s Steve,
who at eleven looked like the young San Sebastian, and who, to his
grandfather’s delight, could quaff cider like a sailor, licking his
lips and drawing his arm across them; and Rebekka’s only daughter, a
pretty, fair girl, whose dark eyes flashed a curious contradiction to
her placid, taffy hair.

It was as if, on holidays, the family thus assembled, the old House on
Sycamore Street must fairly burst its weather-colored sides of hubbub.

The Old Gentleman loved the hubbub. It flowed over him with the voice
of a world he had peopled. The town, the county, and even the state
bore testimony to Schuyler progeny.

Rebekka’s model stock-farm, High Ridge, was one to which the entire
state pointed with pride.

Phil Schuyler was already, though destined for temporary defeat, a
moving figure in what were to be spectacular land deals in the history
of Springfield. Henry Schuyler, who coveted no man’s office, had twice
been approached to run on a Republican ticket, once for Congress and
once for District Attorney, and frequently, Cincinnatus-like, had been
called from his small environment to his state capital, and twice to
Washington, on a point concerning certain legalities of water control.

Yes, the Old Gentleman loved the hubbub of his progeny about him,
and today somehow, with the two polka-dots out on his cheekbones and
his eyes in that faun-like crinkle—there was something about the Old
Gentleman——

Rebekka, who was fond of saying that she knew her father like a book,
and who bartered heifers with him in the open cattle-marts, who housed
his sheep for him in winter in exchange for the second crop of his
South Meadow of alfalfa, and who carried a pot of her own concoction of
cocoa butter in her great leather reticule, for his finger-tips, which
cold split terribly in winter, kept sitting more and more stiffly at
his right.

Even Henry, who had a way of looking at no one yet seeing everyone,
threw his father an occasional glance. Emma was on edge. Ever since she
could remember, there had been things her father did that affected her
like the scratch of a gold ring across a slate. His way of standing
her on the oval-topped parlor table when she had been a child and
pointing out her blonde prettiness to visitors. “She’s a good one,
isn’t she?” In Emma’s opinion, as if she had been so much heifer flesh.
The Old Gentleman’s insistence, during Emma’s second year in High
School, of driving up after her in a dirty old phaeton that barely
escaped scraping the streets. “The Floozy Flump” they used to call it
at school. “Here comes Emma’s Floozy Flump,” would reach her stinging
ears. It was precisely the same way she used to feel later, in the days
when her husband, Morton Milliken, had been wooing her and the Old
Gentleman would sit on the side verandah evenings in his socks, sucking
his atrocious meerschaum, just about the time Morton was due to arrive.

That whole group of grosgrained sensations was on a par with what her
father was doing to her now. What made him squint so? The face of
Mathilda kept fluttering, in the way it had when agitated.

There was undoubtedly in the air the charged quality of something of
note about to happen in the Schuyler family.

A Schuyler must be about to be born. Another impending grandchild?
Which of the girls was with child? Or, by a stretch of the imagination,
was some one, a Schuyler, on the verge of being rebuked? Who?

The sisters and sisters-in-law felt along one another with their eyes.
The bright, inquisitive, rather merciless eyes of women who suspect.
Rita Schuyler, Phil’s wife, had had her last child. A recent operation
had settled that. Well, that left Rebekka. Nonsense! And Clara. No-n-o.
Slowly the women’s eyes swung to Emma, who squirmed and felt more and
more irritated and could have sobbed her denial.

There came Phil’s dry little bronchial cough that always attacked him
when he felt called upon to defend himself before his father. There
had been many such stormy defenses. The troublesome time of Phil’s
narrowly-averted bankruptcy in a land deal known as the Alleghany
Subdivision, against which both his father and Henry had advised. There
had been another jam, when Phil, on the inside tip of a street-car
franchise, had formed a company to buy up two blocks of Hinshaw Street,
only to have the street-car finally run two blocks this side of Hinshaw.

There could be high words between Phil and his father.

And yet the family’s outstanding events had had chiefly to do
with celebration. To be sure, there had been family conclave and
remonstrance when Rebekka had held out for marrying Winslow Renchler,
several years her junior and a sickly fellow. Clara’s marriage to Sam
Holly, a city salesman for the great wholesale firm of Hamilton-Brown
Shoe Company, St. Louis, had also met a certain mild opposition. Sam
Holly was an admirable young man in the good-as-gold sense of the
word. He had no vices; and his virtues, although they made you yawn,
made you yawn righteously. The name Holly in St. Louis was synonymous
with a large dry-cleaning concern. But it was owned by Sam’s uncle,
who had never done a turn for his nephew. Sam and Clara had met at the
St. Louis Exposition. There was something handsome about Sam, who had
iron-gray hair at thirty; and yet, as the Old Gentleman said after
reviewing the rather patient-faced young wholesale shoe-salesman when
he came wooing to Centralia, he had somehow the face of a man with no
future.

Then there was that conclave of a winter five years previous, when
Henry had refused the amazing and unsought opportunity to run for
Congress on a strong Republican ticket. That had been a blow, even
though the Old Gentleman had valiantly come to see his elder son’s
point of view. And besides, even the sting of a secret disappointment
was practically gone now, in the curious and palmy circumstance of the
world finding its way to Henry’s little old one-horse law office up
over Schlemmer’s Hardware Store on High Street.

The Old Gentleman had shone of eye like this, upon the occasion of the
engagements of all Schuylers. Upon the announcement of every one of the
impending births of the grandchildren. The day the honor of the request
of Henry’s candidacy was announced. Always around this very same table.
Only, somehow, never before so much so. This day his eyes went screwing
around in his head. Of mischief. Making the occasion, to his children
who knew him, seem more and more portentous. Of an ultimate solemnity.

Mathilda cut the segments of pie, alternating the lemon and the mince,
until the children’s table had been served and the Old Gentleman’s
match held to the suet pudding, so that the thin blue flicker of
lighted cognac began to flit along it, and the children shouted and
gouged unruly spoons into the fire-dance.

Candied apples, and persimmons for the game of pucker, and home-made
taffy still in the greased pie-pans, were passed around to the
youngsters, and after-dinner coffee in large cups to the elders.
Curtains were drawn and a pail of coal tilted into the base-burner
until it roared. A pair of old silver candlesticks on the two little
curlicue shelves of the walnut sideboard were lighted by the Old
Gentleman, who held each flame in the shell of his hand until the light
grew round and steady. Then Henry, who was six-feet-one, and had arms
that dangled to his knees, lowered the swinging-lamp that swung on
chains over the table, and lighted the Welsbach. It had once been an
oil-lamp before gas became everybody’s commodity. For thirty years, an
old buckeye had dangled from it by a string.

Trina cleared the table, aided and abetted by the Schuyler girls, who
were cocksure about withdrawing the additional leaves, passing in and
out with stacks of scraped dishes, sliding napkins into their rings,
crumbing, folding and laying away the tablecloth in its place under the
sideboard, and spreading a red rep one with black fringe in its place.
Mathilda had her own way of placing the silver fruit bowl, upheld by
three silver cherubs and laden with “Rebekka Wines,” in the center of
the cleared table. The cherub with the deepest dimple in his chin must
always face the South Meadow window.

Then Trina drew the walnut folding-doors, shutting out the children.
Against the plate-glass of the door that led from the dining-room to
the small side porch, it had begun to snow. Big flakes that whitened
the air, but darkened the sky. The slanting roof to the wood-shed was
already lightly covered.

Through the heavy, closed folding-doors, the children could be heard
making a scramble for leggings and reefers, and fumbling in the hall
closet for rubbers and hockey sticks.

“Winslow,” said Rebekka, “hadn’t you better bring Leslie in here?”

“Wait a minute,” said the Old Gentleman, and brought his hand down on
his son-in-law’s, pinning it.

“Father!” said Emma and Clara simultaneously, in a sort of bleat, and
Phil began to cough in the way he had.

The group about the table tightened into the proportions of the table
with the three leaves removed. Mathilda with her timid face and her
timid lips lifted to simulate a smile that twisted Rebekka’s heart
strings with its pitiableness. Twelve faces swimming up closer in
concentration upon the old face above the spade of beard, at the head
of the table, with the sly eyes of a naughty boy screwing in his head.

“Heinie!” faltered Mathilda, calling him faintly by a name she had not
used since Rebekka had been born.

“Children,” said the Old Gentleman, simulating elaborate innocence
of any realization whatsoever that what he had to say was about to
splash over the occasion like a dash of ice-cold water from a bucket.
“Children, it is a Thanksgiving Day for every Schuyler to remember.”

“Puppa!”

“For goodness’ sakes, Father,” cried Emma, the bright tears in her eyes
drying because her eyeballs were so hot and angry, “for goodness’
sakes, Father, the idea of acting—so—horrid. What is it all about,
Father?”

“Really, Father, Emma’s right!”

“If you’ll hold your horses,” said the old man on a strangely forced
chuckle, “you’ll know.”

“Well?”

“Well?”

“Puppa!”

“Oh, for goodness’ sakes——”

“Sh-h-h, Em.”

“Well, Father?”

“Your mother, children, God bless her, is going to have a baby.”

“Winslow,” said Rebekka, in a voice that seemed to be running out of
her like sands out of glass—“awfully silly—but—glass of water—please—I
think—I’m going to faint.”

“For Heaven’s sakes, Rebekka, don’t do that!”

“Of course, I’m not! Give me a drink!”

“Puppa,” said Mathilda, and leaned forward to straighten the third
cherub’s dimple further toward the window that looked out on South
Meadow. “It—it is too hot in here, open—open the window——”

To cross that room, to open that window, was like walking through
the buckshot of twenty-two glass eyes, that were looking at the Old
Gentleman as if seeing him for the first time.




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




Chapter One


There was a game that David loved.[1]

He called it Indian in the Corn.

In autumn, in the field beyond South Pasture, when the husks were built
into tepees around the cobs of massive, orange-colored teeth, it was
his favorite pastime as he bustled up and down the rustling aisles,
to slip into a tepee’s heart. Lie there. Crouch there. Feel sinister
there. And then, deep in his tepee, over the yellow mound of corn that
was like a camp-fire, beat his palm against his open mouth and let out
yips. Henry, when reading him _Leatherstocking Tales_ up in his room
beside the old base-burner, used to yodel thus, against slaps at his
opened mouth.

Never by chance did a farm-hand encounter the particular tepee that
concealed David. Sometimes, to the simply irrepressible excitement
of the small crouching figure whose eyes shone like a cat’s through
apertures in the husks, they rustled perilously near. But never, even
though they could hear him breathe, would hired man be guilty of
finding out Davey.

That made it perennially exciting. Even if one suspected, at times, an
elaborate and almost too consistent immunity to direction of sounds
on the part of the field-workers. Still, one could never be quite
sure. After all, in a wilderness of tepees that reached from the
sheep pasture to the creek, one Indian chieftain might easily throw
puzzlement, even consternation, into the less wily white man.

Tecumseh, Chief of the Shawnees, who had been prominent in border
warfare in that very region where the Old Gentleman’s corn-field flowed
its mellow way, was a favorite rôle.

The War of 1812 could bang in cap-pistol shots among those tepees.

There was a colored picture in one of his brother Henry’s books; _The
Lewis and Clarke Expedition_, of a solitary chieftain skulking in and
out of ambush, and a score of white men from behind a barricade, lying
belly low, aiming rifles at just the wrong clump of bush.

Sometimes Jacob, known throughout the valley as the best farm hand in
the state (when sober), would throw a fit at these yips emanating from
the tepees, and dance up and down on the balls of his feet and rub the
seat of his overalls.

That invariably delighted David into a spell of the short, hiccoughy
laughter of childhood, and out he came, still yipping, and leaping
about in a tribal dance of no authenticity, while Jacob, at sight of
the small figure in the yellow khaki-suit overalls, with fringed sides,
and the band of porcupine-quills made into a head-crest for him by his
sister Rebekka, took to his heels, still rubbing.

Long hazy autumns, the color of an apricot, and of a spanking kind of
heat, these years that led up to Davey’s being seven. Slow days, even
as they grew shortest, that lay in a little yellow mud along the tongue
and tasted of pollen.

All of his life David was to remember the taste of those days of his
first seven years.

Once, in the full prime of his future, standing on the observation
platform of a special train that was draped in bunting, and addressing
a group of townspeople who had crowded up around the tracks of a
station named Vandalia, the smell of that hot autumn haze, drifting in
apricot-colored sunlight from outlying corn-fields, caught him so by
the throat, that he terminated his remarks almost on a gulp and retired
into the car to the rather bewildered cheers of the crowd.[2]

Those with him, accustomed to his grim, unrelenting sort of vitality,
were surprised at this show of fatigue; and his young personal
physician, named Denny Kiskadden, harboring memories of Wilson,
Harding, and Putnam finally exacted from him a respite from the
whirlwind demands upon his time and energy, and the next few towns were
passed with the shades of the car drawn, and the milling crowds about
the stations met with a few brief remarks from the Secretary of State.

But it was not fatigue. It was a memory assailing him along the taste
nerves of his tongue. The taste of the smell of Indian summer drifting
in over soil that was the soil of his being.

The old house on the edge of Centralia was packed with that odor into
the very plush and horsehair of its furniture. Hard coal from the
base-burners, and the smell of winter apples, and a curious smell that
was sweet, like the breath of a cow, mingled with it the year through.

For years, during a sustained hiatus in the growth of Centralia, due
to certain water-power monopolies that held up a foundry-development
which was one day to boom it, the House on Sycamore Street continued
virtually to mark the very spot where the bob-tailed town faded back
into the placid geography of the meadow, field, and brook from whence
it came.

From its square brace of front bay windows, you glimpsed the roofs of
the sedentary houses for blocks along the shady length of Sycamore
Street. But from its rear; from Henry’s window, or Davey’s attic one,
or Trina’s, there uninterrupted, plunged the sheep meadow into the
corn-fields, and the corn-fields into the creek; and climbing out of
the creek, as if the land were hurrying to be on its way, more sheep
pasture, alfalfa, barns and stiles, and so on to the Tarkington Farm,
whose buildings, with the exception of silo, were hidden by trees.

In Rebekka’s and Henry’s childhood, the creek that plunged through
South Meadow had wound its way through the town so that every so
often, as you drove, clump-clump, went hoofs over wooden bridges. The
soft thunder of the loose flooring in these bridges reverberated down
into Davey’s sixth year, then the town appropriation went through for
filling in the creek.

Every Schuyler had reason to remember that rear of flowing pasture and
farm-land, and had plunged and shouted away many a somnolent midsummer
afternoon in this tramp stream that had, in rare fashion, wandered
off the flank of a two-hundred-mile river, to rattle its way over the
stones. While David was growing up, practically all the streets that it
had intersected were filled in, doing away with the pleasant commotion
of the wooden bridges. But like a rash, immediately beyond the town, it
broke out again.

The South Meadow ran on beyond the creek to the railroad. A double row
of persimmon-trees marked the edge of the Old Gentleman’s property.
Sometimes, on the afternoons that were mealy to the tongue of the
apricot haze, David lay flat on his back under them on the coarse,
yellowing pasture-grasses. Sometimes a persimmon came down and spat him
in the face.[3]

Mathilda Schuyler, who sewed a great deal in a large third-story sort
of attic-room, with matting on the floor, and large blobs of unused
blankets, comforters, pillows, and feather beds, tied into sheets and
arranged around the room, could lean out of that window and yodel to
Davey when she wanted him, as she had yodeled to the small Schuylers
who had scampered before.

But somehow, after the interval of more than the score of years that
separated her sixth from this seventh child of hers, Mathilda had taken
on some of the nervousness of a young mother with her first-born. And
an additional kind of self-consciousness, as if to Davey were owing
some sort of an explanation for the circumstance of a curious isolation
caused by years.

And yet, after a certain square little fashion, David was the sturdiest
of her children, with his father’s tight kind of sinew that knitted him
down into stockiness, and short heavy legs that were to remain that way
until at fourteen they shot up, lean and over-lanky. A brownish little
fellow with the blackest of pupils to his eyes, surrounded by the clear
gold of syrup. There were three black dots in the gold of the left eye.
“Faith, Hope, and Charity,” said Emma to him one day, and kissed the
eye shut.

Maybe! But David wriggled. He was pretty constantly being kissed by
the three big women, his sisters. And even by his nieces and nephews.
It was a favorite pleasantry of Rebekka’s eldest son, Steve, who was
fifteen when David was four, to address him as Uncle David and then
pick him up by the seat of his small trousers and deposit him on top of
a mantelpiece.

Emma’s daughter Claire was the niece nearest his age. When she was
an adorable eleven, a blond Bavarian-looking doll with her mother’s
bright, plump Teutonic prettiness, and dimples everywhere, knees,
wrists, elbows, cheeks and chin, her Uncle David was six. It was the
period when he was all square. Square, brown, straight bangs. Square,
ragged front teeth. The squareness beginning to lock his chin. The eyes
of clear gold syrup with the three brown motes in the left, that looked
at you squarely, under the square brow made squarer by bangs.

“He’s a Schuyler every inch,” would say his Mother, placing cold,
oldish hands on his young hair.

“Except the inches that haven’t come yet,” was the Old Gentleman’s
chuckle. “Don’t count your inches before they’re hatched. And there’s
no telling ... he may remain a little shorty....”

“No telling,” repeated Mathilda, with the thought racing across her
eyes that could make them look about to tear. “No telling for us, that
won’t live to see it.”

“We’ll live!” said the Old Gentleman, expanding as if to give validity
to a remark that had none whatsoever, except what grand manner could
contribute. “Never mind, we’ll live, to see everything.”

“Dave, what do you want to be when you grow up?” was a constant
reiteration of the Old Gentleman’s, as if to jerk the future closer, so
that he might cram some of this late son’s maturity into his lifetime.

For the first ten years of his boyhood, with a consistency that never
failed to raise the family-laugh, David stood by a selection that was
neither precocious nor unique:

“I want to be a policeman.”


FOOTNOTES:

[1] ... they christened this late-comer brother of mine David Whittier.
David, a name which Mother had stored up all through the years like a
squirrel its nut, bringing it forth each time a son was born to her
only to concede it in favor of family-names like Philip and Henry.
Whittier was father’s choice, after his beloved Whittier County.

[2] ... I think some of his most brilliant talks are the unrecorded
ones made more or less extemporaneously from the platforms of trains,
or I remember once, from the hangar of a roof just as he was stepping
on board a plane and a few hundred had gathered to cheer him on his
way. The out-of-doors seemed to clarify even that clear brain of his.

[3] A painting of my brother, done from an enlarged snapshot taken
one Sunday afternoon in South Meadow by Miss Henriette Simpson, now
hangs in Americana House, Philadelphia, the gift of the Midwest Junior
Historical Society.




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




Chapter Two


The Renchler Farm stood three miles out of Centralia on a dip of state
road that led in a quick, slick ribbon the three hundred and twenty
miles across two states.

Two acres of it had been Winslow Renchler’s inheritance of his father’s
small estate.

The house stood to the fore of those original seven acres. In the
years since her marriage, and to Rebekka’s just pride, those acres
had been added to by fifty-eight. The last buy-in had been a coveted
acre-and-a-half of old man Algahr’s. For years, the Renchler holdings
had curved around that plot like a greedy finger. When approached,
Algahr, who at ninety had exactly the face of a white, two-weeks-old
kitten, tooted around with his thin, high little voice and refused to
consider. When he died, a sole relative in the form of a heretofore
unknown nephew turned up from Shreveport, Louisiana, and sold it
quickly to Rebekka for less than half of what she had been wont to
annually offer old man Algahr. The catch was that the young scalawag
demanded cash transaction. Even with the advantage to her of cash
terms, Rebekka, whose acquisitions were all on mortgage basis, found
the raising of two hundred and forty dollars no small matter.

Finally it was negotiated with Ephraim Howey, then candidate for
Governor on a Republican ticket and whose stock-farm two miles along
toward Middleton was by way of becoming a matter of state pride.

That gave to the Renchler farm a fine, unbroken acreage of flat land.
You could stand on the verandah of the house exactly as if you stood on
the deck of a steamer, with the surrounding country flowing out from
you in ripples toward the horizon.

Gradually, with the years, as Winslow’s initial and feeble hold upon
the affairs of the farm relaxed and Rebekka took firmer and firmer
clutch, High Ridge came to be known as the Model Farm. For no more
technical reason, perhaps, than the geometric outlay of its uniformly
painted buildings and silos and the well-kept stone hedges, most of
them with their top row of boulders whitewashed.

Rebekka’s eyes and mouth were grim with the purpose of living up to
that appellation. It led her, in breathing space between meeting
mortgages, to cast covetous eyes toward installations of machinery and
modern devices which were ultimately to justify the term, “model farm.”

The Renchler place, with its perfectly square white frame house, its
recent addition of wide side verandah, its front of closed shutters and
green front door that nobody ever used, stood on a rectangular knoll
that was entirely surrounded by sixteen handsome maple trees. In time,
with its flock of outlying buildings painted a uniform green and white,
its regimental silos, its heated and electrically-lighted barns, its
plow-horses of enormous heft, fatted cattle, flowing loam of fields,
it was to become second only, as a matter of local pride, to the Howey
place, which after all was more of a hobby than an enterprise.

There were those who thought that Rebekka, in her concentration upon
the singleness of her purpose, in the sure-footed, deep-throated,
high-busted, and wide-hipped kind of magnificence, was too terrific
with enterprise.

There was something about a woman—even at the dawn of a day when a
suffragette was something that could happen in your own family—stalking
about her house at dawn to the clanking of her keys and the swinging
of her lantern; mingling in the open cattle-marts with men who never
so much as doffed a cap or shifted quid when she swung up in flaring
knee-boots, with her skirts crowded up into them, and, at season,
standing atop a threshing-machine shouting orders, her skirts again,
for want of knickerbockers, lashed in the uninterrupted winds against
her great body-curves; well, there was something about it—a woman and
all that—there was something about it went against many a grain.

It was common say about Rebekka that she could get more than a third
again as much work out of her men as anyone in the county, because they
were ashamed of an endurance that might not match up with her mighty
one.

There was something too ignominious about so minor a discomfort as
a cold, or a tooth- or an earache to be mentioned in the eupeptic
presence of Rebekka.

It was not that she was unsympathetic. There was a shelf in a
tool-house on her place filled with rows of arnicas, headache powders,
antiseptics, and various first-aids, which she personally administered,
calm and unblanched at the flow of blood, sure and firm at the winding
of gauze. Once a boy-around-the-place had tripped against a scythe
during haying time and cut his head in such fashion that a flap of
the flesh hung down over his face in a great dripping mask, blinding
and terrifying him so that he ran screaming through the fields to the
house. Winslow, seated on the side verandah, scooping a very special
brand of tobacco from a can into a rubberized pocket-pouch as the
wretched boy ran up, reeled sidewise from his rocking-chair into a
swoon that threatened, because of its duration, to be more a part of
the emergency than the wounded boy himself.

It was Rebekka who held the flap of flesh in place and kept the blood
stanched until a doctor arrived to sew it, giving orders the while
about the resuscitation of Winslow, who lay like a board.

After it was all over, Winslow, feeling foolish, would have preferred
to sit on the verandah until his legs got rid of some of their tendency
to wobble. But there was Rebekka, back at her interrupted chore of
the setting-out of hundreds of tiny asparagus-plants in frames under
glass, and so with bluster, to likewise prove his fitness, Winslow, who
detested the smell of lime phosphate, went down-cellar for a bag of it
to sprinkle along a border of new-turned earth.

As a matter of fact, Rebekka’s legs were wobbling, too. She wanted to
cry. She wanted Winslow to come and insist that she go indoors and
lie down. She wanted “Doctor Dan” to offer her a quaff of spirits of
ammonia, as he had the kitchen-maid and even old Jeff.

He did nothing of the sort.

It would have embarrassed Winslow to show the slightest concern for
her. It was not until she was in bed that night that Rebekka let
herself have a chill. A long, luxurious one that rattled her teeth and
the bed springs.




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




Chapter Three


The distance from the House on Sycamore Street to Rebekka’s farm could
be cut considerably if you went around by the creek and stepping-stoned
it in the autumn or waded it in spring. That was David’s invariable
way, although in spring, pants were sure to get soaked, along their
edges, even if he crammed them halfway up along his upper leg.

Rebekka always kept an extra pair of trousers hanging in a closet under
the stairs. Knee ones, long since outgrown by Stevey.

They fitted Davey, who never failed to rebel against them, in a comic
hit-and-miss fashion, garment and boy seeming to evade each other at
all usual points of contact.

A little later, when Steve was at State Agricultural College, his room,
up under the eaves, was practically David’s, with a closet for extra
bits of David’s clothing and a nightshirt for those occasions when, for
one reason or another, David slept at his sister’s house.

Paula, Rebekka’s first, was nineteen when Davey was six.

That meant, as in the House on Sycamore Street, here was a forest of
grown-ups. Except Leslie. Who had a face that was delicately hung on,
like a pear from its branch. A face that quivered with nervous little
ecstasies at what it saw.

You could lie on your stomach alongside of Leslie, even though the
forest of years was between, and play with lead soldiers and try to
make an A-shaped formation with them as Henry had read out loud from
Carlyle’s _French Revolution_.

But never for long.

Suddenly Leslie would grab one of them out of formation and wrap him in
a handkerchief and want to play a game called “Angel in Heaven.” Pshaw!
That bored David. To him a soldier was a soldier.




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




Chapter Four


So it was that David had practically two homes. The House on Sycamore
Street that had to get used all over again to a youngster clattering
through its halls and nicking into its base-boards and sliding down
its banisters, and his sister’s farmhouse with the big square light
rooms of almost too many windows and the bright golden-oak woodwork
and the brass bed and balcony-front bird’s-eye maple dressers and
yellow hardwood floors and folding-doors on easy rollers that divided a
dining-room done in golden oak and leather upholstery of the McKinley
period, from a parlor of dragon-footed mahogany-and-green-velours,
two-tone green rug and Victrola with wax cylindrical records.

Rebekka was not much on the details of interior decoration. Until
Paula grew up and had sharp ideas of her own that conflicted with her
mother’s, practically all of the ordering for the Renchler household
was done by mail-order catalogue. Stacks of bulky pamphlets lay on
Rebekka’s roll-top desk in the dining-room bay window beside a pack of
stamped envelopes; and scarcely a day but what Rebekka, who wrote all
letters on pad-paper in lead-pencil, jotted some such as these:

Please send me as per No. r358762 Two hose nozzles, brass finish.

Please send me as per No. 238996 One Pet Chicken-House Oil-Burner. All
attachments. No. 60401 One box 100 sheets 8 × 10 water color paper.

Please send me as per No. 865438 three pair gentleman’s black
cotton and wool socks. Reinforced toes. Size 10½. No. 456787 One
garden-swing. Striped awning. Green and brown reversible seats.

Please send me as per No. 453973 one pair ladies blue felt bedroom
slippers size 5½C. No. 5925596 One Mother’s Comfort Butter-Churn.
Accessories. No. 49572530 One box, half-dozen Toothbrushes, Numbered
one to six. Number 20e65 Six Sure-Fire rat traps.

Winslow, who squinted over the ridge of horizontal lead-pencils,
held out at arm’s-length, and who belonged to a Water Color Society,
was moved to occasional remonstrance at these catalogic tendencies.
Not because they offended, but rather because, as Paula began to
remonstrate, and substituted willow pattern breakfast china for the
régime of granite coffee-pot, and theatrical gauze curtains for
Nottingham lace, something in him, the languid something that made him
want to paint, stirred and agreed.

“Bek, that four-tiered wire flower-pot stand is a fright! Thought they
stopped making those things forty years ago. You can do better than
that right here in Centralia without having to write five hundred miles
for it.”

“Well, if that’s the case, Winslow, it would help a great deal if
you would go shopping. Goodness knows, I’m not so in love with the
catalogues.”

But, as usual, Winslow did nothing. It was easier just to sit and
remonstrate, a little gently, a little ironically and with a charm
that, as his days almost imperceptibly became more laconic, and
Rebekka’s more dynamic, seldom failed to fascinate and amuse her.

“Fraud, you!”

But for outsiders, every manifestation of Winslow’s lethargies
came under the benign heading of temperament. There was something
magnificently creative in the way Bek had spun out of the mild figure
of a mild man with a mild flair for water-colors, the variegated
figure of the artist.

No sooner had the man she married developed indolences of mood and
spirit against which her family had vainly tried to forewarn and
forearm her during the period of their wooing, than assertively and
unrelentingly, to the community at large, Bek became the wife of genius.

It was Bek who took out his membership papers and paid the initiation
fees and annual dues to the Water Color Society. Bek who arranged his
one-man show in the Auditorium of the Tallahassee High School. Bek who
gave catalogue orders for the newest fangle in water-color equipment.
Once Winslow had awakened to find a black sateen smock across the foot
of his bed. That, as he put it, broke the back of his camel’s-hair
brush. Winslow out-and-out refused to wear it. Bek, whose two feet were
said to be on the ground more patly than any woman’s in three counties,
put it in a dresser drawer, where Winslow, going for his shirts, would
be sure to have it ground into his retina every so often.

“These artists!” was frequently a phrase on her lips, in the form of a
sigh. A large, dramatic, sadistic sigh.

Steve’s room, where Davey frequently slept while its rightful occupant
was off at Agricultural College, was an odds-and-ends of a room with
half-finished attic rafters that Winslow had studded with nails for his
collection of pipes. A fine mahogany chest of drawers, a high low-boy
confiscated by Bek from the House on Sycamore Street, stood between two
windows, and a spool bed with a pine-needle mattress that Stevey had
loved and which David loved after him, jammed the room considerably.
A shelf of books, with an assortment of farm journals, Henty, Scott,
Defoe, Dumas, Hugo, Garland, High School text-books. A _Julius Cæsar_,
with S.S.R. monogrammed in lead-pencil along its ragged edges. _Manual
of Chemistry._ _How to Make Your Own Wireless._ _Literary Digest_ for
1902-03, bound. Above it, sprawled across the slanting ceiling, a large
yellow pennant, Tallahassee High, ’09.

It had cost Rebekka some tears as secret as her midnight chill when
Stevey left this boy’s-nest of his for State Agricultural. There had
been reasons, frantic, private reasons, why suddenly, to the mild
mystification of the family, he had been packed off to the first school
whose division of semesters fitted in with the hurried arrangement.

Even after four months of Stevey’s absence, it was as if Bek could not
become reconciled to that sense of the cold, empty room up above the
bedroom she shared with Winslow. She loved having David there now, as
many nights in the week as she could wheedle him out of her mother.

As a rule, he came over toward late afternoon, with the day’s lay of
the fifty wyandottes which Rebekka, from an old-time necessity, due to
lack of space, but since outgrown, kept on her father’s place.

David carried their lay in a chip basket with a cover that lifted from
either end.

From one of her cow-sheds Rebekka could see him come up over the
wheat-ridge, basket in hand, his stocky little figure mounted in a kind
of important isolation against a semicircular wall of sky, his trousers
forced halfway up against his upper leg and sure to be wet from the
wade.

Rebekka’s first question was almost invariable: “Did Mother say you
could stay all night?”

Sometimes, in his small, hiccoughy voice: “Yes.” Sometimes there were
orders for a prompt return.

When he was six, there was already that kind of reliability about him.
One October afternoon, when the apricot haze lay in its inimitable
taste and smell along the child’s senses as he crossed the fields,
Rebekka met him down by the cow-shed, where she had been watching him
approach.

“Did Mother say you could stay the night, Davey?”

“There’s a little sick ewe-lamb in a basket in the kitchen, Bek. I’ve
got to get back. You see—you see, the liddle thing—the liddle thing
he’s got the shivers terrible. The liddle thing, Bek. Jake’s giving him
hot milk out of a bottle. I got to get back and hold the bottle. He’s
got the shivers terrible, the liddle thing.”

He had the heaving mannerism, not uncommon with children, of drawing in
his breath between words as if he were hauling up a supply for the next
one.

Rebekka loved the childishness of it. She used to regard him, while he
spoke, with her teeth gritted as if she wanted to pinch. She had been
that way with her own children, full of the impulse to kiss and maul at
them when they were babies, for what was adorable to her.

On this gray afternoon, there was a letter stuck up in the top of her
boot so that it stung against her knee. It was from the dean of an
agricultural college. A sympathetic letter, written to a woman known
by hearsay through three counties, informing her that a certain aspect
of her son’s deportment was making it impossible for him to remain as
a student. It was a simple, typewritten page, couched in kindness. And
yet Rebekka was seared with it. The letter burned against her knee like
a hot-pack. It was as if she had rubbed flame over her body, and then
in, as you would oil.

She strode down a cinder path that led from the cow-sheds toward the
barns and shouted some orders that had to do with the backing in of a
team of magnificent dray-horses, with light-brown braided manes and
shaggy forelocks. With that letter searing against her body and her
consciousness, she wanted to cry through a throat that was strong and
tried from holding back tears. A great, powerful dam of a throat that
had never failed her.

And through sickness of soul, she wanted David to sleep at the farm.
Up in Stevey’s room. It was foolish, of course. But somehow the
consciousness of the small, warm nub of him up there on the balsam
mattress in the attitude he was to lie all his life, with his knees up
under his chin and the back of his hand curled against his neck, could
lie to her like a plaster of solace.[4]

It was his funny sturdiness. The sturdiness of him marching there
alongside her, the basket of eggs, about as much as he could manage,
always intact. The sturdy kicking of his bare feet into the gravel,
making it fly. He lugged with a will and there was a spangling of sweat
on his upper lip.

“David, let’s go in now and telephone to Mother that you’ll stay the
night. It’s getting along toward dark, anyway.”

“But Bek, the sick ewe, he’s got the shivers something terrible. I’ve
got to hold the bottle.”

“Stay all night, honey. There’s hominy for supper.” There was not going
to be at all until that moment. David loved it with sorghum wound into
it.

“He’s a poor little, sick little ewe, Bek,” began David all over again
in heaving intonations, with his voice full of draughts. “Jacob is
driving some heifers to Middleton tonight and I’ve got to be home to
feed him his milk in a bottle. He drinks out of a bottle, Bek. Oughtta
see. With a rubber nipple like a baby. Ought to see, Bek, he’s got the
shivers terrible.”

“Trina will tend him, Dave. There’s nothing much to do for a sick ewe
but keep it warm. Dave, Bek wants you to stay! There’s some peppermint
taffies Winslow’s brought.”

There was a pucker to David’s mouth when it watered. A nibbling little
motion that set the flanges of his nose dancing.

“C’n I ride Dodo?”

“He’s been plowing heavy all day, Dave.”

To ride Dodo, whose back was as broad as a moor, was to sit astride the
universe.

“Well then, if I stay, can I flibber-jibber?”

To “flibber-jibber” was to ride the unanchored end of the big
ironing-board that unhinged from the wall and then shut up against
it.[5]

“It’s Tuesday, Davey, and Tillie is ironing.”

“You see, Bek, it’s a little sick ewe....”

“Little scamp, you. All right, have your way. Go tell Tillie I said you
could ride the board.”

There was a telephone in the back hall under a slant of low ceiling
formed by the stairway, a wall-affair with a handle that you ground
around as you lifted the receiver.

The House on Sycamore Street was on a party line. A long ring and two
shorts was the Schuyler signal. It was a standing family joke that
Mathilda Schuyler unhooked her receiver for all rings. This she denied
with great flurry.

But the fact remained that in the little pantry where the telephone
hung beside the refrigerator, Mathilda spent long periods a-tiptoe, an
eager-listening side of her face glued against the faint crackle of the
receiver.

“Well, Mother,” was Henry’s habit of greeting, as he entered the
house evenings, “what’s the inside news on the party line today? Any
startling revelations? What’s the low-down? Is Mrs. Wiley making soft
soap this week? Who killed cock robin?”

“Hennery!” She said “Hennery” in a little bleat. She said “Puppa” in
a little bleat. She unhooked the receiver, to Rebekka’s call, with a
little bleat.

“Hello?”

“Mother? Bek.”

“Yes, Bek.”

“I’ll keep Dave all night, Mother, and send him home with the team.
Tell Father I’m sending over that load of dirt for filling in the old
pig wallow.”

“But, Bek, Puppa wanted Dave to stop in at Igrotte’s on his way back
this afternoon for a pat of sweet butter.”

“I’ll send you a pat in the morning. And Mother, Davey’s having a fit
about that sick ewe in the kitchen. Wants you to see to it that the
range is kept banked all night, and he says to be sure to see that
Trina or Jake feeds him from the bottle.”

“Puppa wanted him to stop at Igrotte’s for a pat of——”

“I’ll see to everything, Mother.”

“And, Bek! Hello! And Bek——”

“Yes.”

“Emma telephoned that Claire has a little temperature again and a sore
throat, and insists upon going to the movies with her Uncle Hennery.”

“White spots?”

“I don’t know. Emma seemed right worried. Claire insists upon going
out. Thought I’d ask you to call up right away.”

“Surely. Father there?”

“He hasn’t come in yet from Cottage Corner. He drove out there with
Mark to see some steers.”

“Tell him I bought those two Holsteins we saw out at Seven Mile last
week, at my price.”

“Yes, Bek.”

“M-m-m-m,” said Bek, hung up, and began to grind at the telephone again.

Emma answered, unhooking the receiver of a desk instrument and
seating herself at a small kidney-shaped table in a reception hall of
highly-colored rugs, small oil-studies in large gilt Florentine frames
and shadow-boxes of sheep huddling before a storm; a study of an old
man with very many wrinkles and sunken cheeks, and one of the fat
monks with the look of pouring mugs of ale down inside their cassocks.
A winding stairway rose out of this reception-hall, with a stained
window at its first landing and a rubber-plant in a brown-pottery
jardinière with warts.

Emma’s home had been built at the height of the McKinley indoor period.
Her reception-hall boasted an upright pianola, a piano-bench (the
stool was over in front of one of the windows, with a rubber-plant on
a china plate standing on it). There were lace curtains, sill-high,
and, leading into the dining-room, portières of soft chenille ropes
that clung to your shoulders as you walked through. On the center
mission-table, with its mission-lamp, were such addenda as Owen
Meredith in padded leather and, by rather amusing propinquity, obvious
to no one in that household, a cloth copy of _The Egotist_ that had
found its way there by one of those circuitous and anonymous routes
peculiar to books. There were visiting-cards on a bronze tray shaped
like the Indian head on a penny. Claire’s library ticket. A round
globe of goldfish threading through a castle. A _Saturday Evening
Post_. Morton Milliken’s pipe in a white-china dish. A book of family
snapshots. A cut-glass pickle-dish filled with salted peanuts.

Emma wore a dressing-sacque made of strips of narrow blue-satin
ribbon and Valenciennes lace, and a cream-sateen petticoat with a
machine-scalloped edge.

“Oh Bek,” she cried to her sister, who stood at the other end of the
telephone connection in her knee-high boots and homespun skirt crowded
into them. “I’m so glad you called!”

“What’s this I hear about Claire?”

“She’s got fever again and her throat’s sore. She’s been so stubborn
about my telephoning you. Wouldn’t let me.”

“White spots?”

“A little one, but she denies it. She’s got her heart set on going to
the picture-show with her Uncle Henry and Henriette tonight.”

“Where is she?”

“Upstairs, lying down.”

“Tell her I want to talk to her.”

“Don’t let on Bek, that I have said anything, or she will immediately
suspect that her father or I appealed to you to. She’s right stubborn.”

“Call her.”

Claire Milliken, who had a thick, creamy _mädchen_ beauty that might
have flowed right off her mother’s, was lying under a pink blanket on
one end of her curlicue brass bed up in a square room of stripe-and-bud
wall-paper, bird’s-eye maple dresser with dotted-swiss cover over pink
sateen, a window-seat of dotted Swiss cushions over pink sateen and a
ukelele snugged in.

“Oh, Claire—telephone!”

With a lovely sort of languor that was a piece of her mother’s, Claire
flung off of the bed, and with the pink blanket huddled shawl-wise over
her plump and fair shoulders, pattered out into the hall in pink-felt
slippers edged in white eiderdown, and leaned over the balustrade.

“Who is it, Dee Dee?”

For some reason, with its beginnings imbedded in the lispings of
childhood, Claire was always to address her mother as “Dee Dee.”

“It’s Aunt Bek, Claire.”

Instantly there raced over Claire a tiny rigidity, as her nails
whitened at the hold of the balustrade. There was a letter burning
against her body, too, that bore the same postmark as Bek’s. Only hers
lay warmly to the soft white flesh over her heartbeat; it rang there
as if it were a little electric bell. It was from Steve, announcing
a little too nonchalantly, and binding her to secrecy, the exciting
tiding that he was coming home.

Her secret.

“Then you must have called her up, Dee Dee. Oh, I know!”

“Claire, that is positively not so. I was paraffining those Mason jars
of damsons when the telephone rang.”

“Well, it’s _mighty_ funny. Aunt Bek isn’t going to run my life the way
she runs yours and everybody else’s in this family—and out of it.”

“I can’t help how funny it is, and I hope you won’t ever have anyone
less efficient to run people’s lives than your Aunt Bek.”

“Well!” said Claire with ambiguity. “Well! I’m not so sure about that
by a long shot.” And she dashed down the stairs.

There was something about Claire in her teens, her prettiness
brightened now with fever, of a petulant child.

“It’s mighty funny, Dee Dee! That’s all I have to say,” taking up
the receiver from her mother’s hand and seating herself before the
kidney-shaped table. “Hello!” Her aunt was not one to parry words.

“I suppose you know what a sore throat with temperature means if you
expose yourself unnecessarily?”

“There’s nothing the matter with me, dear! Dee Dee or Father put you up
to this. Or Gramaw or Gramp. I won’t be treated like a simp.”

“Like a what?”

“—elton.”

“It is entirely up to you how you are to be treated.”

“I tell you I am feeling all right, Aunt Bek.”

“Then why are you lying around the house with temperature when it is
your afternoon to sew at the Betsy Ross Club?”

“Just because my throat is a little eeny sore and I am taking care of
it.”

“Yes, that is precisely the way you took care of it when you insisted
upon going to the State Agricultural Prom last month and came down abed
afterward for two weeks.”

“But, Aunt Bek....”

“Your mother had your Grandfather Milliken’s broken leg to contend with
this summer and your father’s sciatica. If you feel that you have the
moral right to pile more worries upon her, that is a matter for your
own judgment. Tell your mother I want to talk to her.”

“But, Aunt Bek....”

“There’s nothing more to be said about it, Claire. If consideration for
yourself or your mother does not prompt you, I cannot hope to.”

“But, Aunt Bek, I tell you I....”

“I’d rather not hear it all over again, Claire. Your mother, please!”

“Oh, very well—of course, if you don’t want to listen! Here, Dee Dee,
Aunt Bek wants you back again.”

“Hello, Bek.”

“Yes. Don’t answer to what I am saying. But you needn’t worry. She’s
not going. And while it’s on my mind, Emma, I wish you would tell
Morton to tell his father that I have reason to know that Second Street
property is for sale after all.”

“Bek, Father Milliken is buying awfully heavy on that Second Street
deal. I was telling Morton last night I just don’t want him bothering
Father again to go his collateral.”

“Least said over the telephone about that the better, but if he insists
upon being interested, Grandfather Milliken had better let me do the
talking, because I handled that same group pretty well the time Phil
went in on that Springfield development.”

“Yes, Bek. But I’m quite sure Morton wouldn’t proceed without
conferring with you anyhow.”

“Tell Aunt Bek I want to talk to her when you’re finished, Dee Dee.”

“Sh-h! I can’t hear a word you’re saying, Bek, with Claire at my elbow.
Here, she wants to talk to you again.”

“Hello, I’m not going, so there, if it makes you feel any better.”

“It does, Claire. Thank you! Good night.”

“’Night.”

“Heigh-ho! So much for that!” said Bek’s manner as she hung up. Then
there was the matter of old Jessup, whose wife Mattie was demanding
that his pay be turned over directly to her. Winslow was really the one
who should take that up with old Jessup. But no, better do it herself.
And those clapboards at the rear of the lower barn needed whitewashing.
Winslow could really do that; but no, better to have Jessup do it after
the bran was mixed.

There was Davey playing at her heels again, hopping along on one leg
after her in a fashion that spun the gravel against her boots.

“Don’t, Davey.”

But just the same, how curiously pleasant the shot of the pebbles that
he kicked up against her boots! He was so snug, David was. So solidly
there! A little snug-bug-in-a-little-snug-rug of a brother. And the
letter was searing into Rebekka, as she strode down the cinder path
toward the lower stables.

Horrible, horrible, horrible, on David’s account if no other, that a
nephew should stand disgraced in college for drinking. Not but what
there were other considerations, more immediate, graver far, than David.

Only you were not always logical about David, as you had been in
practically every other aspect of life, even your own children. Except
perhaps—your marriage. More than for any other member of the family,
Mother, Father, even Winslow, it was most intolerable of all that
Stevey should have dared—for Davey’s sake—to bring this upon them!

David coming along as he had, in his ridiculous little anticlimax
fashion, was an emotion. His diminutive kind of isolation made him
somehow—well, special. Born so almost into a forest of grown-up
brothers and sisters; knee-high to his universe.

These early years of his were spent among the knees. The knees of his
parents, his brothers and sisters, and of even his nieces and nephews.
Grotesque world of knees.

It was hard to treat David as anything except an emotion, even if you
were Rebekka. His smallness, his squareness, his unnamable kind of
solidity. Squat little toadstool in the curiously overshadowing forest
of the grown-ups.

Everything, somehow, some way, must be kept right for David. Stevey
represented part of that responsibility of keeping the forest of the
grown-ups fine for David to grow into.

All the family must have that sense of responsibility to David. To
Bek, striding there, it made Stevey’s defection seem more than ever a
heartburning shame before square, little, stodgy David.

If only he wouldn’t stay stocky. The Schuylers were all tall, except
Mathilda and Phil. Henry, even with his stoop, stood six-feet-two. Bek
herself only slightly under. Funny little old runt of David, kicking
the gravel against her boots.

“David, stop that, I said!”

“Bek, will Winslow make me a pea-shooter?”

“Yes.”

Winslow must be stirred to set about wrapping those mulberry bushes
along the walk in straw against another frost. No, better get Jessup
to do it, Winslow’s finger-tips split so easily. Besides, must tell
Winslow tonight after supper that Stevey would be home tomorrow. Poor
Winslow, having to know at last. Terrible! Terrible! Terrible!

“Bek, is there two kinds of crows’ nests?”

“No, only one.”

“There is so.”

“All right.” (If Father wants to trade me in those two red calves for
the spotted heifer, I take them over. How to tell Winslow!)

“There is, Bek.”

“All right.” (One must stop the habit of listening to children’s
queries with only half an ear. Her own children, growing up, had
resented it. And now here was David with the most insatiable of
curiosities, getting only half an ear.)

“You say there is more than one kind, Davey? Not that I know of.”

“There is so. One for crows and one for a ship.”

“Of course! How stupid of me! You’re right. Bek just wasn’t thinking.”

“There’s a picture of one on a ship in a book up in Henry’s room,
called ‘Our—our—Pac-if-ic Poss-ess-ions.’ What’s ‘Our Pac-if-ic
Poss-ess-ions,’ Bek?”

(Oh Stevey, Stevey—how could you? Where to turn? How? How to tell
Winslow?)

“What are they, Bek?”

“What, Dave?”

“Our Pacif-ic Poss-ess-ions.”

“Why—er—islands in the Pacific, Dave. The Philippines.”

“There’s a picture of a crow’s nest in that book. It’s got a sailor-boy
in it with a hunk of ice hanging on his beard. It’s as cold as the
devil in a crow’s nest on a ship.”

“Don’t say ‘devil’.”

“Henry and Father do. How can it be cold on ship in the Pacific, Bek?”

“You must ask Henry that, Davey.”

“Bek, I can spell ‘Appomattox’.”

“Yes.”

“Ap-po-mat-tox. That’s where Lee surrendered to Grant, April 9th, 1865.”

“Good.”

“Henry read it to me out of a book full of pictures of flags. Ever see
a flag with a skull and cross-bones?”

“Um.”

“Why can’t you say April 1th like you say April 9th?”

“Because.”

“That’s no reason. It’s a word.”

“Well you just can’t.”

“Tramp. Tramp. Tramp-tramp-tramp. I’m a Confederate Union soldier.”

“You can’t be both.”

“Why? Oh, I know!”

(Poor Winslow, having to be told tonight.)

“Tramp. Tramp. Seventeen hundred and seventy-five, scarcely a man is
now alive who remembers that famous day and year. Do you remember that
famous day and year, Bek?”

“No.” (Lime phosphate for the verbena borders.)

“George Washington would remember.”

“Yes, George Washington would.”

“Tramp. Tramp. Tramp-tramp-tramp. There’s a picture in Henry’s office
of Washington crossing the Delaware. Where’s the Delaware, Bek?”

“In Delaware, Davey.”

“It’s in Pennsylvania, too. How can the Delaware be out of Delaware?”

(M-m-m. What to do about Stevey! All the horror of those secret months
before he had been packed off to college. The need for more and
more secrecy. This thing that had Stevey in its clutch. A Schuyler.
Inconceivable. There was something known as Keely Cure. Keely Cure—a
Schuyler. Oh God——Oh God—let me wake up and find I’m dreaming....)

“Tramp. Tramp.”

(What to do? Poor Winslow, he was sure to turn that green pallor and
quiver at the flanges of his nose with the kind of nervous anger that
made the backs of his hands sweat and invariably brought on one of his
colds. Shame, Stevey! Oh my boy! And David growing up.)

“There’s Winslow. What’s he painting?”

“Don’t holler, Davey, while Winslow is painting that lovely corner of
the orchard where all that sumach grows.”

“If I was a painter, know what I’d paint?”

(If only Winslow needn’t be told! How peaceful he seemed....)

“Know what?”

“Sh-h, Davey, Winslow wants it quiet when he’s working.”

Winslow was seated in a grassy cove behind a silo on a folding-chair
that occupied two levels at a time, and from that tilt kept squinting
at a distance of apple trees and fold of meadow-land that were still
faintly lit with the most backward spring of many a year. Along a bit
of crest ran sumach, red as fire.

He had a pale goatee which shot up with the directness of a pointing
finger when he threw back his head to squint.

Rebekka had her own private opinion about Winslow’s head, particularly
seen thus in perspective against sky-line while he painted. White, high
brow, with a blue vein that quivered. Baby-fine hair, a shade darker
than beard, lying back from it in a thin, curling roll. Long, delicate
eyelids. Almost a womanish neck, the same white as his chest.

To Rebekka, particularly the countless times she had seen Winslow thus
at his painting, there was something that suggested the Christ head in
the northeast window of the Second Avenue Rock Church where the Old
Gentleman owned a pew. Strange that no one had ever remarked it.

There was another blue little vein in the side of Winslow’s neck
that jumped when he was tired or nervous. His exquisite capacity for
pain symbolized to her right there in that bit of neck above the old
corduroy jacket. Rebekka was never to realize to what extent her
vitality was dedicated to keeping that vein at the side of Winslow’s
neck from jumping.[6]

“Don’t disturb Winslow, Davey.”

Winslow had already been disturbed. But affably. He came toward them
smiling, one long, white hand plunged into corduroy, leather-bound
pocket, and his pipe hooked loosely into the corner o£ his mouth.

How handsome he was and how slim and straight, with that curve at his
waist which was almost military. It made Bek, who had not kept her
figure, fear that she looked her several years his senior. Except that
her skin had the pat, dewy clarity of butter. Winslow’s had gutters,
and there were long brackets about his mouth. A nervous, dredged face.
A face that might have had the same pear-shaped clarity of his son
Leslie’s, until he had looked into that son’s eyes and, beholding their
vacancy, his own had become turgid with pain for his offspring.

It was horrible to have to tell Winslow, who sometimes cried to himself
over Leslie, at night, as he lay on the pillow beside her, about the
letter from Stevey flaming against her knee.

“Hi, there!” said Winslow, and caught David up by the armpits and swung
him.

“Quit!” cried David, to whom the gesture seemed infantile, and began
dancing on his toes and spitting on his square palms. “C’m on, spar!”

“Shrimp,” said Winslow, and placed his long, white hand against
David’s face in a soft sort of mash that pinned him back against the
silo, “where did you come from?”

“Your brother-in-law is going to sleep here, Winslow.”

The family never tired of its sense of the humor of David’s disparity
among them.

“Well, brother-in-law,” said Winslow, and tossed him high a second
time, “we’ll have the Cherokee snake dance on the Victrola after
supper.”

“Yoo-hoo,” yodeled David, and beat his palm against his wide, open
mouth.

Winslow, who before marriage had lived in New Mexico over a six-month
recuperation from a lung condition, knew some Cherokee lore and had a
great silver tribal belt that wrapped twice around David.

“Indian Territory is bounded on the north by South Dakota, and Henry
says if you draw a straight line——”

“Henry says! Henry says! Henry says the moon is green cheese!”

“Now, Winslow, don’t go teasing that child.”

How peaceful, in the westering light that was lovely across
closely-nibbled pasture, to saunter with these two. Externally as
peaceful as if a letter were not flaming....

“Henry says——”

“Henry says!”

“Winslow!”

“Henry says when I’m big there will be a Panama Canal and then he is
going to take me to see it. Panama is an isthmus——”

“Henry says!”

“Panama is an isthmus, Henry says, connecting North and South America.
Know what an isthmus is?”

“Good Lord, no. Neither would you if you didn’t have a human
encyclopedia for a brother.”

“Winslow!”

“An isthmus is—is——”

“Doesn’t know what an isthmus is. Henry for a brother, and doesn’t know
what an isthmus is.”

“I do so. I’ve just forgot. I do so.”

“Winslow, stop teasing that boy.”

“I did know what an isthmus was.”

The sweet, the westering light. It was like a bath to Rebekka, flowing
along her flesh. Her pastures. Her lands. Her husband in his lithe,
easy way that suggested a remoteness from the soil she wrestled with,
ambling along at her side. And her brother David, for whom the family
must be kept perfect with integrity. And against the love in her for
the peace of the land she was wresting her success from, there burned
that consciousness of Stevey, about to be suspended from college
for what to her was an unnamable vice. A vice that she had secretly
wrestled with in this boy-child of hers for five years; ever since the
November dusk she had first stumbled over him below Casey’s Cider Mill,
lying huddled on his way home from High School, as if an old sack had
been lying there.

And now, after she had fought it with him to the finish of packing him
off to college, apparently cured, here it was again, the old terror,
lifting its head.

The struggle to keep the thing that had happened, and then happened
again and again, secret. Just her fight and Steve’s. And now that it
seemed won—poor Stevey! And there was Jessup. Oh—poor Jessup! Jessup
and Stevey were so terribly akin.

“Winslow, you and Davey go on up to the house. I’ll be along in
a minute and dish up supper. I want to stop and talk to Jessup.
Winslow—would you speak to him for me? Never mind.” (If only Winslow
would! It would be easier somehow for a man to reach a man.)

“What about Jessup, Bek?”

“Never mind. Go ’long. I’ll be up to the house in a minute.”

Jessup was forking fertilizer from a horseless cart that was backed
up against a barn door. A few brown wyandottes stalked about without
scarcely the ado of fluttering before her, as Rebekka strode across the
clean wood flooring.

“Jessup,” said Rebekka, and hit herself on the thigh as she drew up
before him, “there won’t be any need coming up to the house for pay
tonight. I’ll be sending it to your wife by Hallie when she comes down
for milk.”

The watery old face of Jessup swam toward her, milky-eyed,
cranberry-nosed. The head of Jessup, long and hairy, was like an old
cocoanut, nicknamed “Emmy Sue,” that had dangled from the ceiling of the
barn of the House on Sycamore Street ever since Bek could remember.

Jessup’s was just such an old hairy ellipse of a head, with eyes with
red rims that were constantly about to brim over.

She had taken him off her father’s hands, for whom he had worked
thirty-five years, because the Old Gentleman, as Jessup took more
and more to bad moonshine whiskey that filtered over so cheaply from
Kentucky, used to fly into his terrific apoplectic tempers and berate
and shout at him and scream and curse him in round, sound terms that
mortified Mathilda terribly.

And now here was Jessup at sixty-eight, who had never fallen this low,
beginning to lay hands on his wife, until pretty Hallie, their orphaned
granddaughter who made her home with them in a little old wooden house
behind Casey’s Mill, had to run out dead of night, calling help for her
grandmother, whom Jessup was flaying with an old broom.

“Now, Miss Bekkie,” said Jessup, shifting quid, “you wouldn’t be
humiliating an old fellow like me in that fashion, now, Miss Bek?”

“Oh, Jessup, Jessup,” cried Rebekka, looking into the watering old eyes
that were so kindly when sober, “don’t try to bamboozle me.”

“But, Miss Bekkie—an old man——”

“It’s what you deserve. Shame! And Hallie growing up in your house.
Shame! Have you no decency left? No pride, Jessup?”

“I have, Miss Bekkie. Pride for working for the Schuyler family all
these years. There’s things, Miss Bekkie,” said Jessup in a sudden,
cautious whisper, and advanced a step, after the manner of one about
to reveal something secret and sinister, “there’s things can take hold
of a man without his knowing it. Devils. Drink-devils that get hold of
him and make him what he ain’t. Mattie hadn’t ought to be told on her
old husband. Twenty years of poultices I’ve laid to her old back, Miss
Bekkie. It’s a bit of a swig makes a devil of me.”

“That’s the common defense of the common drunkard, Jessup,” said Bek;
and as the words came, the memory cut her like a knife that Jessup’s
words were practically the words Stevey had used to her one dreadful
evening when she had found him in bed stupefied. “Something gets a
fellow, Mother, like a burning devil over which he has no control.”
(Oh, Jessup—poor, poor Jessup!)

“It’s in every man’s power, Jessup, to be stronger than those devils.”

“Now, that’s because you’re so strong, Miss Bekkie, that you say that.
The weak has more pity for the weak than the strong for the weak. They
know.”

How often Stevey had defended Jessup!

“The weak ones are the most sympathizingest, Miss Bekkie.”

Was that true? Rebekka, who could scarcely bear to look into the
watering old eyes of Jessup cringing there before her, knew the
capacity of her strength better than she knew the gauge of her pity.

“Don’t take down my pride, Miss Bekkie. That’s all I’ve got left to
keep my old woman from kicking me into the corner like the dirty old
sack I am. Don’t deal out my pay to my wimmin, Miss Bekkie, that’s the
low-downest a man can fall.”

Jessup, who could be so pitiable in his sobriety and a lashing kind
of demon in his cups. It made it so difficult. Who was she, with that
letter flaming against her flesh, to judge that watery-eyed old face,
horny with its years of service to her family? Besides, this was a
man’s job, by rights. Winslow should be chastising Jessup! Sometimes,
a kind of slow anger smote Rebekka at the brand of her own efficiency,
which made it appear there was nothing she need be spared.

“Miss Bekkie, I’m going to turn over a new leaf. Watch me!” Stevey
had used just those words the night they had so secretly decided on
college. “Mother, watch me. You won’t be sorry we’ve fought this thing
out secretly. I’m going to turn over a new leaf.”

“I got a little crazy last week. Fust time this winter. Don’t take down
my pride, Miss Bekkie.”

“I’m sorry, Jessup. Your wife and your grandchild cannot continue to
live in terror every Saturday night for fear you are not going to get
back from Seven Mile with your pay.”

“Miss Bekkie, I’m going to turn over a new——”

“Don’t—don’t—keep saying that!”

“Why, Miss Bekkie?”

“Because. Because. Because. Too many years of that speech, Jessup!”

“Miss Bekkie—please—I’m an old man....”

If only he wouldn’t bleat and roll his eyes like something wounded.
Great Scott, a drunk and a wife-beater was nothing to snivel over.

“Sorry, Jessup.”

“Miss Bekkie!”

Why didn’t he rise up? Or threaten to quit? Or kick over the traces?
Gnarled old servitor, with thirty-odd years of Schuyler soil and toil
ground into his pores. The terrible meek. That was what hurt most.

“Sorry, Jessup,” said Bek and went out with her firm tread full of
emphasis along the wooden floor, and the heart inside of her sick.

       *       *       *       *       *

Winslow and David were already at table, building wigwams out of
toothpicks and waiting for Bek to come in and dish up. When Paula, who
taught kindergarten in Cleveland, was home, the little pressed-glass
holder for toothpicks was not in evidence, nor the four-caster cruet
nor the mother-of-pearl napkin ring with “Niagara Falls” and “Daddy”
written across it.

To Bek these things mattered little.[7] Even as her house became more
modernized and furnace supplanted base-burner, and the coal-range,
that had made fiery Hades of the kitchen summer after summer, had been
replaced with a nickel-trimmed gas one, and the old walnut dining-room
set with golden oak, selected by catalogue, Bek’s table, except where
Paula intervened, remained broadly a farmhouse board. Rich flour
gravies to be sopped into with hot biscuit. Fried foods soaked through
with flavor. Every home-made conserve and preserve, pickled, brandied,
and sweet. Home-killed meats and fowl. Home-corned beef; salt pork;
smoked hams.

Even then, Bek had been about considerably. Stumping the state for
Ephraim Howey’s second-term candidacy; and once a year Bek went as far
as East St. Louis to the stockyards and put up across Eads Bridge, in
St. Louis proper, at the Planters Hotel instead of at Clara’s, who
lived in the “West End” of the city and a good hour’s trip from the
scenes of Bek’s activities. Bek had also attended a convention at
Louisville as delegate from her state of the Home Growers Association,
stopping at the Seelbach Hotel for a week. Every few years she
and her father spent a few days in Chicago at the stockyards. The
Schuylers, seven strong, had attended the Chicago World’s Fair, and
Bek and Winslow had honeymooned via Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Niagara Falls
and Washington, to New York. And once, Bek and Winslow and Leslie
had journeyed to Rochester, Minnesota, to consult a pair of famous
physicians there on the matter of brain surgery. Then, of course, too
casual for mention, were the trips to “The City”—twenty-five miles
distant.

Bek had been about, but she still set her table in red-checked cloths,
punctuated with large pressed-glass dishes of preserved and pickled
stuffs, and two great white ironstone pitchers of milk with the foam
still on. She did the work of an eleven-room house unaided, except
for Jessup’s wife Mattie, who came down on Tuesdays to help with the
rough-dry ironing. The “hands,” now that the children were grown,
no longer sat at table, but in quarters of their own, rigged up over
the summer kitchen, but Bek still did the cooking for them, and at
harvest-time, fed as many as twenty from the great copper pots that
hung in rows, unused from season to season.

Winslow, whose habit it was to sit down before the meal was served and,
proclaiming his hunger, eat in frugal fashion once the food was before
him, had pushed back his plate in the game with David, so that knife,
fork, and tumbler cluttered up the center of the table.

“Winslow,” cried Rebekka, tying on her apron over the heavy cloth
skirts, boots and all, “that’s no way to clutter up the supper table,”
and began shoving back objects into place and jerking David into a
semi-high chair that she had used for her children, and then hanging
his napkin about his neck by a home-made contrivance fashioned out of a
discarded pair of suspenders.

“Food! Food!” intoned Winslow, and beat with his fork, which set Davey
beating after him.

“Food! Food!”

“Babies!” said Bek, flouncing out into the kitchen, smiling because she
loved their being babyish.

Her children and nieces and nephews and in-laws said of her that she
could stand in the center of her vast kitchen and reach with her long,
sure arms for anything she wanted. That accounted for her amazing
kitchen efficiency. This was scarcely true, of course, but fact was,
Bek could prepare and dish up and serve a meal in the kind of jiffy
that appalled, rather than merely amazed. No one ever saw her “in
dough,” yet her pantry could steam with pies on a half-hour’s notice.
Her doughnuts were a matter of community pride and sold at bazaar as
“Bek Schuyler Beauties.”

Bek could cook! With the kind of tastiness that poured itself into the
palate and quickened the gastric juices.[8]

In later life, David was to recall these sleight-of-hand meals of his
sister’s preparation with astonishment. Her fowls that seemed to run
the succulent kind of juices that only Bek could coax out. Bek’s bread!
She baked twice a week, mixing after the family was abed, and covering
the pans of swelling dough with flour-sacks which she cut open and
hemmed herself. And hominy! Either you were a hominy person or you
weren’t. David was. The isolated, taste-packed pearls. Strange, David
was to have cause to comment later in life, how few people knew how to
cook hominy. Usually, they slopped it together in a mush. Bek’s pearls
stood each and every one alone. White, perfect globules, inviting the
teeth to grind out their corniness. And then, when Bek poured sorghum
over it in a great, slow, amber rope from a glass pitcher with a mouth
that opened back like a new sparrow’s, your own mouth began to water in
two expectant grooves.[9]

There was barley soup tonight, full of the taste of bay leaves and
cylinders of ox-tail that you fished out with your fork and then
flecked with mustard. Sliced cucumbers called “hasty pickles,” that
Bek peeled first and sliced longwise and then set to boil in vinegar,
cloves, and sugar. Pickled beets, grape jelly, pear-and-quince
preserves, piccalilli and chow-chow, in the pressed-glass dishes.
Hashed brown potatoes with a crust on. Ox-tail stew with circles of
green pepper swimming in a rich brown gravy that the very biscuits
seemed to sop up hungrily as you dipped. Hominy and sorghum. Milk
with a half inch of cream on top. And then Bek’s fruit pie with the
fork-prints on the cover and the lurid juices making it soggy. Cherry
pie tonight, out of Bek’s closet of hundreds of Mason jars of preserved
fruits. How the ruby flavors spurted as the fork dug in. Usually,
though, David took up his slice and bit, so that there were two gashes
of smear beyond his mouth, into the middle of his cheeks.

There was never anyone, for all her bigness, more lithe than Bek.
Presto, change-o, with scarcely more than a rattle of pans, a dart or
two through the kitchen door, and there steamed the meal on the table!
Winslow’s dish of soda-crackers, that he liked to break up into his
soup, and Leslie’s special soup-plate that had a legend from “Peter
Pan” on the rim.

At eighteen, Leslie, who was tall to gangling, pale, and with the
identical heart-shaped face of pallor and a certain beauty that had
been his, six, eight, ten years before, was not, to members of his
family, the mental delinquent that all of Bek’s journeys with him to
specialists had so irrefutably determined.

Leslie was Peter Pan detained by the lure of perpetual youth. There
was the fine hand of Bek for you! Subtly, surely, if gradually, out
into the community at large, Leslie became one visited with the
strange wisdom of knowing how to stay a child. There was something
sly and subtle in the way Bek dressed this borderland boy of hers.
Great, slender gawk of a youth with the frail look of a girl, startled
by the sound of the fall of a leaf in a forest. There was always an
adventurous-looking feather in the soft green-felt hat that he wore,
and his jacket was of bottle-green, too, cut Eton, with an open
collar and short trousers of the kind of brown stuffs that blend with
tree-boles and reveal bare nut-brown knees. Peter Pan.

Bek always led Leslie to table herself, with her arm about his waist,
as if they had just strolled in from a somewhere that was as lovely as
it was mysterious. Without Bek at his side, food might sometimes have
tumbled off his fork and down the white-linen front of Leslie’s blouse.
That never happened.

It is doubtful if in those first years of his life Leslie was a whit
more peculiar to David than any other member of the world of grown-ups
into which he had been born. Except that it was so much easier to
play pretend with Leslie. For instance, when you told Leslie that the
carpet sofa in the dining-room of the House on Sycamore Street was a
sea-serpent, Leslie didn’t fall creakily to all-fours and begin making
pretentious, insincere noises like his brother Phil or Grandfather
Milliken when he came over to play chess with the Old Gentleman of a
Sunday afternoon.

Leslie really saw the sea-serpent there and tackled it. Except when he
got what Davey called the sillies, and just sat and stared or insisted
upon draping everything, even the sea-serpent, with a bit of white net
from an old curtain that he was forever dragging everywhere with him.

Angel-veil he called it. Of all the silliness! Trina confided a curious
reason to Davey why Leslie always carried about with him a bit of net.
Because he was born with a caul over his face. Leslie was half angel.
Of all the silliness! Angels never came on earth. Leslie had just
shoulder-blades. Not wings. Besides, it was said of David himself, that
he had been born with a caul over his face. But only a little one, that
tore.

Oh, but there was a good one about the bit of net! David could make a
naughty little roly-poly of himself and slap his thighs with laughter
at the mere recollection.

Once Leslie had pinned the bit of net against Bek’s great, thick, cloth
skirt, and out she went into the pasture to look over some heifers,
with the bit of veiling flapping backward in the wind.

Leslie had been known to deck out pretty nearly everything about the
place as his angel. But oh, Bek! Somehow doing it to Bek was funniest
of all. In bed, at night, to Davey, who had a habit of coming up out of
sleep along past midnight for a wakeful little period of five or ten
minutes, that picture of Bek with veil flying off her boots would often
set him to rollicking with laughter up and down against the bed springs.

At the Renchler table, Leslie was always served first. Great, tender
helpings that he never half consumed. David came second. It had always
been Bek’s theory that the growing child was the first responsibility
at table. David loved to eat there. He ate abundantly. Had a short way
of masticating, caught up his food on quick fork-stabs and, unless
watched, cracked bones between his ragged, saw-edged teeth.

The barley soup let him in for rebuke, too. He let it wash around
his mouth noisily, for that moment when the cunning flavor was most
tickling. Tonight there was hot corn-bread, to be pried open like an
oyster-shell, and a knifeful of pale, sweet butter slid in.

With Paula off teaching in Cleveland and Stevey at College, her table
seemed immeasurably reduced to Bek. Just her three boys to serve.
Winslow, who always ate languidly. Leslie, and then Davey, when she
could borrow him from the House on Sycamore Street.

Bek, eating quickly, but heartily, herself, up and down, in and out.
Replenishing. Carting out plates. In with fresh ones for pie. Granite
pot of steaming coffee, replaced, when Paula was home, with a Wedgwood
one, with a tricky snout. Leslie had to have his pie cut up for him, so
that he dished it up with a spoon. Often his hand trembled. Then Bek
steadied it from the elbow.

Sometimes David wondered why Leslie’s hand trembled.

“What makes you shake that way? Huh? What?” David had once asked with
the directness of childhood.

Leslie, who had a strange vocabulary of nouns joined together by shakes
of his head, was bewildered at this, and only quivered his head the
more. Bek, with a sixth sense where Leslie’s dilemmas were concerned,
had called from another room where she had been rushing muslin window
curtains onto their rods:

“Leslie’s all full of secrets, Davey. He’s like a leaf on a tree that
rustles with laughter each time the wind tells it a new one. You and I
can’t hear the wind like Leslie can.”

Winslow, who had been painting in his attic-studio, overheard, and took
his pipe ruminatingly from where it hung cold, as usual, on the edge of
his lips.

Strange woman, that Bek of his.

Davey ruminated, too. Aw—the wind don’t talk. That was on a par with
dressing up a lead soldier and calling it an angel. A soldier was a
soldier. Oh—oh, the time Leslie had pinned the angel’s veil to Bek’s
skirt! No siree, wind don’t talk. And yet—come to think about it—if
you ran when you crossed a meadow and it zipped through your hair,
there was something quick and rushing in what it seemed to say. Swift,
almost uncapturable things. That must be why Leslie trembled. They were
not too swift for him to capture. Anyway, Bek knew more than anybody.
Except Henry.

“Yum-yum, the cherry pie was good!” Davey made a pyramid of the pits
and it tipped over onto the cloth, and he got spanked softly across the
back of the hand by Bek.

“Davey, fruit-stains don’t come out!”

“Let the youngster alone, Bek,” said Winslow, sitting back in a slim,
relaxed fashion he had, that made him a restful note in any room, and
feeling down into his side pocket that Bek kept replenished with a
brand of tobacco she ordered by catalogue. “Gad, but it’s good to be
tired and fed and warm all at the same time.”

Poor Winslow. Logically, now was the time to tell him about Steve.
After dinner, with the warmth of inner well-being to sustain him, would
be time enough to tell him. Poor dear....

“Davey, run upstairs, honey, in Bek’s room. There’s an express package
from Sears Roebuck on the table. Open it carefully. There’s two new
phonograph records in it. ‘Sweet Adeline’ and ‘Viennese Melodies.’”

“Bek, hand me my specs while you’re at the sideboard. They’re in the
silver pitcher.”

It was so hard to tell him now, with his _Chicago Tribune_, which came
on the afternoon mail, ready to be slid out of its folder, snapped
open, read. Well—later—upstairs in bed—perhaps.

“Winslow, hadn’t you better run upstairs and lay a fire in the alcove?
It gets chilly for Leslie.”

“Can’t Davey put a match to it while he’s up?”

“That child, handle fire!”

“Nonsense, he has the steadiest hand I’ve ever seen.”

“Never mind, I’ll run up. Have to go anyhow.”

“I’d have gone, if you’d have given me the chance.”

It was usually like that. Bek already up the stairs and down again,
drawing shades, turning on the dome of many-colored glass over the
dining-table (Paula’s installation), clearing the table, folding the
“silence cloth,” spreading a fringed red-and-green rep cover, and
placing a red-glass bowl of russet apples in the center.

There was Saturday’s pay roll to make out, what with two extra hands
at work on fencing in the Algahr addition. There was a note to be
met, that eked out exactly the last dollar of her bank balance, on
a seven-per-cent loan from a shark of a fellow named Joe Quirk, in
Middleton, who had advanced her five hundred toward the Algahr buy.
Such further addenda as bill-of-sale for two heifers to be drawn up.
Trade Hiram Igrotte load of small winter apples for two hauls of
cinders. Hog medicine. Mail blue sweater to Paula.

Heigh-ho! Davey and Leslie playing at lead soldiers in the corner. The
phonograph turning out the new ones, “Sweet Adeline” and “Viennese
Melodies.” How debonair, the last melody, in a stately Old World
fashion that suggested some of the Old Gentleman’s tales of the Vienna
he had glimpsed once as a boy. And then Winslow’s favorite, Alma
Gluck’s “In the Land of the Sky-Blue Water.” Bek, lower and lower over
her accounts at the roll-top desk in between the windows.

The light was bad. For fifteen years, Winslow had been warning her
she would ruin her eyes in that corner. Steve, when he was fourteen,
had once given her a student-lamp with a green shade for a Christmas
present. But that was up in Winslow’s studio in case he might need it
to browse around his dim store-closet among old canvases.

The unwieldiness of her pay roll, especially during harvest and
periods of extra labor, was pretty constantly worrisome. She hated to
have to borrow from her father, as she almost invariably did on those
quarterly months when notes of one sort or another were falling due.
“Land poor,” was the bugaboo phrase with which Bek had constantly to
flagellate herself, when her acquisitiveness for more and more acres
laid hold of her. Yet everyone, even Stevey, with his agricultural
phraseology acquired at college, had approved the Algahr buy.

“Looks like I’ll have to ask Father to meet me at the bank, after all,
Winslow. I was counting on Heffernan’s cash for those three calves, and
now he wants to trade in that last year’s Ford truck body. Of course,
we need it for light hauling, but that three hundred Phil borrowed last
week, and now that wire fencing, have put me in a hole.”

“Pity Phil couldn’t have gone to the Old Gentleman for his loan.”

“He must have had good reason, Winslow.”

“The very good reason, I suppose, of too high frequency.”

“Phil knows how he can get on Father’s nerves.”

“Well,” said Winslow and snapped his newspaper and slumped down more
deeply into his Morris chair, “see where Taft isn’t going to give in an
inch on the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The Roosevelt Big Stick is still
waving from behind the throne. Can’t you see those Roosevelt teeth
grin?”

“What’s a throne, Winslow?”

“A throne, my young brother-in-law, is the chair at present occupied by
a King called Edward who rules the greatest democracy in the world.”

“Winslow, don’t confuse the boy!”

“Teddy’s teeth! I know. I know. When I get big I’m going to be a
rough-rider and have the biggest—the biggest teeth in the world.”

“Fee, fie, foe, fum, with which to dig your grave.”

“Lookie, Leslie, my two front teeth are out in the middle for bigger
ones to come in. Let’s see yours!”

Leslie opened his mouth obediently. His long, narrow pointed teeth hung
almost like a young terrier’s and as beautifully white. When he showed
them, Bek, through the adding of accounts, turned her head.

Leslie’s mouth, when he opened it, constantly reminded Rebekka, with a
stab, of a girl named Lotta Hensel, who used to carry her father, who
was a house painter, his tin pail of hot lunch from the Hensel shanty
in South Centralia. Lotta had been a pretty thing. Sixteen. And under
Bek’s very eyes, had run screaming one day into the kitchen of the High
Ridge Farm, in flames. Some burning leaves had caught at the hem of her
skirt as she was passing along the road on her way to the Algahr house
which her father was painting. Bek beat at the flames, but Lotta, in
her terrible plight, only milled around faster, fanning them. Later
there was an emergency operation and skin-grafting in the dining room.
Bek stood by. There was no anesthetic, only a linen cloth laid across
the upper half of pretty Lotta’s face, as she lay stretched on the
table. At the first incision into her already boiling agony, Lotta’s
hand tightened on Bek’s. But her mouth, where it showed beneath the
linen mask, a pretty bud of a mouth, opened as sweetly as a child’s.
“It doesn’t hurt,” she said. And died.

There was something about Leslie’s mouth that reminded Bek perpetually
of Lotta when her lips below the mask had lifted into a little smile to
say that.

“Leslie has beautiful teeth, David. You see, his baby ones have never
come out. He still has his angel-teeth.”

“Angel-teeth,” repeated Leslie, who usually picked the noun out of a
phrase to repeat.

“I can spit through mine.”

“That’s horrid, Dave.”

“Father does.”

“Winslow, I’ve work to do here at the desk. Go along and take Davey and
Leslie up to bed.”

“I was just starting to read the Taft inaugural address, Bek. Fellow
ought to....”

“Henry was reading it to Father last night, but the new mare had colic
and Father said Trina was giving him the wrong bran and Father hollered
like anything and Henry went on reading out loud just like Father
wasn’t hollering.”

“I’ll wager Henry knows it by heart, by now.”

“I know what’s in it.”

“In what, Davey?”

“Pres-i-dent’s in-augural. We’re going to have a bigger navy. I’m going
to be a sailor. Teddy wasn’t fat like Taft, was he, Bek?”

“No. Come. Winslow must read. Bek’ll take you and Leslie up to bed.”

“What if Mother forgets my little ewe lamb? Once Mother forgot to let
in Sofia and Sofia froze her foot.”

“Won’t you ever forget that, Davey? I’m sure, honey, in the millions of
Sofia’s ancestors, most of them born under the board walk that leads
from the house to the kitchen, that not a single pussy of them ever had
a frozen foot until that night Mother, for the first time, forgot.”

“But if Mother forgets again....”

“Mother won’t. Come, Leslie, and Mother will tell you for a good-night
story how the moon carries honey to the bees.”

“For Heaven’s sake, Bek,” cried Winslow in the key of having said it
countless times before, “get it right. The _bees_ carry honey to the
_moon_.”

“Of course. Mother meant that, Leslie. Oh, Winslow, you are so much
better at tales than I am. Leslie would rather be put to bed by you.”

“All right if——”

“Oh, never mind. Come, Davey. You skip on up to your room and Bek will
be there in time to tuck you in.”

“Bek, I can recite the preamble of the Constitution: We, the people of
the United States, in order....”

“For the love of Heaven, muzzle that child, will you Your brother Henry
is going to make a gibbering encyclopedia out of him before he’s seven.”

“... in order to form a more perfect union.”

“Come, Davey.”

“The moon,” said Leslie trailing after—“honey—to—the—moon.”

“You see, Bek,” said David, clamping each small square foot on the
stair as he toiled up after, “you see, he’s such a little ewe-lamb,
and if such a little ewe gets thirsty and there’s no one to give him a
drink....”

“Muzzle that kid,” said Winslow, hooking his pipe into the corner of
his mouth and stretching out comfortably on the dining-room sofa with
his _Tribune_, “s’pose a fellow ought to read the inaugural speech—dry
as dust——”

“The bees don’t neither carry honey to the moon, Bek. Now the way a bee
makes honey is this....”

“Muzzle that kid!” roared Winslow, ramming his right ear into a cushion
and jamming another on top of his left.


FOOTNOTES:

[4] The morning of the afternoon upon which my brother was to press a
button from Washington that officially put into motion the transfer
that marked the formal beginnings of the Philippine Free State, I found
him lying asleep in his study where he had left orders no one was to
be admitted but me. He looked drawn from the rigors of his epochal
Congressional address but otherwise strangely the boy. It may have been
his position in sleep. One knee drawn up under his chin and the back of
his hand curled against his neck—as I remembered him a hundred times in
childhood. For a fleeting instant it seemed to me that all the terrific
present fell away from us, and there he lay up in Stevey’s room—asleep
on the balsam mattress....

[5] My brother Davey used to ride my ironing-board beating his small
heels and dancing up and down as he sat astride. Flibberty-jibbeting,
he called it, for some mysterious reason of childhood. Friends who saw
this home-made device in my kitchen, advised me to have it patented.
Later, when reverses struck us and when I saw its counterpart become
a general commodity, I had reason to regret I had not capitalized
the little idea before others got in ahead of me and made my device
worthless.

[6] I know that there were those who thought I spoiled Winslow. Brother
Phil used to twit me about it good humoredly. If I did, it was to
try and repay the measure of happiness he brought me. Diametrically
opposed as we were in temperament, it was that very antithesis that
apparently brought us together. In all the years of our lives together,
up to the very hour of his death, I can truthfully say that it was
his fineness, his more delicate discernments, his dear unobtrusive
co-operation that brought me the more conspicuous success of the two.
As the brother-in-law of the President of the United States, and the
husband of a woman whose activities were destined to be more or less
conspicuous, Winslow never forfeited one of his splendid qualities to
those rather spectacular and at the same time enormously difficult
conditions. Neither did he ever avail himself of any largesse of
favor which might have come to him because of my brother. He sought
no favors. He asked precedence over no man. An artist of parts was my
husband, whose work, in my opinion, never won the wide approval its
gossamer beauty deserved. It was as a revered father, a beloved and
respected husband, that he was to come into his own. The day of his
death, the greater part of the light of the world went out for me.

[7] ... I was never able to take those differences of taste seriously
which accept the antimacassar in one generation and ridicule it in the
next. As I used to say to my daughter Paula, who before she became
State Superintendent of Schools had a small modernistic gift-shop
of her own in Cleveland, a good thought for anyone to hold, who was
over-impressed by the rightness of his own time as over and above all
other times, was Omar Khayyam’s salty old observation that tomorrow we
may be with yesterday’s seven thousand years. I often wonder to what
appalling extent my clear-eyed Paula must think me the old fogey.

[8] David never lost his childish fancy for my cookery. I recall
once, the second year of his first term as Governor, his visiting
the International Food Show, in the days before the general use of
dehydrated vegetables. There he stood before my booth where I was
demonstrating, in the name of this great food-revolution in which it
was my privilege to act as pioneer, and with cameras clicking upon him,
shamelessly devoured three portions of my dehydrated hominy prepared in
a fireless cooking-range and served piping-hot under molasses cubes.

[9] My brother Henry, never too reverent, used solemnly to recite
the rosary over my hominy. I can hear him now ... impaling with his
fork, to the rhythm of “each bead a pearl, each pearl a prayer.” Dear
Henry—simple spirit. Great spirit.




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Five_


It was snug up where David slept. Bek’s covers were nicer to snuggle
into than the ones in the House on Sycamore Street. Chiefly because
Bek used quilts that an old farmer-woman over just beyond Cottage
Corner made with spud-like fingers out of the choice cotton and percale
scrappage of a county of attics. Blues and reds and grays and oyster
whites. There was one, Davey’s favorite, with a border that looked like
rows of intently listening rabbits’ ears. In Bek’s attic, it smelled
like calico as you tear it. Clean lint of the loom. There was a window
set in a slant of ceiling and sometimes it was entirely filled with
moon that made everything white except the shadows and the school
pennants that Steve had nailed up against the slopes of wall.

There was a moon tonight. He had a toothache. He often did when he came
up almost full, one of his cheeks bulging and making him lopsided. It
was nice to be tucked in bed at Bek’s under quilts that did not scratch
like the gray blankets in the House on Sycamore Street.

When blankets got old, sick ewes liked them. If a ewe-lamb got
sick, a very baby one, and you didn’t give it warm milk out of a
nursing-bottle, it died.

“Poor e-w-e. E-w-e. Y-o-u. Funny. How could you always know which of
the two meant? If you said, ‘You go downstairs,’ it couldn’t mean
e-w-e. But if you said, ‘poor e-w-e,’ then which you? E-w-e or y-o-u?
Henry would know even that.”

Haw, Leslie thought the bees carry honey up to the moon to make it
clear. Haw!

“Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord, my soul to keep. If I
should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. God bless
Mother ’n’ Father ’n’ Henry ’n’ Bek ’n’ Leslie ’n’ Winslow ’n’ Phil ’n’
Emma ’n’ Clara ’n’ Jacob ’n’ Hallie ’n’ ewes ’n’ Pete McNall ’n’ the
in-laws ’n’ nieces ’n’ nephews ’n’ Teddy and let me go to see him march
when he comes back from Africa ’n’ make Mother remember to feed the ewe
’n’ God bless me for not swiping Henry’s coon-skin cap for my tommyhawk
and bless we, the people of the United States in order to form a more
perfect union——we——the——people——of the United States, in——order——”

       *       *       *       *       *

Down in Leslie’s room it was moonlight, too. It was not really a room,
but a sort of alcove that adjoined Bek’s and Winslow’s so that the
moonlight flowed in from their room.

That was exactly the reason of the alcove. Because it had no windows.
Sometimes Leslie walked in his sleep. There were bars across the window
in the big room.

The moonlight lay in a long patch. To Leslie, in bed it was like a
river. Of light. It fascinated him as things that gleamed always did.
He sat up in bed to feel the sway of its bright tide.

Leslie had a song. It went something like “Evoe! Evoe! Evoe!” His
mother had attempted to teach him ballads, tried and true, but this one
was Leslie’s own. A little chant that he always sang with his long,
white eye lids closed. Henry, who knew his self-taught Greek, was wont
to observe with mock manner of pious rebuke, that there was something
Bacchanalian about Leslie’s choice of lyric outburst. “Evoe! Evoe!” The
call of Greek youth....

That last was enough for Bek. “Sing your song, Leslie. The song of the
Greek youths.”

Leslie, with the droop of his long, pale lids: “Evoe! Evoe! Evoe!”

“Go to it, Leslie! Vine leaves in your hair.”

“Don’t tease Leslie, Henry. It’s the perpetual call of youth in Leslie.”

Later, after she had come upon Stevey that first time behind the Cider
Mill, Bek had cause to feel her flesh crawl at that song of Leslie’s.
“Evoe, Mother!” he had shouted to her.

“Evoe! Evoe!” sang Leslie in bed, to the swinging tide of the
moonlight. The bright tide down which he could feel himself riding in a
skiff made out of a bed. “Evoe! Evoe!” The humming of voices from the
big room was disturbing. One of them a harsh, man’s voice, that split.

       *       *       *       *       *

The humming of the voices was Rebekka’s and Winslow’s. Winslow was
lying rigid in bed, with the flanges of his nose quite green, and
Rebekka had the light on and was throwing an extra blanket, which
she had to stand on a chair to drag down from a closet shelf, on top
of him, and finally against his continued shudderings, his corduroy
jacket, with the strings of his tobacco-pouch dangling out of the
pocket.

“Making yourself sick isn’t going to help matters. I suppose I
shouldn’t have told you, but there are some things I haven’t the right
to carry alone. Besides, he will be home tomorrow.”

“I won’t have it!” said Winslow, through teeth that shuddered. “Damn
him!”

“Scarcely the most helpful way to set about getting Steve out of
this—mess.”

“I won’t have it!” said Winslow, and began to cry quite weakly against
the pillow; and along his brow and the backs of his hands, the
tallow-colored, moist pallor sprang out, and beads of moisture, in the
weakening fashion that Bek dreaded.

“It’s no wonder,” said Bek, standing surveying him and wanting to keep
her voice cold through her rising concern for him—“it’s no wonder I
carry everything alone sooner than go through this sort of thing with
you.”

“Young pup, he’ll not drag his family name into the dirt.”

“He will, unless you treat this matter like a problem instead of a
calamity.”

“I won’t have it!” cried Winslow, and beat with his hands into the
pillows and sobbed like a baby.

“It’s not a matter of what you’ll have. It’s a matter of what you’ve
got to face.”

“There’s something you’re holding back. There’s something more to it
than just withdrawing him from college at the dean’s suggestion because
he’s loafing. Boys don’t get fired for such small-fry offenses. There’s
been something more behind it right along.”

Rigid at his bedside, Bek bit her lips with the truth of this. But to
tell Winslow all the facts of his homecoming, she realized now, was as
impossible as it had been to tell him the truth of the hurried decision
to send him away.

This must apparently remain her fight and Steve’s. She had meant to
tell Winslow the why; the whole miserable why of the going and the
coming of Steve; of the wretched reason of her sudden determination to
send him to State Agricultural; of that first time behind the mill—that
second—third, fourth time. The deceits. The deceptions. She had meant
to tell him all, now that Steve was coming home, his secret pledges
to her shattered.... Winslow must fight the fight with her and Steve
now.... Winslow must be taught a quality of mercy and wisdom toward
his boy ... who needed him.

“I’m cold.”

Winslow must—must meet this with her——

“I’m getting a chill.... Damn young pup—he’ll not drag our name in
dirt.”

“Winslow, you mustn’t get yourself into a state. Are you really cold?
Or just nervous? You don’t want the hot-water bottle?”

“Young puppy!” sobbed Winslow. “Over indulged. Gentleman farmer. Never
quite understood it all, anyhow. No son of mine comes home suspended
from college for loafing ... young puppy ... won’t have it. I’m getting
a chill.”

“Hot-water bottle, Winslow?”

He was sure not to want it or to endure it, once it was there, but his
silence meant acquiescence to her going for it. That meant padding down
through the dark, cold hallways, and the slow performance of waiting
for the water to boil in the black iron kettle.

“If it will make you feel better, Winslow, I’ll go down and heat water.”

“Amos Milliken,” said Winslow, from his pillow of misery.

That was a localism that needed no interpretation to a Schuyler. Emma
Schuyler’s father-in-law, Amos Milliken, had long since placed the
flavor of his hospitality in local ill-repute, by his habit of asking
a guest, “Have a cigar if I go upstairs and get you one?” instead of
passing around the box of his own excellent brand that always reposed
in the top sideboard-drawer.

It was just as well, though, not to act on Winslow’s jab of a reply.
It was only his nervous ague. She had first beheld him in the grip
of it in the days of their engagement, during a quarrel that had to
do with some trivial misunderstanding over the time and place of an
appointment.

High-strung! To Bek, whose nerves seemed to run through her body
with serenity of veins through marble; there was a preciousness to
Winslow. Standing there in her plain, white-muslin nightgown, vigorous,
deep-fleshed; her strong, brown hair, that even her own children seldom
saw down, hung in two plaits that were almost too enormous for beauty.

There _was_ something Christ-like to Winslow’s face as it pressed into
the pillow that way, with the profile ground against it in pain.

A picture of her father on the night he had screamed and raved about
the house when she announced her engagement, rose before Bek.

“You’ll get nothing out of a Renchler! It’s not in them to give.
They’re takers. His father before him would take a favor from you
like it was coming to him; And the dam’-fool part of it is he got the
whole town to thinking it was coming to him. Once a Renchler always a
Renchler. The whole tribe of them. Pretty folks. But not in them to
earn a penny or keep it, except when they marry money and catering
wives. I know the Renchlers. Mark my word, Winslow Renchler will ride a
girl like you to death. He’s a taker.”

Was Winslow riding her to death? Not while the rich flow of her
sympathies could well out to him, as he lay there, shivering of
the ague of nervousness. Theoretically perhaps, Bek was the giver.
Actually, though, she would have clawed for him; fought for the
qualities in him that were weaker than she was. There was pain in
loving like that. And fierceness and a certain glory. And, strangely
enough, reward.

“Damned young puppy!” sobbed Winslow again and again and again.... “I
won’t have it!”

“I’ll go down and heat you the water, Winslow,” said Bek in a
lusterless tone. “You _are_ chilled.”

Downstairs, in her enormous kitchen, spick, span, clean and cold,
putting match to the gas-stove to which she could never become quite
accustomed, playing its knobs as you would the stops of an organ, and
then standing by to watch the water come to a reluctant boil, a lump of
misery lodged itself in Bek’s throat.

Here she was, confronted with what must surely be one of the grim
climaxes of her life. Surely, surely, none grimmer could await her.
Leslie up there swinging himself softly to sleep on “Evoe! Evoe!” while
to that rather unearthly rhythm, downstairs in the chilled kitchen,
needing Winslow if she was ever to need him, she stood alone, faced
with the homecoming of a seventeen-year-old inebriate son. Here she
stood, as usual, administering solace to the husband who should have
been administering solace to her!

How unreal! Steve, who had grown, like a streak, from his adolescence
into a young-manhood that delighted her. A curious combination of his
Grandfather Schuyler and of Winslow. There was a threat of fine fettle
to Steve, which made his profile dance like a blooded horse about to
leave his post. A poet, or a peasant, or both. And now this.

Stevey must be helped. Cured. Men were. There was George Birkaway.
Carrie Birkaway used to drop something into his coffee. For five years
before his death, George had not touched a drop. Backs of magazines
were full of remedies. Stevey must be helped. There was yet time.
He must be made to have the power to resist. And without Winslow’s
knowing. Winslow was too high-strung. Without anyone’s knowing.

They must again fight it out alone. The Old Gentleman—why, the Old
Gentleman might have a stroke if he knew. Stevey must promise—Stevey
must promise—on Davey’s life! For Davey’s sake!

How good, how strangely comforting, the consciousness of the little nub
of him up there asleep in Stevey’s room. How good....

       *       *       *       *       *

After a while, the shining tide began to slow—drowsily—“Evoe! Evoe”
sang Leslie to himself, and singing it, dropped off to sleep.

       *       *       *       *       *

The hot-water bag, sure enough, lay unapplied on the floor when Winslow
finally dropped off to sleep with his head resting on the upper part
of Bek’s firm arm as she lay beside him, his hair damp and smoothed
backward in long strokes of Bek’s fingers, even after he slept.

What to be done? Repeated drunkenness, the letter had said.
Solitary-drinking vice, that, unless he left college at once, must soon
leak out among his colleagues. Solitary drunkard. It spread black wings
over all the things that mattered. And suddenly they were not mattering
at all. And they must! There was so much to be done. Tomorrow’s
workaday was spinning toward. Everything must matter as usual, if one
was to carry on. That broken plowshare-blade to be shipped back to the
factory for repair. Rock salt for pasture. Father to be broached at the
bank tomorrow for a loan.

Old Jessup’s eyes. They had turned at her like the reproachful eyes of
a dog that had served her well. Poor Jessup!

Emma’s Claire needed a talking-to. She had worrisome ways with her
mother. Sometimes a vagrant thought flashed through Bek’s mind. Claire
and Stevey. The eyes of those two cousins when they were together.
Nobody in the world had noticed except Bek. A disturbing thought that
never got more than half-born before she banished it.

Father must be got at before ten in the morning at the bank. If only
Phil weren’t needing that loan. Why couldn’t he have borrowed directly
from the bank, instead of crippling her this way? Three heifers due
Thursday by shipment from Tom Groady’s place. Groady must wait, now
that Phil had horned in for this loan. Foolish of her to have mentioned
Phil’s loan to Winslow. Winslow hated the perpetual financial cross
currents. And tomorrow Stevey. Oh, Stevey, how could you? All these
weeks of reassurance about him, and now the secret terror lifting its
head again. Oh, Stevey! She wanted to cry. She wanted Winslow to hold
out his arms that she might creep into them. Instead, her arms were
held out to him as he lay there asleep with his head on the pillow of
her shoulder.

But good, at least, to feel up there in the room under the rafters the
somehow reliable little old nub of Davey.

His being there, absurdly enough, gave a stability to the large white
night that was spinning tomorrow relentlessly toward.

The room was so bright. It’s shininess finally hypnotized her to sleep.

       *       *       *       *       *

How bright! Davey waking into it, leaped up with a sense of broad
daylight. It was still only moonlight, except that the old fellow,
with his slightly swollen cheek, had moved entirely out of the window.
Davey, in his flannelette night-drawers that fastened about the waist
with large bone buttons, sitting up in bed, gouged his eyes with his
fists. Sense of awakening to something not right. What if Mother had
forgotten! What if they had let the fire in the range go out. The ewe
with the blue eyes and a black slit down their middle.

By day and to the routine doings of people about, there had even been
a wrench about it. But now, in the still white drown of a moonlit
three-o’clock-of-a-morning, what had seemed fairly all right by day,
was dreadfully all wrong.

The little old thing in its blanket beside the stove had pulled at
his finger as if it had been the teat of a mother lamb. That little
old thing had looked up so and trusted Davey, sitting up there in his
cotton-flannel night-drawers, with the moonlight flooding over him, and
Davey had not gone back. But Bek had wanted him. That made it hard.
Being wanted by two people not in the same place. Ewe-lamb wasn’t
really a person, but the ewe wanted, just the same. And Bek was so big.
In a world full of big things, Bek was almost the biggest. Only Davey
and the ewe were small. And the ewe was smaller than Davey, and the ewe
trusted David.

Up through the window there was only a slant of sky, the color of
a grape. Cold. Terribly clear. If one could run home and back. Bek
needn’t know. The ewe-lamb had pulled at your finger so!

How cold it was! The cutting cold of a March that comes raw. It made
David shiver as he drew on his pants and almost with the same gesture
snapped down the little suspenders over his flesh. There was no time
for shoes and stockings, besides, shoes squeaked. In the _Book of
General Information_ on his mother’s kitchen shelf, from which Trina
could laboriously read, you took the squeak out of shoes by standing
them in a half inch of water overnight. “I know how to take the squeak
out of shoe-es. I know how to take the squeak out of my shoes.” It
helped to chant foolishly, against a rising tide of fear. One leg over
the sill. Two.

Many a time he had slid the galvanized rain spout that led from Bek’s
second-story room down into a black-mouthed barrel beside the porch.
From the third story, it was another and steeper matter. Ouch! His body
made a soft rush going down and the snag of tin that he struck took a
bit of the flesh too. Almost the only sounds, that tiny rush and tiny
tear, in this great white night that slept with one eye blazing open.
It was almost like a sun, that lopsided moon. It made the shadows short
and grotesque and a little frightening.

Something made a neighing sound that caused Davey to crouch for a
moment beside the rain-barrel. He knew that neigh. It was Flora, the
right gray mare of Bek’s huge plow-team. Except that in the white
night, the curious inverted noonday, it smote him with the strange
terror of unreality. The sound that by day made the world seem small
and friendly, was by night a thin cry of the mystery of all beasts.

Out across the pasture, toward the creek, there were almost no shadows.
Just the greenish grayness and the light-drenched silence. It made
Davey’s heart shy back so that he plunged his hands into his pockets,
and once out of earshot of the house, set up whistling. A pretentious
kind of whistling, mostly breath.

How good it was, even with scare at the pit of you, to be going to the
ewe-lamb, and then back to Bek, too. All that you had to do if you had
to choose between doing two things, was to do both of them.

It wasn’t fair to quit the ewe. It wasn’t fair to quit Bek. Now you
weren’t quitting either of them.

Sometimes something crackled and made him scurry.

There was a song Jessup was always singing as he mended harness in the
barn.

Ole Black Joe. Ole Black Joe.

There was something out there! Out there where the ghostly pale meadows
ran into the grape-colored sky. There was something. A cow?

  “I’m coming, I’m coming,
  For my head is bending low;
  I hear their gentle voices calling,
            ‘Old Black Joe!’”

Bek’s cows slept in rows of long, clean stalls. Jessup’s cow? But
Jessup had no cow. Tarkington’s stray cow? Nobody’s cow was that tall!
It was hard to continue going toward it, with the tongue a stiff thing
in one’s mouth, and the throat so dry it would not swallow.

“Ole Black Joe.” You couldn’t sing with a throat that was parched with
terror. You only squeaked like something rusty, “Ole Black Joe....”

Here, now, was the creek to be crossed. At night, somehow, it became
a terrifying, bottomless divide, that by day trilled with water that
showed the stones it ran over and slid past the brilliant flanks of
minnows.

It was hard not to cry, and most difficult of all not to run back. That
something on the horizon, that object too tall to be a cow, was coming
toward him! Splash! The water came running up about the legs, greedily.
Sucking in a way it never did during the day. Pulling downward in a way
that terrified. Plunge, plunge went David’s knees, so that he came out
drenched to the waist, this time, shivering. And there was the thing
now almost upon him.

“Bek! Henry! Mother! Go way, you. Big Thing!” sobbed Davey, and began
to cry, and back toward the creek. “Go way,” screamed Davey and because
to really turn back was unthinkable, threw up his arm across his eyes.
Henry would not be afraid. Nor Bek. Mother might. If Mother might be
afraid, it was not wrong to be afraid. Sur-ren-der, in the histories
Henry read from, meant something like afraid. No. Lee surrendered.
There was a colored picture of his surrendering in Henry’s book, called
_General Lee_. Lee surrendered. But that wasn’t that kind of being
afraid. Of just a thing. A thing in the moonlight. One didn’t surrender
to things in the moonlight.

“Go way, you!” screamed Dave, and batted his eyes and plunged forward,
so that suddenly the thing swung into outline. An outline that suddenly
sent him limp as a bag, of relief.

The thing was a threshing-machine. Many a time his bare legs had kicked
its flanks. He gave it a punch as he passed. Corn runts began in rows
now, brittle against his feet, and then a bit of fallow land with
the turned earth in frozen little peaks that bit against his soles.
Jessup’s place came up over a ridge, huddling for all the world like an
old hen in her shoulders. That must be Jessup’s old rooster Cheetie,
who would never sleep under roof, perched on top of the hen-house like
a wart against the sky.

Dave’s six-year-old world, moonlit, flowing there under the feel of his
toes. Its reassuring familiarity warmed him clear into his being, like
a toddy going down when he had a cold. Lickity-split! He ran and spun
the fields back from under him. The gnarled old veteran fields lashed
by March that seemed to be resting from their day-by-day burden of the
toiling of the men who tilled their faces.

They smelled deeply. Known smells that you could rub between your
fingers in a nub of dirt. That was part of the warmth. The great
sleeping world that milled and tilled so by day, asleep and docile,
with its great bosom swept with moonlight.

When you were no longer frightened, and sick with the impulse of
surrender, it was good to be spinning through their March starkness on
that mission, between the ewe-lamb who needed you, and Bek who wanted
you.

The kitchen window opened from the outside, so that just by shinnying
up a tin water-spout, balancing tiptoe on the sill, and shoving down
the upper pane by the ends of your straining fingers, in you were! It
was dark inside, not even a red circle showed around the stove lid.
Mother _had_ forgotten! Trina had failed! No, Mother hadn’t forgotten.
It was just her way of thinking that with the little iota of red
coals over in the corner, there would be enough heat for the ewe. The
nickel-plated lifter in the stove-lid, you could raise noiselessly and
place on one end of the range. That threw the kitchen into faint glow.
Just a handful of red coals, supposed to be enough for one ewe.

The kitchen in the House on Sycamore Street was the oldest room in the
house. Full of sags. Sags that might almost have been scoured in. Two
white-pine wood tables that sagged and smelled perpetually cool and
sudsy. Mathilda ground into them with scrub-brush in grand semicircular
smears. A scrubbed floor that sagged. A safe with a perforated-tin
front, that sagged. Even the sheet of metal around the range, scoured
tin that shone, sagged. A scrubbed, scoured, spotless kitchen, with
everything turned to the wall, nights. And there, in a chip basket
beside the range, in its blanket, tiny thing, the ewe-lamb. With its
snout thrust up.[10]

There was milk in the pantry in a five-gallon pail. It was about the
same height as David. That made it difficult to tilt. The bottom made
a great clanging sound as it left the floor. What if it should awaken
Mother or Father? Or Henry, whose room was over the pantry, and who,
winter and summer, slept with his cot drawn up to the window and his
pillow on the sill so that his head was out-of-doors.

It was easier to find a dipper, stealthily, to save clatter, scoop down
into the pail and heat the bit of milk. Over the sink, so that he had
to climb, was the bottle, with the rubber nipple.

Funny ewe-lamb. Without opening its eyes, it sucked it all down, in
gurgles. Grateful, sleepy darling gurgles. The pulling against the
rubber nipple. It was like the thing that made the creek move. And the
lilac-bush to bloom. And worms to ooze up in the lower pasture after
rain. Gosh. Little thing. Little old thing. In a world of big things,
it was the littlest old thing.... “Getty back there. To bed. ’Nuff, I
said. Getty back! ’Night, you!”

Scampering back, up hillock, down hillock, lickety-split, over the
fallen tree-trunk that spanned a small ditch, up hill, down, around,
splash!—the already wet trousers sopping in more water—zither—through
cinder-paths. In less than twenty-five minutes, the return was
accomplished.

It was deliciously good to be in bed again under the quilt that was
gay with rabbits’ ears, and with the moonlight, now receding, leaving
enormous dark splotches in the room. Good, except that almost before
he could sigh out with the satisfaction of it, plomp! sleep was a
bottomless pit into which he had walked, open eyed.

Not so Henry, who, up in his window, cold pipe lax on his lips, had
seen Davey come and Davey go. Such a strangely beautiful steel-blue
night as this would not let a body sleep, for pondering and pondering
on a bit of everything and nothing in particular.


FOOTNOTES:

[10] I think we had the most beautiful kitchen in the world in the
House on Sycamore Street. Old Trina used to tell us how the Welsh love
their kitchens. Normandy is filled with quaint, curtained, shining
kitchens after every woman’s heart. The kitchen plays no mean part as
the social center in the entire history of civilization. To the Dutch
and the Danes, it is still literally the nucleus of the home.

Our kitchen was that. Father originally built a house of one room.
A kitchen-living-bedroom. It ran, of course, the width and length
of the building. A long, low room, with oak rafters and an open
fireplace with a spit. Later, when the original room was surrounded and
surmounted by more rooms, the enormous fireplace was fashioned into a
bricked-in range. And what a range! It had a hot breath that warmed
through the fine thick walls. It could roar with a draught the like
of which I have never seen since. In winter, even after the house had
grown to proportions sufficient to comfortably house a family of five
youngsters, that range attracted us like a great flame all the little
moths. We toasted corn over its red caves. Baked yams and marshmallows
in its fierce oven. Dried our snow-clogged clothing before its Sahara
breath. Usually, there was a baby lamb or an ailing calf or a cat with
a leg in a splint in a chip basket beside this astonishingly maternal
stove.

It was a more beautiful kitchen than Washington Irving’s. It had
mullioned windows that opened outward. In summer, they were grown over
with columbine, that had to be kept clipped in order to allow opening
them. There were two long white-pine tables in our kitchen, big enough
to seat eight. On a bench, beside one, was a wooden bucket, with a
dipper gourd, filled with the coolest cistern-water in the county. A
second bucket was filled with well-water. Softer, for cooking. How
well I recall the festoons of peppers. The hearth-broom made out of
the left wing of a rooster. The great crocks of the various greases my
mother rendered from goose and hen and parts of the hog. There was a
wooden box in one of the window-sills stocked with twists of newspaper.
Firelighters. A rifle, sans barrel, and with a broken cock, said to
have belonged to Daniel Beinville, hung over the door.

My mother’s pleasant mania for starched ruffles asserted itself
everywhere. Along the shelves of the safe. Along the muslin curtains
in the sweet old mullioned windows. We used to tease her about these
ruffles. Yes, there was a God Bless Our Home sampler over the cupboard
door, and a small white ruffle along the shelf that bore it. And a
clock, mahogany, with a nosegay painted on its glass door. This clock
may be seen in the American Institute in Baltimore. Every Schuyler of
us has reason to remember this kitchen with affection.




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Six_


It was one of those days like Christmas or Washington’s Birthday, or
Father’s birthday, or Fourth of July, or April Fool. One of those
particularly nice days with an underlying current of events to it.

First, Stevey was coming home from Agricultural. “For good,” Claire had
said and kissed Davey square on the lips and hugged him until his cap
came off. Then there was the something pending about Henry. Henry, it
seemed, could have had celluloid buttons, with his picture on, that you
wore on the visor of your cap. “Vote for Henry Schuyler.”

Phil was coming in on the four-twenty-eight, too, and Clara from St.
Louis, but this time without Sam or the children.

But it meant meeting three trains practically at a scoop, because they
all arrived within three hours. The Old Gentleman never missed being
the first to welcome home a Schuyler.

Phil’s wife Rita always declared that her father-in-law’s basket
phaeton, a dirty affair much maligned by the family, which you could
see by craning your neck, as the Springfield train drew into Centralia,
was as much a part of the landscape as the Capitol dome was to
Washington.

The family was given to exchanging amused persiflage with one another,
and suggesting to the Old Gentleman, from time to time, that he
had better will over the phaeton to the State Museum as a relic of
pre-Civil-War transportation.

The Old Gentleman lived under a barrage of winks and nods between his
children. He moved calmly among them, oftentimes mimicking their very
gestures with his sly old eyes.

David liked meeting trains with his father. They swooped in
magnificent, whizzing reality from the world that lay flat and
inanimate in words against the pages of Henry’s books. Trains dashed
into Centralia depot that must have come from Gettysburg where Lincoln
made the speech. And from the shores of the Delaware that Washington
crossed. Why, there was a railroad called the Chesapeake and Ohio.
Chesapeake! Captain Lawrence cried “Don’t give up the ship” on board
the _Chesapeake_. There was a picture of the frigate _Chesapeake_, in
colors, in one of Henry’s books.

Yes, it was fine meeting trains. And the depot, a rather grimy, small,
red-brick affair, was filled with that intangible and tickling odor
of travel. The smell of leather and coal-smoke and pot-bellied stove,
red-hot. The baggage and shipping rooms, stacked with crates and bales,
trunks and milk-cans and egg-cartons and plow-shares and dynamos and
pumps and bicycles boarded up for travel along with shipments of
Centralia’s not inconsiderable exportations of hardware from the Tools
Works, were jammed with the further interest of reading labels. And
addresses. Braunson Hardware Company, Terre Haute, Indiana. Mr. Silas
Dikey, Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Firbers Mill, Trenton, New Jersey.
United States Shipping Company, West Street, New York. It made one
tingle with a sense of the outside world. Alton, Missouri. Vesey
Street, New York.

Bob Fenton, the baggage-master, who had one eye and a black-cloth flap
for the other, gave David gummed labels, which could be spat upon and
pasted against all sorts of surfaces. Fragile. Hold. Live Stock. Eggs.
Baltimore and Ohio. Farmers Shipping Union. Glass. This Side Up.

There was sure to be talk as easy as the jangle of change in a pocket,
around the depot. Talk that ran like this:

“Hi, Schuyler! Got them two red heifers up at Seely’s place if you’n’
Miss Bek want to drive over tomorrow ’n’ have a look. Hi, Schuyler,
who’s coming home today? Hi, trade you that youngster o’ yourn for a
red calf. Hi, Schuyler, see that new breed of hogs Lederman is showing
up t’fair? White belly-bands. Look good. Wal, sir, see where they’re
mentioning Henry hereabouts for District Attorney. He’s got my vote.”

A vote was something you couldn’t see. People kept talking about them
and offering to give them, but nothing ever seemed to change hands.
A vote was something that was not something in your hand. Just the
same, if Henry wanted them, he could have them. Henry, who had a head
that was almost the shape of the bottom of a foot and a bald, shiny
spot where hair should have been, but hair that grew down the sides of
his temples into two oblongs on the sides of his cheeks, where hair
should not have been, and the very nicest eyes in the world that smiled
and did things that most people did with their mouths; it was highly
desirable that Henry should have all the votes in the world.

Even on the way to the depot, rumbling along in the Old Gentleman’s
phaeton, the way was strewn, from the sidewalk and from passing
vehicles.

“Hi, Mr. Schuyler. See to it that boy of yourn runs this time. The
state needs his kind. Hi. Howdy. Hi. Somebody acomin’ home, I take it?”

The Schuylers were rallying for conclave all right. It was fun rumbling
up to the depot with the Old Gentleman. It was in the days before his
self-importance had shrunk to a kernel. Was in the days when the dirty
old phaeton was only a badge of his unassailable well-being like a rich
man’s shabby hat.

Down Second Street toward the depot was the most familiar ride in the
world. When Davey was five, and the Old Gentleman dozed at the reins,
not infrequent with him, the small boy held them importantly. Not but
what every mare that the Old Gentleman ever drove knew its somnolent,
unguarded way through the streets of Centralia. Even when the
automobile had practically nosed out horse traffic, the Old Gentleman’s
mare and phaeton had a sort of right of way.

There was a flat building going up on Second Street. The first in town.
A square, two-story, two-family affair of concrete. A “St. Louis flat.”
The Old Gentleman could never pass it without clucking his disgust.

Further along, though, the street relapsed. The Blue Bird Lunch Room.
The Red Trunk Dry Goods Company. Binswanger’s Hardware. Hot Lunch.
The White Kitchen. Gents’ Furnishings. Buddy’s Cut-Rate Drug Store.
Co-Operative Mill Supply Company.

Beulah Kohn, who wore her left leg in a brace from meningitis, leaned
as usual across the picket fence of the dirt-colored frame house where
Mrs. Kohn kept a rooming house for mill workers.

“Hi, Mr. Schuyler!”

“Howdy, Beulah! Come out here and shake hands.”

“Now, Mr. Schuyler! ... you’ll hurt!” But out she came limping, while
the mare drew up, just as if this event did not take place every time
the Old Gentleman passed Beulah Kohn’s home. The Old Gentleman reserved
his trick, handshake for the very old, the very young, and the ailing.

You extended your hand. He took it gingerly by the tips of the fore
and little fingers, and then, with his free hand, came down whack
across the wrist of his victim, causing the bones to make a cracking
sound. The Old Gentleman’s delight in this was unfailing. Sometimes
children cried. Then he plied them with licorice. Beulah knew his
licorice-pocket, into which she dove immediately following this
habitual chastisement.

Rattly old phaeton. You could jump in and out while it was moving,
which David did all the way along.

Second Avenue, as it approached the depot, was myriad with interest.

“What does ‘Katy Flier’ mean, Father?”

“Katy flies, I reckon.”

“B and O,” began Davey, bursting for no apparent reason, as another
sign presented itself to his amiable gaze, into loud cacophony, and
beginning to direct an imaginary orchestra from standing position
in the phaeton, as he faced Jenny’s unexcited tail, “Bawleymore and
O-high-O! B and O. Yip! Yip!”

The Old Gentleman never minded. Sometimes David climbed up his flank as
he drove, balancing on his shoulders and shouting aloud as the little
panorama of his thoughts came tumbling.

The Old Gentleman never flecked an eye, or for that matter, heeded.

The train tracks cut through Centralia like a diagonal, bisecting a
rhomboid. Their grime kept the chestnut trees along Sycamore Street
gray. They grazed the red flank of the Five and Ten on High Street by
one foot. They skirted the edge of the Old Gentleman’s South Pasture
just remotely enough to have netted him not a penny when the railroad
was out franchise-buying.

It rushed into town like the proverbial lion.

It tore out of town like a howling hyena. Never was the somnolistic
tendency of a community more ruthlessly split to smithereens by the
bangs, the bleats, the bells, the puffings, and the backings of
steam-engines, than Centralia with the railroad trains across its very
face, as it were.

Siren-shrieks and plumes of smoke lay on its dead of night. Fee, fie,
foe, fum, snorted and rampaged one engine after another at the red
flank of the Five and Ten. Freight engines backed-and-forthed up and
down the center of Maple Street, baa-ing, moo-ing, and grunting with
cattle and freight cars. Fee, fie, foe, fum, I’ll blow and I’ll blow
’til I blow your house down. Where Maple Street intersected Second
Street, the railway’s gates were almost always down, Buick and Ford
delivery-wagons, farm-teams, buggies, roadsters and family-cars
waiting, and often, to save time, backing down and making détour around
the viaduct-way.

“Stop, Look and Listen” signs criss-crossed the streets of Centralia.
The local Democratic and Republican factions both had a Grade Crossing
Abolition plank. Nothing happened.

Centralia smelled with the railroad tracks that entered and intersected
her, and erected white crosses upon the scene of every grade-crossing
casualty.

Driving along Second Street, not only the Old Gentleman could detect
the first remote halloo of the incoming passenger train, but up went
old mare Jenny’s uncurried ears that were the shape of the perpetual
corner tied into the Old Gentleman’s handkerchief, and jerk went the
basket phaeton that was as full of creaks as of years.

Centralia met its incoming trains with a line of short-snouted
family-sedans and open Fords; occasionally the Milliken seven-passenger
Cadillac that belonged to Emma’s father-in-law, or the Howey
Pierce-Arrow, mixed in. They stood in motley line-up before a row of
what had once been hitching-posts.

The Old Gentleman’s phaeton and the yellow lorry from Dr. Spaeth’s
Sanatorium were usually the only relics of a horse-age. They waited
side by side in a little brick clearing opposite, where there were no
hitching-posts, and their horses wound necks.

Jenny knew her place all right, even when the Old Gentleman dozed,
edging herself and phaeton in beside the lorry, or where the lorry
usually stood. When David was along, even when he was so small that a
shake of Jenny’s neck jerked him forward by the reins, he drove her
quite grandly into the station, clucking at a great rate.

The Old Gentleman was not dozing today as he drove in. There was a
constant screwing noise he made with his tongue, spurring old Jenny
to uneven lopes; and above his square, white beard that hung like a
curtain, the humorous blue eyes, twenty-five years too young for their
setting, kept radiating. Phil’s wife was right. He was as indubitably
a part of the landscape as the rick-rack outline of the depot against
the stubble of corn-fields. In his hip-high reefer, jouncing along in
the old phaeton which creaked around him like a rusty ocean, he was an
institution for you! He was a silhouette unto himself, in reefer, round
cap bound in astrakhan, slightly mangy, in puttees, string-wound where
the tapes gave out.

“Old Gentleman’s quite a character,” someone or other was forever
saying.

“Hi! Howdy! Hi!” called the Old Gentleman, driving up.

“Hi! Hi! Ho! Howdy!” said the loiterers.

Almost simultaneously, Emma Milliken drove up in her father-in-law’s
car, a slick, night-blue affair of shine and snout, with a
nickle-plated Discobolus doing a lunge off the hood. Her
mother-in-law, Annie Milliken, occupied the rear seat, a sparse,
iron-gray woman, with a palsy-affliction that kept her head like a
flower on a stalk in a stiff breeze. Beside her, quite a beauty after
her blonde fashion, sat Claire, in a brown beaver toque and brown
beaver on her broad-cloth coat. Lalite and Kenneth Chipman, children of
Donald Chipman, barrister, next-door neighbors of the Milliken seniors,
were tucked into the collapsible chairs for the ride down to the depot.
They made a carful.

“Mother Milliken, there’s Gramp and Davey.”

Mrs. Milliken leaned her palsied head forward. “So it is. Your father
hadn’t ought to come down looking like that, Emma. ’Tain’t right. I
don’t see Mathilda.”

Emma wound down the glass window-pane of the car.

“Oh, dear! Your Gramp _does_ look a sight, Claire. How could he come
down to meet Phil and Stevey looking like that! Gramaw didn’t see him
leave the house looking like that, I’ll wager. Fath-er!”

The Old Gentleman shambled over, Davey off to the baggage-room, and
Jenny standing without so much as the reins wound around her whip stock.

“Father, come here. You do look a sight, dear.”

The Old Gentleman had never ceased to regard Emma, his sixth-born, as a
feast for even his sly old parental eyes. As a child, he had carted her
among the farmers and had even been known to stand her on the counter
of Fred Firpo’s bar and appraise her yellow, little-girl loveliness.

“She’s a good one, boys. My little Emma she’s a beauty! I’m right? Give
her a pretzel, Joe.”

Although it was Emma’s daughter Claire who was now considered the
family beauty, Emma herself still possessed a certain cabbage-rose
prettiness; and despite the fact that it had always been said that
Emma Schuyler did not know how to wear clothes, and was a natural-born
“slop,” she had realized enough to all her life affect velvet toques
to match her eyes, and when she remembered even now, she used a
gayly-painted rolling pin which hung in her bathroom, to ward off the
pads of fragrant, cream-colored flesh that threatened her shoulders and
upper arms.

“Father, Mother Milliken’s right. You _are_ a spectacle!”

It was rather futile of her to lean out of the car, tilt back his head,
and yank at his reefer-collar, particularly since little Lalite Chipman
was already at his reefer-pocket.

“Licorice, Gramp!”

“Please, Father, don’t give her any. She gets her teeth all full of the
horrid stuff.”

As if Emma herself, Emma’s Claire, and virtually every youngster of the
last four decades in Centralia had not, at one time or another, had
their milk-teeth blacked from the yield of those pockets.

“Gramp,” shouted Kenneth, who was nine and had the straight bangs of a
medieval saint, “give me a pretzel.”

“Guess which pocket,” cried the old man and struck his flanks.

“Both,” shouted the boy, and made a dive.

That tickled the Old Gentleman, who dove into a third pocket for more
lunch-counter loot.

“Please, Father, Mrs. Chipman won’t like it. There’s always tobacco in
that pocket. You’ll make Kenneth sick. Isn’t Mother coming down to meet
Phil?”

“Yes, Bek is driving her down.”

At just that moment, Bek drove around from the shipping-platform in a
Ford, with a hooded front and a delivery-body, onto which was loaded
a crate of Chester White hogs that she had just picked up from the
freight room. Seated beside her, in a little bonnet with a jet spray
and a cape with fitted shoulders, was Mathilda, her hands clasped
nervously over an empty shopping-bag of shiny black oilcloth.

David leaped the running-board before she brought the car to a short
stop beside the Milliken Cadillac.

“Bek, I c’n bound Ohio. Ohio is bounded on the west——”

“Davey, don’t hop a going car!”

“—by Indiana on the——”

“Look at Puppa!” cried Mathilda weakly and threw up both mittened hands
in a faint gesture, “And I laid out his brown pants on the bed.”

Emma and Claire had climbed out of their car.

“It’s a shame, Mother!” cried Emma. “I declare, Father, I wouldn’t come
down to meet a load of heifers looking like that. How do you think
Phil will feel stepping down off the express, with you looking this
way to meet him. There’s always plenty of Springfield and even Chicago
business-men on that train. And Stevey coming too. I declare, Mother,
I’d burn that phaeton, if I were you.”

“Puppa,” said Mathilda, a little tiredly, and a little helplessly, “I
laid everything out ... your cuffs with the buttons in——”

“Poppycock!” said Rebekka. “He looks all right. Let him be.”

The Old Gentleman made one of his sly, screwing noises with his tongue
and poked an elbow into his wife’s hip bone, where the cape neatly
covered it.

“I’ll dress up, ’Tilda, when we have an Attorney General in the family.
I’m right?”

“Does Henry know, Father,” said Rebekka, “that you sounded the
ram’s-horn for conclave about his candidacy? He’ll be a mad hatter.”

“What he don’t know don’t hurt him until he sits himself down to
supper,” said the Old Gentleman, and went off chuckling, with David
anchored to his pocket, burrowing for a pretzel, which had looked good
to him as he saw Kenneth nibble bites out of his.

“Bek,” said Emma, eyeing her sister, with a furrow between her pretty
eyes, “isn’t it sudden, Stevey quitting Agricultural this way in the
middle of a semester? Nothing wrong, is there? Never knew a word about
it until Claire told me she’d a letter——. Nothing wrong?”

“Nothing,” said Bek, looking straight ahead over the wheel upon
which her square, white hand lightly rested. “His father and I
think it best to have him home this winter. That’s all. It is good
practical experience for him to be around while the state dam is under
construction. He’ll learn more about practical irrigation that way in a
month than in a college year!”

“Funny, though, his coming so sudden,” said Emma.

It was as if the slight figure of Claire, standing beside her mother,
swayed as a fir tree sways, from its toe to its tip. An almost
imperceptible sway, except to Bek, to whom most tiny things were
perceptible.

“It’s Junior League afternoon, Claire. Why aren’t you there?”

“Just felt like running down to the station with Mother and Grandmother
Milliken to meet Uncle Phil and see the four-ten come in,” said
Claire, her pretty, her appealing but faltering blue eyes meeting the
absolutely horizontal ones of her aunt.

“And, of course, you wanted to come down to see Stevey too, dear,” put
in her mother, who was a great putterer in the name of amicability.
“You didn’t even know Uncle Phil was coming until Gramaw telephoned
just before we left.”

“And Stevey too, of course,” said Claire. Her voice was as thin as a
quail’s and her white young throat beat like one, as she met her aunt’s
gaze.

“Of course,” repeated Bek. Her voice was so level, to Claire swaying
there, like a vast and level plain.

“Bek,” said Emma, and leaned close, “Mother Milliken is so sensitive.
Hadn’t you better go pass the time of day with her? She gets more and
more sensitive as Father Milliken’s notes to Father fall due. Better go
over....”

“Indeed, yes,” said Bek. “Come, Mother, you too. And be sure you don’t
ask her about her brother in Saalsberg, Mother. Intimate as you are
with Annie Milliken, you cannot seem to remember that he died last
year.”

“I am glad you reminded me Bek, it does slip my mind. Saalsberg is so
far,” said Mathilda, lifting her skirts neatly, as her two daughters
and Claire assisted her down the step of the car. “I think I’ll take
her a bit of that nice, crisp celery; it’s under the seat. I just
picked it up at market.”

“Hurry, Mother,” said Bek, striding across the platform toward the
Milliken car.

“Bek,” said Mathilda timidly, and put out a restraining hand upon her
daughter’s stride, “I don’t want to seem unchristian, Daughter, and I
wouldn’t have Emma hear, seeing how bad’s Annie’s palsy, but you and me
riding up in the Ford truck, Daughter, and there sits Annie Milliken in
a Cadillac, them never out of your father’s debt.”

“Sense of humor, Mother,” said Bek, hooking her Mother’s arm into hers
and patting it. “The Lord gave us ribs so we could keep them tickled.”

“Yes, but not jostled, while Annie Milliken rests hers in an
upholstered limousine.” Just then Davey, spying little Dora Tarkington
walking primly into the depot with her hand in her father’s, made a
megaphone of his: hand and shouted to her:

“Stevey’s coming home!”

“Stevey’s coming home!” Bek’s heart, all the time that Claire’s was
fluttering like a bird’s, was heavy within her.

Stevey was coming home....




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Seven_


Phil was the first of the Schuylers to go chubby, as the saying is. So
rotund, in fact, that in his middle thirties, his waist-coat, that was
usually a none-too-subtle check of plaid, buttoned over a semicircle.
He was a teetotaler, from inclination rather than conviction, but there
was something in the veininess of Phil’s face and the drape of flesh
over the back of his collar that suggested alcohol.

There was an air of too-high blood-pressure about him. His face red and
his voice a little breathless. At thirty, Phil Schuyler had twice been
almost a rich man. The elusiveness of his quest glittered in his eyes.
It was as if in attempting to force his destiny, he had antagonized it.

“Anything very special, Bek?” he said, through the light peck he
deposited on his sister’s cheek, as she ran considerably ahead of the
others to greet him.

“They’re after Henry again. District Attorney this time.”

“Suspected as much. Well, he’s got to take it. If he doesn’t feel he
owes it to himself, he at least owes it to the family. Man can’t go
through life turning down one honor after another. Howdy, Father. Well,
Mother! Careful! There’s some geranium-cuts in this paper bag Rita sent
along for your side-yard borders. No, Rita decided not to come. Baby
seemed a little croupy last night. Well, Father, am I to ride in the
one-hoss shay?”

“Better men than you have ridden in it.”

“Dirty crack!” cried Phil, who was accustomed to his father’s easy
irascibilities where he was concerned.

“Puppa—Phil was only teasing.”

“Well then, so was I.”

“’S all right, Father. You’re immense.”

“So are you.”

“Now, Father, don’t taunt me for my figure. Who’s giving me a lift?”

“I’ll drive you home, Phil. I can bound Ohio—Ohio is——”

“Can you bind my kitten’s broken paw?”

“Phil!”

There ensued then the usual family-conclave, Emma bidding for Phil
to sleep in her spare-room, where he could have steam-heat, Mathilda
demurring that Phil’s old room in the House on Sycamore Street was
ready and the fire laid. Claire threw her young arms around her uncle’s
neck and begged him to wait for Stevey’s train and then to ride up in
the Cadillac, David meanwhile lugging his uncle’s valise, and almost
toppling backward with effort, toward the phaeton.

“No, never mind anybody waiting for Stevey’s train, Phil. Claire and
Emma will drop you and Mother at the House on Sycamore Street. Davey
and I will wait for Stevey.”

As she spoke, Rebekka’s eyes, round as two pinwheels, had come to full
stop upon her niece Claire.

“Go, Claire.”

“But, Aunt Bek,” faltered Claire, her blonde skin pinkening furiously.
“But, Aunt Bek....”

“Run along,” said her aunt and laid a firm, a heavy, an uncannily aware
hand upon the small, frail shoulder of her niece.

“But....”

“Claire!”

“But, Aunt Bek—my own cousin—coming——”

“A good thing to remember, Claire. Your—own—_cousin_.”

“Oh, you—” almost sobbed her niece, and ran after the others, with her
handkerchief pressed against her lips—“you’re—terrible to me.”

The family shooed off before Bek, with an automatic kind of
acquiescence.

There were only Davey and Bek left standing, wind-blown, on the
platform, as the five-fifteen, bearing Stevey, drew in.

       *       *       *       *       *

How handsome Stevey was as he stepped off the day-coach, in his
slip-over sweater and a pigskin bag and a tennis-racquet in a case and
his cap crammed into his pocket so that his hair, Winslow’s waviness
and baby-fine brown, blew backward giving him a swift, winged look.

Stevey was really David’s eldest nephew. Leslie somehow did not count,
as ages go. A lean-jawed young fellow, with his father’s sensitive
nostrils and his mother’s level mouth. Gray-eyed, with the depth
to them that black lashes can lend; as indefinable a tang to an
expression, as the flavor of the caper to sauce. Personable, after
a fashion, cut along lines rather lighter than the Schuyler heft,
wide-shouldered, light-waisted, with something correct about the
line from femur to ankle that was not characteristic of the House of
Schuyler in general.[11]

“How handsome he is!” thought Bek even when he could not quite meet
her gaze in greeting. She wanted to take him in her arms, except that
it would have embarrassed them both. For one second it flashed over
her, as he made a quick movement of greeting, that the returning
prodigal might be going to take her in his. Flashed over her in a warm
goose-flesh. Of course, Stevey did nothing of the sort. People did not
take Bek in their arms. He did exactly what she gave him the cue to do.

“Hullo, Mother,” said Stevey, and flung out for her hand and shook
it low, down and vigorously. “Hi. Unk,” and caught up Davey by the
armpits, as he was forever being caught up.

“Stevey, I can bound Ohio.”

“Bound it tomorrow!”

“Stevey, me and Henry have a chart and we followed the American fleet
around the world with the red pins.”

“—as well as with breathless interest.”

“And, Stevey, I know where the American fleet was on February
twenty-first. Ha-waiian Islands, and Teddy fired a salute to Mo-lo-kai
where the lepers live. If I was a leper, I could get fired a salute at
by Teddy. Know what?”

“Dave, you run home now! Bek is going to drive Stevey home for Winslow,
and then we’ll all be over to Sycamore Street in time for supper.”

“Can I have a houn’-dog out of Tom Willet’s litter, Bek?”

“No, those Willet dogs are always flea nests.”

“The flea is a para-sit-ic animal that lives off——”

“Good Lord!” cried Steve and tossed him again. “Go tell your Brother
Henry to get you bound in a soft-leather edition and sell you from door
to door.”

“Run along, Davey, there’s a good boy, and tell Mother not to bother
about the sweet butter. I’ll stop by Koerber’s and bring a pat. Jump
in, Stevey.”

How easily as Davey with his short legs spun off toward Sycamore
Street, Stevey swung into the seat beside his Mother, not bothering to
open the door, just one long lithe leg after the other climbing over it.

“Shall I drive, Mother?”

“No,” said Bek, and threw a clutch that jerked them forward.

The town in its cold March drabs was a one-colored affair. Sky the
color of the weather-beaten boards that houses and fences and many
of its sidewalks were built of, dry wash in back yards half-frozen
and flapping stiffly gray, against gray sky, streets merging off,
with scarcely a change of gray, from the smoothness of made into the
roughness of unmade roads.

Down Second Street, Beulah Kohn still swung on the broken front gate.

“Hello, Miss Bek. Hel-lo, Stevey.”

“H’lo. Stevey, that’s Beulah Kohn, the one with meningitis. Poor child,
speak to her.”

“Hel-lo Beulah,” called Steve, and tried to smile through a face that,
once alone with his mother, had grown stiff-looking and white.

At the wheel, Bek’s hand, ungloved now, was large and calm and
pliable-looking as a surgeon’s. But inside, against the palm, it was
throbbing.

“Nobody knows anything, Stevey. Not even your father. The dean’s letter
came so—sudden, son. Your father might just as easily have been the one
to open the mail-box and—find it first!”

Steve moved his lips, but nothing came.

“I—I’ve explained to everybody that I want you home—while they’re
building the dam. Practical observation—irrigation, y’see?”

His face only whitened and tightened, and his lips handsome when in
repose, shirred inward now, like a scar. Out of the tail of her eye, as
she drove, Bek could see the young face becoming old. Terrifyingly old.
A scarred old walnut of a face.

“I’m no good, Mother. Sooner or later you’ll have to reconcile yourself
to everybody knowing that.”

“I’ll fight you to the finish,” said Bek, on a click of teeth, “before
I’ll make up my mind that a child of mine is no good.”

“It gets me, Mother. It burns me. It makes a human bonfire out of me.
There ought to be some cure for it, like there is for ulcers and scalds
and hydrophobia. It gets me. Help me, Mother!”

“Help me, Mother!” At that, a cry that suddenly became the cry of the
wind in her ears as they sped along; there lodged in Bek’s throat a
ball of ache, so that it was a block before she could muster voice. Her
kind of dead-level voice without flutter to it.

“I’ll fight with you, Stevey.”

“Help me, Mother!” Why, to Bek, trying not to wobble the wheel, that
was a cry in the wilderness. It smote her. It cut her in two. It
made her veer so suddenly, as she crossed Second Street, where it
intersected Elm, that Skeet Mapey, the sixty-year-old police man on
that beat, shook an unaggressive old finger at her, as they shot past
him.

“I’ll help you, Stevey, to help yourself. You hear me! No one can help
you but yourself.”

“Then I’m lost,” said Stevey, and quite horribly began to cry, sitting
there with his face twisted and his lips a knot-hole, and his chin all
tucked up like a weazened little old man’s.

“Oh! Oh! Oh!” Bek kept saying to herself. “Help me to help this boy!
God, you—help me to help this boy!” She had the rather disembodied
feeling of everything within her stopping like a run-down clock.
A momentary inability to think or feel or do. A deadness, as if
circulation and heartbeat and the universe of her body had ceased.

“You can do everything, Mother. Save me.”

That warmed one back, somehow.

“Is it so terrible, boy?”

“It burns, Mother. Not like anything you’ve known. It cracks one’s
tongue, and then one’s whole body is like a cracked tongue—thirsting.
You can’t know—ever——”

“God knows, no, Stevey. Never in our family—anyone—anywhere—or in your
father’s—no one ever——”

“It’s like being lined with hot steel, Mother, that you want to cool by
making hotter. Or go crazy! Or go crazy! It’s hell, Mother. You’re too
strong to understand.”

“Too strong to understand.” There it was again. The alienating power
of strength. Too strong to understand, when the hand with which she
steered so surely was of flaming steel. The same flaming steel that
tortured Stevey.

“Oh, Stevey—tell me. Tell Mother. Before we get home. Nobody must know.
But you, Stevey, and me. We’ll fight it out. How did it happen again?
So suddenly—you promised....”

“Not suddenly, Mother—for a little while nobody there knew—that was
all——”

“Stevey, Stevey—as a child—as a little boy—you never even saw it around
you, and now—now this——”

“Never—except Gramp——”

“Gramp!”

“No. No. I mean, first I remember ever seeing the stuff at all—Gramp
used to keep a jug of cider in the phaeton for long drives—winter-time.
I remember once or twice taking a swig or two out of it if he fell
asleep at the reins. Remember, he used to think it amusing and cute for
me to do that. Way back there—me a kid—it used to warm me, Mother, in a
way I hadn’t ever felt before. I’ve always felt cold inside. Remember
how you used to fix me hot lemonades with mint in? ... that was because
I craved it. Even then. Warmth. Remember me always sucking peppermints?
That was it, Mother. The burning. The burning.”

“Oh, my boy!”

“That time you found me by the mill—that was the first time, Mother—I
was—that way. I’ve sworn that to you so often. You must believe.”

“I do.”

“And then—and then—after you got me away—the first three months—I
didn’t—not a drop——”

“That’s why, Stevey, when it came—so sudden—I had thought—you were all
right, boy——”

“Mother, those first months. The torture. No wonder my marks were
so bad. Mother, you’ll never know. I used to get up at night—and
run—Mother—go out and run around the track—until they began to get
on—and think me nutty. I tried so terribly, Mother.”

“Stevey! Stevey!”

“And then—the fellows—they began to rush me for Beta Beta. That was
the real beginning. I hadn’t even seen the stuff around, before I
began to get in with the frat crowd. And then seeing it—in bottles—on
tables—help yourself. The night they initiated me, I—that was the
beginning.... Ugh.... Mother——”

That cry in the wilderness. The rumble of the tinny little car over it.

“Shame, shame, Stevey.”

“Oh! Oh, Mother, if you only knew! If I had any guts—I’d kill myself!”

“No. No. No. Stevey, I’ll help you. Mother will help you.”

“You will, Mother. You will, won’t you?” And sobbed, without troubling
to cover his face, which somehow was most horrible of all to her.

“Father—what will he——”

“He mustn’t know, Stevey.”

“I couldn’t stand his knowing, Mother. Father so—so sensitive—so
nervous—I—he couldn’t stand it!”

“Father so sensitive. So nervous.” What was the secret of Winslow, Bek
asked herself. Not bitterly, but out of an enormous wistfulness and
fatigue.

“We’ll make our fight together, Stevey. I’m not afraid, Stevey—if
you’ll fight with me. We’ll win!”

“I will fight, Mother. There’s a bottle of—it—wrapped in a green
sweater in the bottom of my bag. Take it away from me, Mother.”

“You’ll win, Stevey, like that! You’re a Schuyler, son. There may be
families in the state hold their heads higher, but not any straighter.
Look at Davey, Steve. I always say he’s everything in us summed up.
Seventh child, I guess. Sturdy. Square. That’s us.”[12]

“Yes, Mother.”

“We’ve got to keep the family fine enough for him to grow up into,
son. Ever think of that? Hello there, Supe. Stevey, that’s old Lem
Dinwater’s boy. Speak to him. Supe, you tell your Pap to make me
another offer on that hog corn. He’s going to lose a good chance not
giving me a price on that feed. Good boy!”

“My Pap says you’n him can’t do no business, Miss Bek. My Pap says
you’re a better man ’n he is.”

“Hop out here, Stevey, and into the drug-store, and get me a bottle
of Sloan’s Liniment. One of my new mares has gone right lame in her
foreleg. Never mind, I’ll hop out myself. I want to see how Granny
Koerber’s asthma is today.”

“Mother, won’t that keep? How can you—_now_!”

“No, Stevey. My mare’s limping. Those things don’t keep.”

“But, Mother....”

“Open your suitcase there under the seat, boy. There’s something in it
wrapped up in a green sweater. A bottle of something I want to make a
present of it to Granny Koerber for her asthma.”


FOOTNOTES:

[11] ... poor kid ... destined as he was for the exhibitionism of
lecture-platform, rostrum, grand-stand, David had not escaped the
Schuyler femur. From the hip to the knee, with most of us, the line was
too short, making us a top-heavy-looking lot. We girls managed to hide
it. But with the boys, Henry excepted, the effect was stockiness. We
used to laugh about “the Schuyler femur.” It is the answer, I think, to
the fact that my brother Dave was what is known as a static speaker,
remaining quietly behind his table or stand. It is also the answer to
why, with the one exception of the Landsdowne painting, there are no
full-length portraits of him. From the waist up, he gave the appearance
of towering solidity. The effect of the long waist and slightly too
short legs, even in the Landsdowne, was to make him appear stocky.

[12] ... as I used to say of our Davey, long before he showed the
slightest precocity other than a sort of walking-encyclopedia
garrulousness, for which we used to hold Henry to hilarious account,
that he was the typical Schuyler. And so he was, embodying in his very
babyishness the square, plodding quality of a small war-tank.




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Eight_


For the half-dozenth time, his mother, through the buzz of grown-up
talk, had turned her rather breathless face upon him and pantomimed
Davey to go to bed. By mouthing back violently and stretching his eyes
and doing somewhat fearful grimaces with his mouth to indicate that he
was the reverse of sleepy, it was possible to appease her from time to
time.

The supper-table had long since been cleared, and the red-rep cover
back in its place, and the silver bowl supported by the silver cherubs,
in its center. There were seven apples in it. They shone under the
swinging-lamp that had the buckeye dangling from it.

Henry was speaking. The faces about the table swam in light. Mathilda.
The Old Gentleman. Bek. Winslow. Claire. Emma. Phil. Henriette Simpson,
who never missed her Tuesday-night dinner with the family, and who was
a sufficiently privileged old friend to “sit in.”

The scene reminded Davey of something. Something too vague to
capture. Flat on his stomach on the carpet-sofa in the corner, elbows
propped and chin in palms, he regarded it, when he could keep his
fascinated eyes away from the to-bed pantomime of Mathilda. Ah, he
knew! It reminded him, that circle of conclave, of a picture torn from
Redpath’s Universal History, that hung in Henry’s dusty little old
office, up over Schlemmer’s Hardware Store on High Street, “Signing
of the Declaration of Independence.” The solemn array. The women,
by half-closing the eyes, could be made to look like men in wigs.
Henriette Simpson looked like a horse. But a nice horse. Such a kind,
slender, solemn horse. A brown horse with a braided mane. But she, too,
by squinting, could be brought to look wigged. Only the Old Gentleman
spoiled the illusion. He was peeling an apple. You could never conceive
of so much meticulousness crammed into the peeling of an apple. He held
it poised between thumb and forefinger, as a sculptor might carve a
hand holding a pearl in that position.

It was impossible, after the introduction of the peeling of that apple,
not to keep the eye riveted. Even Mathilda left off her pantomime to
watch it, and rose once, tiptoeing to a cupboard for a plate, which
she slid under, and which the Old Gentleman kept shoving away. He was
removing the peel, after his habit, in a single long curlicue. The
thinnest possible ribbon. Gradually the eyes of the entire group, with
the single exception of Claire, who kept her gaze fastened on the
weaving motion of her needle over the round of a darning ball, became
focused upon the intact unwinding of that apple-peel.

Henry was speaking. He had a solemn, monotonous voice and to David,
even then, a wise, intoning voice.

“It is unfortunate that Father did not consult with me before calling
you all together at this time. I have never been anything but settled
in my mind about it. In fact, the party has already had my written
refusal for twelve hours.”

“Stuff,” said Phil, watching the winding of the rind, and his purplish
face pursed as he leaned forward across folded arms. “A man can change
his mind. I can have Senator Burton on the telephone and that letter in
the waste-basket in five minutes.”

“You’re talking nonsense, Phil.”

“Why, any man they put up in your place will be a stuffed shirt! There
is not another possibility in the state except you and Scott Baring,
who’s never going to get out of that French Lick sanatorium unless on a
stretcher.”

“That may be,” said Henry, in his dry way, and strumming with his dry
fingers, and his eyes on the slowly unwinding rind. “But my mind is
made up.”

“If it was me,” said Emma, in that airy, cozy way of hers, tapping
her darning-ball and holding a red-and-brown-checked sock off at
arm’s-length, “I’d take it, just to show those horrid old Democrats
that this state has never really had a District Attorney before.”

This remark was deemed worthy of nobody’s rejoinder. Emma was seldom
answered. Nor minded.

“Well,” said Phil, who kept wanting to shout but after the first word
or two restrained it and toned himself down, “if you ask me, and you
don’t, I’ll say it’s a dog-gone shame that the party comes into a Jim
Crow town like Centralia to pick its man, does a Schuyler the honor to
put him on the sure-fire ticket for District Attorney and....”

“You’re right, Phil, I don’t ask you. This is the kind of question a
man has to decide between God and his own soul.”

“Yes, but what the dickens can your soul and your God find in a
proposition like this except honor?”

“Son, take not the name of the Lord, thy God, in vain.”

“Excuse me, Mama, but, good Lord, look at the honor for himself and his
family. It was enough turning down mayors’ committees, trusteeships,
school-board appointments, and pretty nearly every honor the town has
to offer. But when it comes to a big state job like this—’tain’t fair
to us!”

“Sorry you feel that way about it, Phil.”

“I do. Mother and Father are entitled to a little something out of this
game. I’m bringing up my little family to the best of my ability,
struggling along to make good American citizens out of them. Bek’s
got standing and children. Claire. Emma. Davey’s going to want the
background of good, sound family-connections. No one person’s got the
right to deprive an entire family of honor. No, by God, not even——”

“Phil!”

“_Gad_ was what I said, Mother. Wish you’d try to remember that, Ma.
No matter what I may happen to say—it’s ‘Gad’ I mean—no siree! Father
here comes to this country a poor boy. Not much more than an ordinary
farm-hand. Mother here a girl that had never been out of her Tyrol
village——”

“Kufstein, son.”

“Kufstein, mind you. Well, what do they do, these two? Practically not
a penny to their names. Strangers on a strange shore.”

“We were awful strange, son,” said Mathilda, and placed the tip of her
handkerchief to a reminiscent tear.

“Phil should set this lyric he is singing to ‘Hearts and Flowers’,
Mother,” said Henry, and slid one of his sly, wry winks to Henriette,
who laid an admonishing forefinger against her lips.

“I think it’s beautiful, Phil—I love to hear it over and over—the
coming to America of our Mother and Father. I just think it beautiful,”
said Emma, leaning over her darning-ball, her soft, blue eyes filled
with tears of melting dolly sweetness. “How was it, Mother, you and
Father stood hand in hand when you got off the old coach at Centralia,
all those years back? Tell it again. I love it. Father holding the
carpetbag and your two precious quilts wrapped up in a huge sheet, and
you clutching onto your great kerchief-bundle of clothing, with a pair
of Father’s brogans joined by string flung over your shoulder. What a
cute, adorable greenhorn you must have looked. I can just see you!”

“Your father was down to his last twenty dollars, son. At Ellis Island
they wouldn’t let us——”

“Yessir!” cried Phil, warming. “There’s a picture for you. Scared out
of their lives. Practically broke. What do they do? I’ll tell you what!
After managing to eke their way out here just because a fellow named
Hans Stengle from their same little village was living hereabouts, what
do they do? I’ll tell you what——”

“When Puppa and I arrived greenhorns, and first set foot in Centralia,
son, I can tell you, except for some few kronen inside my bodice and——”

“They come out here practically penniless and with their bare hands,
and their courage, and their grit, they build up the name Schuyler
to one of the most upstanding in the state. We’re not what you’d
call a moneyed family, but by Gad, we’re as upstanding as they come.
The name Schuyler has come to be in these parts synonymous with
salt-of-the-earth. Those two little peasants that got off the coach
here forty-odd years ago, have put their notch in what’s called the
backbone of this country. We’re the backbone. You’ve got it in you,
Henry, with your head on those shoulders of yours and your reputation
for being a sort of Cincinnatus at the plow hereabouts, to make this
here name Schuyler not only the salt of this here county, but salt
of the earth the country over. I know I haven’t always done all the
fine things I set out to accomplish, due to no fault of mine. I’m part
boob, but you’re a big man, only you haven’t got the sense to show
it. No siree, you haven’t got the right to deprive this family of
adding inches to its stature. Why, man alive, men with no more brains
to them than you’ve got have become President of these United States
of America. Men with no more brains than you’ve got are sitting on
Supreme Court benches while I’m saying these words. Fellows holding
big office and with twenty times your money, and running to you for
advice on the laws of the world, aren’t they?—No siree, you haven’t got
the right to deprive the Schuyler family of being as big as its biggest
man! No siree!”

Here was Phil, with the little roll of fat above the rear of his
collar, bulging and apoplectic with purpose, and his two fists
striking against the table again and again, making the apples in the
silver-cherub bowl rattle, and all eyes slowly swinging away from
the unwinding of the Old Gentleman’s perfect one-piece rind, to burn
solemnly upon the speaker.

“Phil’s right, there,” said Bek in her square, even tones. “Leastwise,
he’s right until we hear what you have to say in rebuttal.”

“Why, everybody knows Henry’s one of the smartest lawyers in the state.
He could be in big-league boots today if—if everything didn’t always
seem to seem funny to Henry, instead of worth wanting.”

Curious how even the occasionally pithy remark of Emma’s could go by
unheeded.

“Hennery—it would be a fine honor for me and Puppa——”

“You hear now, how your Mother feels! It isn’t often she asks what she
wants, in so many words. She just sits and eats out her heart.”

“Phil’s right, Henry.”

Here went Phil, soaring again: “Why, with your mind there’s no telling
how far you can go. You read a valedictory on this here town’s
high-school platform, when you were sixteen, ought to be printed and
put in every boy’s hand in this state today.”

“Beautiful,” said Emma. “I remember I cried. And to cry on a hot night
like that meant something.”

“You’re one of the biggest authorities on international law in this
country, only you go holler down a well about it.”

“For God’s sake, Phil—let up!”

“Hennery!”

“Sorry, Mother.”

“Why, men from as far east as Pittsburgh and Washington have found
their way to that little old dusty office of yours up over a
hardware-store. What do you think it does for the rest of us having a
man of authority in the family? Take the matter of a man’s credit. Why,
just take a man like me. The difference it would make to a man like me
in a town like Springfield. Family-standing. Brother of Henry Schuyler.
Yes, I’ll say it right out. Selfish, maybe, but I’m honest, that’s all.
I’m not afraid a fact will bite me if I say it out. Yessir, I believe
in calling a spade a spade, and a big one.”

“Not much sense to calling it a steam-shovel, Phil.”

“That’s all right, Bek. I’m showing my hand a little bit plainer than
the rest of you. Pull. Influence. Power. That’s what it will give the
family. Not asking anything of him except honor for himself, and,
what’s left of it, for us. Why, there’s no telling how far—gives me the
shivers, that’s how far a fellow like him can go——”

“Me, too ... right down my spine,” cried Emma, and did shudder a little
quite cozily, between her shoulder blades.

“Know something? Well, if you don’t, I’ll tell you. Man named Bill
Slade down in our town, newcomer from Indianapolis; nice fellow, quite
a promoter from what I understand, and bringing some good capital
behind him for a garbage-incinerator project he’s backing, well, that
fellow sat next to me at Business Men’s Club lunch other day. One
thing brought on another and finally, talking over the Republican state
ticket, this fellow says to me, he says, ‘You’re not by any chance
related to Henry Schuyler, down Centralia, are you?’ ‘No,’ says I,
‘excepting he happens to be my brother,’ I says to him, just like that.
Could have knocked that fellow over with a feather. ‘Well sir,’ he
says, ‘there’s a fellow, they tell me, could have the biggest political
plums in this state, if he’d a mind to. Why, I hear, if he wasn’t such
a queer duck for hiding behind a bushel-basket—why, sir, they tell me
that brother of yours, with his slant on things and his reputation
for having been the inside brains on everything from water-power to
franchise in the state for the last ten years, why, sir,’ Bill Slade
says to me, ‘why, sir, a fellow like that there brother of yours,
proper handling, can go far. Why, sir,’ Bill Slade says to me, he says,
‘What this state needs is more brainy men like him with hindsight, and
fore. A fellow indifferent enough to glory to be able to refuse to let
his party tweak his nose and lead him. Why, sir, a fellow like that,
proper handling, can go far!’”

“Go far!” said the Old Gentleman, on a sudden snort. “It does me a lot
of good if I enter a horse in a race that’s got it in his legs to win,
only he won’t leave the post.”

The family laugh broke out on that, and Morton Milliken, entering
in corduroys and hip-boots just in time to catch the drift, seated
himself beside Emma and placed the large sprawl of his hand against her
shoulder.

“What Henry needs is a little political catnip,” he said with the sort
of disinterested amiability characteristic of him.

“Yes,” said Henry. “It’s a great game, if you weaken ... enough.”

“Oh well,” said Phil and pushed back his chair with a toss of his
napkin toward the center of the table, which his mother caught up and
neatly folded, “I don’t see why I am the only one seems to be taking
this thing seriously——”

“No, no, son, we all——”

“What say you, Henriette?” cried Phil, suddenly finding her out with
his bulging eager eyes, where she sat quietly, a little out of the
group around the table, her chair pushed a discreet few inches to the
rear, as if to suggest that even though she was a privileged friend
of the family, after all, even so close a friend must know her place.
“Seems to me, if anybody is entitled to a say around here on this
subject, it ought to be you! What say you to Henry’s making little of
everything big that comes his way?”

There was Phil for you! Every time! The family drew in a simultaneous
breath of embarrassed dismay. Leave it to Phil to overstep. To go
too far. The same bungling tongue that doubtless kept matting up his
business affairs. The one wrong thing, here it came. The wrong thing
that Phil could usually be trusted not to leave unsaid. Sooner or later
he would not fail. The composite breath of the family was a pained and
embarrassed one.

All except Henriette and Henry. Strangely enough the long, rather
spinster-like face of Henriette was not unlike Henry’s in its
lantern-like contour. A face shaped somewhat like the sole of a foot,
and that even in its twenties had had no particular youth or age to
it. At this time Henriette’s face was practically what it would be at
forty-six, even to the coloring of the brightly brown bangs. Frizzed
ones, worn unfashionably above handsome brows. There was about her,
and remained even after she had ceased to teach, the odor of the
fifth-grade schoolroom.[13]

Chalk-dust seemed to hang on Henriette’s skin, making it pale and
brittle. And chalk seemed forever against her finger-tips, which made
her brush them together lightly of a dryness that had a tiny harsh
sound to it. She wore a shirtwaist dress of dark-blue silk, with
polka-dot collars and cuffs; and a round bag made of tiny steel beads
hung from her belt after the fashion of the day.

Except for the fact that she fumbled at this chatelaine, there was
nothing about Henriette to denote the flutter of heartbeat underneath
the blue silk at this spot light of a remark thrown suddenly upon what
might be regarded as her equivocal position of intimacy with the family.

“If Henriette Simpson and Henry Schuyler aren’t engaged, they ought to
be,” was about as far as local insinuation could possibly stretch to
the apparently impeccable friendship of these two.

To the wrongness of Phil’s question, Henriette revealed an illuminating
row of slim, beautifully white teeth.

“Seems to me, Phil,” she said, “that Henry is a pretty fair master of
his own soul.”

“Staunch words, friend-ally,” said Henry.

“Who am I to match my judgment against his?”

“That’s what lots of us would like to know,” growled Phil cryptically.

There was a long, stunned moment after that, nothing said, except that
over the back of Henry’s neck, so that he put up his hand as if to stem
it, there rolled a flush.

To David, lying flat on his stomach, heels waving, and his bright,
square gaze carefully averted from his mother’s fluttering one,
that rush of red across the back of his brother’s neck was like the
running-up of a flag. It was fascinating to have seen it happen. He
bored with his bright gaze against the spot, waiting to see what next.
When the red that did not belong there faded out, it was disappointing.
It just blinked out. Like a light.

“... No siree—neither Democrat or Republican——” Phil was saying to more
stamping of fist—“no siree—neither Democrat or Republican——”

“Nor,” said Bek.

“Henry,” said Dave in a shrill voice that he threw into the group, “to
be a Republicrun, does it mean to run the Republic?”

“Davey, go to bed!”

Henry had a peculiar kind of ingrowing laugh. Davey loved to watch it.
From the carpet-sofa, he could see it begin. Had he been silly? Well,
to be a Republicrun could mean to run the Republic. Henry’s was sure to
be a silent laugh, almost an imperceptible one, except for the heaving
of the shoulders. There was something furtive about Henry’s laughter.
There was something about laughter that seemed to make Henry ashamed.
He seldom, if ever, showed his teeth. Curiously, again, they were
strangely like Henriette’s in shape. Long. Only quite yellow and twice
the size of hers. A clean old-ivory yellow. When he laughed, he kept
his lips down carefully over them; and, as if from the effort, tears
sprang into his eyes and the color dyed his face in splotches. It was
altogether a sort of a contortion of a suppressed impulse. He laughed
now until the tears in his eyes took form and began to roll, and he had
to fumble for the rear trousers pocket of his nondescript gray suit
and fish out the great square of cotton handkerchief which his mother
ironed for him into the four large folds he liked.

It impressed the family to see Henry laugh. Because he laughed seldom.
There was nothing about Davey’s remark that had appealed to the
risibilities of any of them. It had only happened to strike Henry’s,
probably tapping him of nervous strain to let it rumble out in
laughter. Just the same, it was the signal for family-hilarity to mount.

“What’s the joke?” said the Old Gentleman, who himself loved to be the
one to arouse family-risibilities and then pretend to feel aggrieved.
“Here we sit! We’ve got a fine fifteen-hand trotting-horse, there’s the
finest pail of water in the state before him. He won’t drink!”

“You can lead a horse to water,” cried Emma, leaping brightly, “but you
cannot ...”

“Yes,” said Morton, and patted her hand.

“... but you cannot—make him drink,” she concluded, on a soprano
shriek, and not to be done out of her _bon mot_.

Henry cleared his throat, and with head lowered, set his piercing eyes
upon the Old Gentleman’s apple. The family knew precisely what the
Old Gentleman was going to do about that now nude apple. He was going
to plug it with his penknife as you would a watermelon, impale each
segment upon its tip, and pop them, one by one, into his mouth, for
short, audible mastications. The women hated the grinding sound he
made, the men scarcely noticed.

“You’re exactly right, Father,” said Henry, strumming his fingers,
and his eye unswerving upon the apple. “I’m not thirsty. You people
make the mistake of reckoning without your host. Naturally enough, I
suppose, under the circumstances. Except you, Bek. I should hardly
expect this of you, after the number of times we have been over this
sort of thing together.”

“This is different, Henry. This is big stakes. Not just local
chicken-feed.”

“It isn’t different. It is just another plan to project me into public
life.”

“Sooner or later, Henry, the world will find its way to your door.”

“If what you say is true, Bek, then it must do just that. I am not the
man to run out into the public marts to meet it.”

“Man alive, who’s sending you out into the public marts? You talk like
Julius Cæsar or one of those guys in a toga. The party for which you’ve
never turned a hand comes to your very door to seek you out.”

“‘Know thyself’ isn’t just a copy-book line, Phil, that you used
to write in Spencerian fifteen times after school. It’s about the
darnedest good advice was ever packed into two words. I’m onto myself
sufficiently to realize that my greatest service to my family, my
state, my country, does not lie in the public service of holding
office.”

“I’ll be dog-goned if it don’t look to me like your idea of your
‘greatest service’ is handing out free advice to everybody from a
poor-white squatter who has had his hog poisoned, to a state commission
which needs expert advice on a franchise situation. And a pin for your
pains! That may be service all right, but its damned idiotic service.
All that gives a diamond ring any value is the fact that there’s a
price-tag stuck on. Start giving them away, and see how long they keep
their value.”

“You’re right, Phil. But hang it, for the life of me I can’t seem as
interested in intrinsic values.”

“For the life of you,” said the Old Gentleman, “is the best reason a
man has got to be interested in values. In-trinsic—if it means what I
think it means, is what you try to forget when you’re trying to sell a
fellow a bronze medal.”

“Puppa!” bleated Mathilda.

“Pah!” said the Old Gentleman, dusting his hands free of apple. “Don’t
worry. I’m not joking, Mother. If Henry chooses to live and die a poor
nobody, that’s his own business.”

“It’s nothing of the sort, Father. It’s the family’s business, too.”

“Well, I’ve never asked any help of my children and I hope to God I’ll
never have to.”

“There’s not one of us would fail you, Father,” said pretty Emma.

“I know that. But all the same, I hope to God I never have to.”

“There are men in life, Father, who belong on the captain’s bridge, and
there are men who direct the course of a ship, and there are men who
build ships, and there are men who raise money to create ships. My job
is in the engine-room of a ship. As Phil says, these matters we are
discussing are not my own business alone. I have you to consider. But
I know myself, Father. I can serve you well from the lower decks of
this old boat we’re bobbing along in, but not if you force me out of my
greasy old overalls into brass buttons and try to proclaim me captain,
when I have the heart of an engineer. I want to serve as passionately
as you all want me to serve. But in my own way.”

“What way is that? Hollering down a well? Hiding behind a
bushel-basket? Back-door diplomacy?”

“Phil!” cried Henriette, as if she could endure no more—“You don’t
understand Henry—none of you—I mean—oh, I mean you can’t tamper with
the course of a river or the course of the sun—oh, I mean—what do I
mean?” and sat back with her knuckles pressed against her lips as if to
stem what further might come indiscreetly rushing to them.

“What Henriette means,” said Henry, stepping in calmly, as if to build
a wall of words between her and her flooding embarrassment, “is that my
way is the way of a man, Phil, who knows the limits of his strength and
the extent of his weaknesses.”

“A man, when the big men of his state and even from Washington look
him up in his little office in a small town, don’t talk about his
weaknesses.”

“But, Father, therein lies my strength. I am a spectator. I stand by. I
can develop wisdom only by attaining knowledge, and my kind of a brain
can achieve knowledge by contemplating from the side-lines. I’m like
that old fellow Cincinnatus, Father, in one respect anyhow. I think
best behind my plow. And my plow is that little old yellow desk up
over a hardware-store. It’s the nature of the beast. Surely you must
understand.”

“I understand that no one with the brains you’re supposed to have,
would turn down the opportunity to put some of those brains to turning
a wheel. I’m not saying the attorneyship in itself is the biggest plum
in the world. It’s what it can and will lead to. Power, man. That’s
what counts.”

“That’s Henry’s whole point, Phil, and as usual, you’ve gone
elaborately out of your way to miss it. He’s just finished saying that
his power, he believes, lies behind the machine of state.”

“That’s it exactly, Bek.”

“Pah, wouldn’t give a nickel for that behind-the-throne stuff.
I’d rather have been Marc Antony than Mark Hanna. Believe me, the
up-and-coming man of today is the up-and-going one. Get into big
business, or politics. Not only get your hand on the lever that
controls the machine, but _be_ the machine. Huh—if I had your chance——”

“If ifs and ands,” said Emma, and smiled at her brother—“were pots and
pans——”

“You want this town to furnish bond to secure factories and foundries,
don’t you, Henry?”

“Yes, Centralia’s water-power warrants it.”

“Good. You believe that the grade-crossing conditions in this town
are a menace to public safety and should be radically dealt with!
You believe that outside capital should be attracted into the state.
You believe, according to an article of yours in some law magazine
called _Civic Inventory_, that Elihu Perkins quoted at the Chamber
of Commerce, up home last week, that towns under half a million
population, Centralia for instance, should be run by about twelve
members of a board of estimate and apportionment. Well and good! You
believe, according to that article, that in making a budget, the civic
organization must be the hub, bringing all the civic interests together
like the spokes in a wheel. Mighty fine way you put it, ‘The spokes in
a wheel.’ Well, you try just blowing off steam about it in a magazine
article, and then being in a position to pull strings, that can set
some of those theories into practice, and see which gets you there
quickest.”

“I know, Phil. Every man who shares Blue Plate luncheons with you at
the Business Men’s Club agrees with that.”

“Bet your life they do, because they’re the go-getters without your
brains to go-get! Yessiree, you disbelieve in capital punishment,
don’t you? You say Prohibition is bound to come in this country, but
you favor a light-wine-and-beer plank, but only one that the people
themselves demand, don’t you? You’re watching that Hague show over
there, aren’t you? They come to you to get your opinion on the Johnston
extradition-matter, don’t they? You were the mainspring behind the
Centralia municipal-bond issue for sewerage-extensions and additional
fire-protection, weren’t you? You believe that the Taft administration
is in a position to do important things for the country, don’t you?
Well? Well? From up over your hardware-store, what wheel does it all
turn? No wheel! You spend your brain-money like water, and the other
fellow cashes in on it. Bah, that’s not even good Americanism!”

“Phil,” said Rebekka, regarding him with a slow, tired tolerance that
made her eyes crinkle, “you’re a fool. Perhaps it is Henry, of all of
us, who is truly American. Show me a man in this town, in this county,
in this state, with enough idealism in him to turn his face away from
the marts of men, if he had the ability and the opportunity Henry has.
Would you turn yours away?”

“No, by God. _Gad_, Mother. _Gad_, and I’m not ashamed to say so. Maybe
Father might. Hanged if I know. With all his shrewdness, I’ve seen him
do sky-larking things in business that you couldn’t account for. He’d
be a far richer man today except for those blind spots in his dealings,
like staying out of the Fulton Market project that time, for fear of
having a hand in damaging Milliken’s residential property along Third
Street when there was a garage already horning in. That’s what they
call in the classics, tilting at windmills. Guess you know all about
that deal, Morton?”

“I do seem to remember something about it.”

“I never knew, Pap, up to a year ago, from old man Grokin in
Springfield, that you went flat broke the year Bek was born, trying to
save some low-down crook of a cattle-dealer, who had double-crossed
you, from going to pen.”

“Why, Father, did you really?” cried Emma, her mouth falling open in
easy surprise.

“Sure he did. That’s fine. That’s great. But it was tilting at
windmills. Didn’t save the dirty little crook from dying in the pen, so
Grokin told me, did it?”

“But I didn’t put him there.”

“Why, take Fulton Market today, what you bet, Morton, that your old man
would think even better of Pap than he does, if Pap had jumped in and
cleaned up on that deal.”

“I’ve never discussed it with Father, Phil.”

“Maybe Henry is a chip off the old block, eh, Pap?”

“Henry is chip off the old block, but the block is not me. It’s
the block of his own hard-headedness. I don’t go into a deal that
will shove meat-market business property next door to my friend’s
residential holdings, and ease my conscience telling it there’s a
garage already there; but I don’t hesitate over the difference between
doing something and getting the honor for it myself, or doing it and
letting somebody else get the honor for it. If it was me in Henry’s
place, I would say to myself you’re a fool if you don’t take all the
honors they pile on you.”

“Now you’re shouting, Pap!”

“But if I was in Henry’s place, and felt like he does about it, then I
would tell the whole business of them to go straight to hell.”

“Puppa! Davey, go to bed!”

“You’re swell, Papa,” said Rebekka, winking broadly, brazenly and with
an open grimace toward Phil.

That seemed to startle the family plumage. Clara, sitting forward on
the edge of her chair, with her china-blue eyes dots of exclamation,
and Emma looking like a broody hen that had suddenly been startled off
her nest.

“All right, have it your own way, Pap, only I say again, Father ought
to be as rich a man today as there is in the county, instead of just
bobbing along, middling well-off and putting up what he can lay hands
on as collateral to help somebody else get by.”

“That’s the least, Phil.”

“Easy enough, Henry, for a bachelor to look at matters this way, and
regard money as only a secondary consideration. Guess if the truth is
known, that’s the answer to the mystery why you stay bachelor.”

There was Phil again with his turtle-shot gesture of head toward
Henriette! The family fingers curved inward, of instinct to throttle
him.

“Yes siree, easy enough for a bachelor, but there’s not a member of
this family with his head high enough above water financially to
see shore. We’re a funny crowd thataway. I’m not here to talk about
myself, but take me, for instance. You don’t need me to tell you, Pap,
that with capital in back of me, I’d be in a position to ride in on a
land-boom in my town that would put it on the map.”

“No, Phil, I don’t need you to tell me you need money.”

“There you go, always ready to dig the spurs into me. But look at
yourself, Father. Generally acknowledged to shrewdest cattleman in
the state, natural kind of smartness to you that can’t be learned in
schools—what have you got to show for your years and years of rising
at dawn, trapesing through snow and sleet and rain while other folks
are asleep—what’s it got you, compared to what you ought to have?”

“I’ve got this much. I don’t owe a penny that I can’t show
land-collateral for. I’ve got a name as clean as a whistle. I’ve got——”

“Of course you have, Father. That’s just the point. Here’s as
straight-dealing a family as there is. Father’s word as good as his
bond. Misses-out making himself a rich man in the Fulton Market deal,
out of purely ethical consideration for a friend....”

“That’ll be about enough of that, Phil,” drawled Morton; “nobody’s
contesting that point.”

“Sorry, Mort. No reflections on your old man.”

“It’s not considerate, Phil,” said Emma, and dotted the back of her
husband’s hand with little pats from the darning-ball. “Father’s
always been only too happy to go Grandfather Milliken’s collateral.
Grandfather Milliken would do as much for him.”

“Mort knows his old man stands all to the good with me. I’m just
pointing out that Father’s only well-off, when he ought to be rich.
Land-poor, when he ought to be pocket full. Nothing personal in what
I’m trying to say.”

“You are not so wrong there, son. Land sucks the money up.”

“Look at Bek. Best business man in this county.”

“I’m just one of the Schuyler boys,” said Bek, drily.

“That girl’s working the best farm within a hundred mile radius.
Runner-up to the Howey place itself. With capital, she could make the
Howey place look like a dime. Capital. That’s what she needs.”

“Capital is right, but I’ll compromise for the moment on those eight
Poland-China sows over at Pemberton’s I’m trying to make him take my
sixty-day note on.”

“Well, be as funny as you like, pigs is pigs. I know the power of
money. I know that if Morton here didn’t have his inheritance from
his grandmother tied up, he’d probably be building bridges instead of
laying out the sewerage of the back streets of this town.”

“We can’t complain, Phil. Morton’s doing well, and his father is paying
off the house for us.”

“Well, just the same, with the right kind of pull, he’d be in on the
big plums.”

“A fellow can’t crash through the politics of this town.”

“Exactly, Morton! What this family needs is the kind of political
influence that gave the Whittier family the position it holds. You
don’t think Ephraim Howey would ever be where he is if Zach Whittier
hadn’t happened to be his father-in-law, do you? You don’t think Ryan
Whittier cleared a cool million on that Light and Power deal, do
you, just because it fell into his lap? Every member of the Whittier
family owes where and what he is to Zach Whittier. He went out for
political power. He got political power. Long before Howey ever dreamed
he could do more than polish the handles of the big front door of
the gubernatorial mansion, Zach was throwing this and that municipal
and state plum in his son-in-law’s way, so that he couldn’t get past
without stumbling over them. That’s how the Whittiers became what they
are today in this state. Zach Whittier had talents, and he used them.”

“That’s exactly what I’m doing, Phil,” said Henry, swinging his long,
lean lantern of a face toward his brother. “Using my talents, such as
they are, to their best advantage. God knows I wish it were in my power
to elevate the family fortunes. But it isn’t, Phil. I’m not the stuff
of which rich men are made. It doesn’t worry me, either, except when it
worries you.”

“I’m not saying it worries me....”

“You are, Phil,” cried Bek. “You’re saying it for all of us. Well, it
doesn’t worry me.”

“Nor me.”

“Me neither.”

“It doesn’t worry me neither, son, so much as the waste of the
smartness. Your mother and I have no kick coming. I’m better on my
feet today than any loafer I employ on the place. We’ve got a good
administration in Taft. I see good crops and good times ahead, if not
this year, maybe next. We’ve got our health. Our children, God forbid
we should ever need it, we have around us in case of need. All we are
asking now is honor. Honor is about to come to one of us. We want to
honor back the country that took in two immigrants, all those years
ago, by giving the best we got.”

“And that’s you!”

“We’ve got a little fellow growing up in this family Henry. It would be
fine if he should grow up in a family that has been honored....”

“Davey, go to bed! I knew he’d fall asleep there!”

Bek leaned forward. “Father’s hit the nail on the head there, Henry,”
she said softly, with her face carefully averted from the small,
sleeping form on the carpet couch. “Supposing he were to grow up into a
great successful family like the Whittiers or the Howeys, family that
has an Attorney General in it isn’t to be sneezed at.”

“Don’t worry about Dave, Bek. I’ll lay a red chip on him. There’s
quite a few little fellows have managed to grow up into a pretty fine
manhood, in spite of District Attorney in the family, too. Don’t worry
about Dave. Dave’s all right.”

Dave. Dave. Dave. The name kept flickering against his eyes, as he
lay half-asleep round and warm, on the sofa, while the carpet-nap
ground in against his cheek. He had been dreaming, ever so lightly,
in between the little pecking admonitions of his mother and his own
mouthings-back. His mouth ached a little from grimaces. The snatches of
dreams had a to-be-continued quality to them, like the newspaper comic
strips that he devoured from day to day. They were of Minute Men in
knee-breeches, and three-cornered hats trimmed with pen-wipers.

Rub-a-dub-dub. There was a line of them, with short, white stiffish
plaits of hair, like a sow’s tail when you hold it out of kink,
marching down an old street in one of the gray-looking pictures that
hung in Henry’s room. The Minute Men at Charlestown. The two foremost
rows of them carried drums and short fifes. Poised against the drums
were short sticks ready to r-r-r-rattle. Henry knew forty stories about
them. “I’ll lay a red chip on him.” Now why did Henry want to lay a red
chip on him? Tiddlywinks. There was an old set in the attic over at
Dora Tarkington’s.

The Minute Men in their three-cornered hats marching past an old
state-house with columns down the front like Renchler’s house—the
Minute Men at Lexington ... don’t worry about Dave—Dave—Dave. The name
kept flickering like a match before his consciousness. Who? Me? When he
forced open his eyes finally, stretching his small body so that it rose
in an arch off the sofa, there was the family of grown-ups, down among
whose knees he lived, regarding him.


FOOTNOTES:

[13] Possibly Henriette was plain in appearance. To know her was
never to think one way or another about how she looked. It was what
she looked. And what she looked was all the calm competence in the
world. Henriette _was_ calm competence. A woman with a rare gift of
knowing how to bide her time. How frequently and with what success, in
the turbulent, stirring years that were to fall our lot, she imbued
members of our family with some of that secret of hers, I shall not
take time to record.... Suffice it to say that what this powder-dry
little lady taught us out of her innate culture of mind and spirit, her
wisdom-before-the-event, and her incalculable power of patience, no
Schuyler can ever repay.




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Nine_


Warm gush of spring in spurts of living, bubbling mud up between his
toes. Its ooze among the dog-violets and anemones flowed and tickled,
and there was still hard stubble here and there that bit up into the
soles of his feet and made him hop and screw up his face from the sting.

The soles of his feet, the first day of earliest spring that he went
barefoot, were pink, tender things from shoes, heel and ball spanned by
a thin strip of white arch that would tan soon enough, and toughen.

The sweet, flowing meadows seemed to rock a little of mud. It was like
swimming, to run through the soft splash of grasses.

When Davey was only six, there was a five-o’clock chore expected of him
three mornings a week. Carrying a pair of pails of sluggish looking
cream over to Jessup’s Mattie, who did the churning for the Schuylers,
now that Trina’s weight was rendering her more and more incapacitated
every year.

Lean, agile, and wiry as a cat, and with an endurance that seemed to
lodge somewhere in the steel wires of her nerves, butter simply would
not gather under Mathilda’s churning. Something gray and curdled
coagulated instead under her eager, thin fingers.

As a girl in Austria, they had used to chant about her, a farm-legend
that translates something like this. “Maid whose butter will not
churn, do not be downhearted. Unlucky at butter-making, lucky at
love-making.”[14]

Sometimes the rod onto which the pails were hooked cut deeply into
Davey’s shoulders. Then it was not so easy to swim through the meadows.
One plunged, instead, with short, high, stabbing steps, and the cream
in the pails swirled and sometimes slopped out.

It was richly sweet milk, that the Old Gentleman had pulled in long
even strokes from his Holsteins. Its sweetness was part of the grand,
teasing smell of spring.

Usually Mattie, who was all soft bulge of flesh through gray calico,
came out of the gray, shanty-colored house in the hollow behind the
Cider Mill, and waved to him, with arms that were exactly the shape of
the rows of hams that hung in the smoke-house at Bek’s.

“Hurry—Dav-ee!”

Ugh! Whew! Mattie must not know how the ridges, where the pole across
his shoulders dug in, were blazing, and that something heavy seemed
hung onto his heart, making him so terribly short of breath.

There was always that blessed moment of heaving up the last lap of hill
before the easy swoop of the descent into the hollow. Mattie lifting
the rod out of the blazing ridges and depositing the pails upon a bench
that stood against the rear of the shanty.

Mattie’s cookies had a spice-taste that came out best when you minced
them finely between the front teeth. There came a time for David when,
minus two front teeth, those cookies bit up sharp as needles into the
gums. But when the flavor came flowing over the prick that was a
magnificent kind of alleviation.

There was always the smell to these every-other-mornings in the spring,
of Mattie’s bacon-cracklings sizzling on her range. Sometimes, after
the cookies, there was a good tough piece of rind to chew on the way
home. It had about the consistency of leather, but flavor that could be
coaxed out every inch of the way, even if he took the long route, down
past the hedges that skirted the Tarkington place.

Curious, the pungent tenacity of those days of his first years. Apricot
haze that tasted and had a slow thickness of smell, like syrup.
Bacon-cracklings. Warm uddery smell of sweet milk. Winding of smoke
off burning leaves that writhed like human hands in pain. They were
the unforgettable smells. The leathery one of Henry’s office, that was
to persist through the years. The Old Gentleman’s short reefers that
smelled of fertilizer. Dora Tarkington’s breath when she darted at him
from the hedge, if he happened to take the longer road, and stuck out
her tongue in a little flame of naughtiness. Dora’s breath was exactly
the smell of a calf’s that has been chewing the yellow life out of a
buttercup. Flower sweet.

Dora’s breath scented those days of those earliest years. There came a
time when Davey never took a return-road except the longer one that led
past the hedge that was apt to conceal her crouching little figure.

The Tarkington place had a red roof that showed through the battalion
of maple trees and hedgerows that divided it from the Schuyler South
Meadow. There was a new silo, too, with a red trim at the top, that
remained pretty much in evidence from any two-mile radius.

Mornings, after the milk-lugging, to Dave’s whistle between the “V” of
two fingers, Dora Tarkington, who was sure to be playing around the
gunnysack-wrapped feet of Old Nemo, a black gardener, would scuttle
her plump little body through one particular spot in the hedge. Their
opening. Dora’s and Davey’s opening. It wasn’t much of an aperture,
just a little dug-out, large enough to belly through.

Sometimes Dora, who started every day in a fresh blue-and-white apron
edged in three bands of rick-rack tape, came through the aperture all
smudged. That was the signal, even before they raced down the slope
together, or started the morning sharply with a “Tag, you’re it!” for
them to stand scraping at the mud-clot together; nor was Dora above
aiding with saliva.

Dora’s old Mammy, who kept house for the widowed Tarkington, could be
stern about mud-smudge on freshly clean aprons. Besides, Dora had a
certain fastidiousness all her own. The dive through the hedge was one
thing, but the damp, black earth clinging to her made her say “Ugh!”

Davey liked her to say “Ugh!” The pink cave of her mouth came open,
all filled with the littlest teeth. One was missing now. In front. The
front of Davey’s own mouth was an excavation. Two fingers could pass
through the gap.

“Last tag,” though, was what set them into flame as if two matches had
been struck.

“Last tag!” and off they were through the lush of meadows. Spring-lit
mornings of tearing through dirt that smelled softly as it kicked up
after them.

Dora Tarkington was a little terror. She sometimes seemed to go
liltingly mad. “Last tag! Ba-a-a, you’re it! Lickety, lickety-split—I’m
a kitten having a fit! Meou! Dare you to catch me! Catch me if you can!
Davey’s mad, and I’m glad and I know what will please him. A bottle of
wine to make him shine, and three little niggers to squeeze him.”

“Don’t say ‘nigger,’ Dora. Nemo’ll hear. Nemo’s got feelings same as
you ’n’ me.”[15]

That was the signal for Dora to scuttle all the way back through the
hole in the hedge and throw her arms around the white cotton head of
Nemo, bent low and slow over his task.

“Nemo’s mine. Nemo’s my old Nemo.” That was pretty nearly true. Shaggy
old Newfoundland dog was what Nemo amounted to in the affections of the
child Dora. She rode him as if he were one, kicking her small heels
into his tranquil flanks. “Giddy-app—you can’t ride my Nemo—giddy-app!”

“Don’t want to. Wouldn’t. Get off. Get off, I say.” Once David jerked
her off so that she fell in a soft, little crab-like sprawl into a
strawberry patch, her mouth opening to an outraged howl of wounded
pride, and old Nemo floundering after David with a threatening gesture.

It hurt David for Dora to ride Nemo as if he were a pony. And his pain
and his sympathy, as always, took the form of impelling him to action.

When Dora said “Nigger” in front of Nemo, or rode his delighted back
and pummeled his flanks, when Davey did not knock her off or charge
head-first and bump Nemo in the stomach so that she bounced off, he
tore off homeward on scuttling legs to hack at wood in the shed, with
an ax that was almost as tall as he was.[16]

It helped to hack wood after Dora had ridden Nemo as if he were a dumb
beast. And Dora, who loved Nemo with a fierce inner ticking of her
small heart, took wicked delight in seeming to beat him with her heels,
which in reality slowed so by the time they reached Nemo’s flanks,
that part of his pretense at neighing was laughter from the tickling
sensation.

Dora was a tease, all right. And such fun. “Catch me if you can!
Whoop—double-dare me to jump clear across the creek without getting my
feet wet?” She could stick out her stomach and blow out her cheeks and
make herself into a fright. She could somersault without so much as
showing more than the ruffled rim of her panties, clasping her hands
about her knees, and then, in a little hoop of herself, over! Over!
Over! And climb! Dora, who was plump and full of curves, and with the
round bisque face of the doll that sat in a small toy rocker in the
Tarkington dining-room, could shinny up a tree on her toes and her
finger-ends, turning furiously if you gave her so much as a boost from
her rounded little legs. Sometimes Dora spiked all of her honey-colored
curls on the top of her head with a meat-skewer, and pulled an old
stocking-cap down over her forehead. Then it was precisely like playing
with a boy. You knocked her down without feeling the foolish crawl of
curls across your hand. You shinnied up a tree after her, prodding her
pedaling body unmercifully from the rear. Sometimes, when she wore the
stocking cap, you forgot far enough to clench in a wrestling-match, one
kicking, panting, struggling little body grinding down the other into
the tickling, tender grasses.

Warm, sweet mornings. Davey and Dora seven and six, fleeting
through them. Oh, but Dora was nice! There were usually cubes of
brown gingerbread in the patch-pocket of her apron. Sometimes still
deliciously warm. She let you bite, holding her finger, just so far.
Sometimes you bit at the tip of her finger, and she squealed. A warm,
delicious squeal that went through you like a corkscrew.

The sheep in lower South Meadow scarcely bounded, as the shouting,
running, children darted through the dusky snow-bank of them. The
feel of their undismayed, curly flanks gave Davey a warmth at the pit
of him. He could swing himself off the ground between two of them by
placing a hand on each of their backs. Dora had rather a frightening
way of throwing her arms too tightly about the necks of the nibbling
creatures, startling them so that they shied back like broncos, in an
effort to throw her off.

It was almost the only time she made Davey remember she was a girl. A
fellow didn’t hug things thataway. “Aw, quit, Dora! You don’t do that
to sheep. They don’t like it. Silly, you don’t do that to sheep.”

It was the sort of thing that women did. Like having one’s face tilted
back, by women, for a kiss from a grown-up. The back of Davey’s hand
was forever at streaking across his, wiping off Clara’s and Trina’s
and Mathilda’s kisses. Bek seldom kissed. She had a way of patting a
shoulder, that made one feel a man, every inch. Imagine Henry kissing!

Oh, yes, there was something else Dora did that made him remember
fleetingly that she was a girl. Her way with kittens. There were
constantly-replenished litters of them in the Tarkington and Schuyler
barns. Dora clasped them to her in violent, gleeful hugs that drew
small wails of misery.

Why, the way to handle a kitten, unless you were silly, like a girl,
was to lift it by the scruff of the neck. Silly of Dora, gritting her
teeth and squeezing thataway.

Dora herself was handled pretty much as she did the kitten. Jerked
toward. Squeezed. Pinched. Her cheeks were so round and plump. The
women were always pinching at them. The pinching, gritting women. Why?
And the Old Gentleman used to poke his finger against the round little
ball of her stomach and make a skewering noise along the side of his
mouth.

Frequently, these mornings of Davey having delivered the milk, Dora
turned a continuous string of somersaults down the slope of the lower
South Meadow. David after. Usually they wound up in a heap at the
salt-rock, staring at each other breathless and disheveled. Then
suddenly, and by some hidden secret signal, up simultaneously, quick,
staccato. Last tag! And off again.

Sometimes, by the time they reached the Schuyler summer-kitchen,
Mathilda, at her baking, had already three pans of fluffy bread, which
she painted by dipping a camel’s-hair brush into a teacup of water,
making the loaves sleek and varnished-looking as violins. Usually
there was a coffee-ring, sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar, and a
crescent-shaped bun of the sort the Old Gentleman loved to “dunk” all
steaming and smelling on the table. The cinnamon, and the sour, hot
smell of dough, cut into the very grooves of the mouth, causing saliva
to flow. Break that crescent in two, and its hot breath made little
fountains of the pores of your mouth.

From the leavings of the dough, were two cookie-cakes sprawling in
a pie-pan. A hunky little girl, with the spread arms of a semaphore,
and currents for eyes and a current for a nose, and a mouth done by
pricking it with a fork.

Dora, whose little incisors were as white and as sharp and as greedy as
a mouse’s, beheaded her girl-cookie with a snip. Sometimes Davey, with
little more than surreptitious rubs of his tongue over it, carried his
boy around in his pocket all day, bringing him out at bedtime a crumby
mass, and then trying to put him together like a picture-puzzle.

Long, sweet, innocent days, when Dora was barely turned six and Davey
was seven.


FOOTNOTES:

[14] Curious thing about my Mother. Try as she would, butter would not
churn for her. I can see her yet, standing on the flagstones outside
the kitchen of our house on Sycamore Street, a plane tree throwing
its mackerel shadows across her, and wielding the rod with all her
might and main. The result was sure to be a fibroid, stringy mass.
In later years, Mother developed a sensitiveness on this subject and
sent the milk over in pails, which Davey lugged in on a rod across his
shoulders, for Mattie to churn.

[15] In the light of the important rôle my brother was subsequently
to play in the destinies of both the American Negro and the American
Indian, it is not surprising that, all through his childhood, the boy
had a most inordinate sympathy for the black man. In our small town, we
had a colored population of about three hundred. Dave was known only
to a few of them, and those the ones who occasionally worked about the
place. I have seen him listen with a sort of pained quiescence to my
Father’s flash-in-the-pan outbursts of temper toward some one on the
farm. But let it break against a black man, and for some reason, as if
he could not endure further humiliation for the race, off he would rush
to some self-inflicted chore, such as water-drawing or wood-chopping.
Anything to shut out the sound and scene. Once, it must be recorded,
when he was only five, he fairly flew at my father and banged him
in the stomach for screaming his rage at a negro farm-hand who had
overturned a five-gallon bucket of soft soap.

The two Chinese laundrymen in town used to interest him too. He was
forever standing against their plate-glass windows, watching them
sprinkle clothes by holding mouthfuls of water and spraying it out.

I think one of the finest passages in H.T. Wayne’s preface to his
three-volume work entitled _The Thirty-five Terrific Years After
Roosevelt_ is the one Winslow loved, and which I am sure I can write
down by heart.

“It was as if the Negro race, once it found its legs, thanks to the
divine intervention of a Lincoln, found those legs, figuratively
speaking, to be as spavined, as rickety, and as bowed as the children
of squalid negroes could be.

“It was left for David Schuyler to lead the American Negro out of the
more or less dazed eighty years following his emancipation.

“The Schuyler Housing Bill, as applied to the Southern States alone,
stamps its author as one of the great social liberators of his time,
to say nothing of the subsequent intellectual awakening of that race
under the benign influence of his three administrations. The American
Indian owes him territorial, civic, state and property rights that
were to clutch him back from a precipice that overlooked the abyss of
annihilation.

“‘The Yellow Problem,’ as handled in those three terms, will not bear
elucidation here. The fourth and as yet unwritten volume of this group
will treat of it exclusively.”

[16] ... except for the unique form of restraint Dave could exercise
over his temper, I sometimes think he might have been subject to
Father’s kind of outbursts of passion. But David literally worked
off his rage. I have seen him run out of a room and chop wood or lug
something heavy or go curry a horse when threat of anger began to rise
in him.

In later life, he had a habit of abruptly leaving the room during a
disagreeable conference. Usually, it was for nothing more than to gain
control of a rising anger by pacing an adjoining room or indulging
in a momentary and completely irrelevant task of stacking books or
rearranging a desk, a power of restraint that was to stand him in good
stead.




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Ten_


For sixteen years Henriette Simpson and Henry Schuyler, as the saying
is, had been “going together.”

They had graduated together from the Tallahassee High School, Class of
’91. A framed photograph of that class of nine girls and three boys,
with the brick wall of the school-building for background, hung in
Henriette’s front hall.

Henriette herself, a long-necked, frail-necked girl, supporting a
weight of pompadour which she seemed to balance as if it were a vessel
of water, while around her feet swirled train, and against her breast
beat a gold watch hanging from a gold fleur-de-lis pin. Held firmly
upright against her lap, a framed placard bore in admonitive script
the class-motto, “ANIMUS. FIDES. SUCCESSUS.” Eight more sweet-girl
graduates flanked her on each side, interlarded with the three
generous-wristed male members of the Class of ’91. They were a necky
group, Henry’s characteristics of more-than-considerable of neck
gangling above tall collar and stand-offish ears, holding for all of
them. Henry’s hair, which at that time gave no sign of the premature
horseshoe of baldness which was to beset him, was clamped in straight
bangs across his brow. An enormously sober young man with a lantern jaw.

Henry and Henriette used to laugh over that picture. Only six out
of the class, what with deaths and removals, were still living in
Centralia.

May Kinealy, the third girl from the left, with the yellow Della Fox
curl oozing from the center of her pompadour, had married Phil Koerber,
the son of Centralia’s most prosperous grocer. The Koerbers had grown
rich. Koerber’s Corner, where canned goods were piled in bins on the
sidewalk and sold at slashed prices, was one of the thriving ones in
town. May, who was fat now, and whose Della Fox curl had straightened
from an interrogation-point into an exclamation-point at what she had
become, had nine children. She still did her own work, however, and her
own green-marketing at the farmers’ wagons, which gathered around Court
House Square on three mornings a week, cramming purchases into two
oilcloth shopping-bags, which bulged from beet, celery and carrot-tops.

Tom Powers, the exceedingly narrow boy, wedged in between Bleema
Deifenbach and Ella Tarl, had married Hanna Quick, first girl on the
left, and, at thirty, held what was to be a lifetime position as
foundry-foreman with the Giles Tool Works, at a salary never to exceed
twenty-four hundred a year.

Ella Tarl, the class beauty, with the small heart-shaped face hanging
from her pompadour like a bangle, had died in a shameful childbirth,
and the shooting and maiming of Judge Sloan’s son Tod by Ella’s
brother, who was acquitted, was one of Centralia’s sensations of the
decade.

From their first year in High, Henry and Henriette had paired off.
That is, when there was occasion for it. Class functions, especially
the senior year when Henry was class president and Henriette
sergeant-at-arms. In the debating-society when teams were formed.
Commencement hay-ride. The senior week-end excursion to the Etruscan
Pottery Works and the Art Museum.

In the subsequent years that Henriette had been teaching fifth-grade,
and Henry plodding his slow and thoughtful way into his curious sort of
muted eminence, that friendship had ripened; indeed, there were those
in Centralia who would have said, over-ripened—into one of those cases
of courtship that never seem to come to anything.

“’Twan’t nice.”

“Henry hadn’t ought to.”

“Of course, just as abiding a pair of young folks as there is in town,
but Henriette ought to have more pride.”

“Well, it might be abiding, so far’s anyone could tell, but why didn’t
Henry marry her or leave off keeping company?”

“All those years. ’Twan’t nice!”

“Surprised the Old Gentleman would stand for such doings.”

“Now that Henriette was orphaned, too....”

“A nice pair.”

Centralia had its solutions. A streak of hypothetical and absolutely
untraceable insanity that might lurk somewhere in the ostensibly
nice, clean stock of Beebe Simpson and his wife, who had moved West
from Edelweiss, Maine, years before. Then there was the old wives’
hypothetical legend of some streak of frigidity that might lurk in
Henriette. Those high-shouldered, lean-necked girls. No telling! Or
was it due to Henry’s just out-and-out failure to live up to his
responsibilities of so long a courtship. Could that be? Henry, as fine
a son to his family as ever breathed the county air!

For twelve years, at least, public opinion had wagged over this
protracted courtship. The idea! High time! Here they were, Henry
thirty-eight now, and Henriette possibly a month or two the older. Not
that it mattered, where the difference was so little! For at least ten
years of Friday nights, long before her parents had died and left her
alone in the little, frame, two-family house on Primer Street, sure as
fate, Henry had suppered at the Simpsons’. Every Saturday for at least
the past eight years of her life, Henriette had lunched with Henry at
the Blue Bird Lunch Room on High Street.

For those same eight years, Henriette had partaken of Tuesday suppers,
Christmas, Thanksgiving, and birthday dinners at the House on Sycamore
Street. The summer that Bek Schuyler stumped the state for Ephraim
Howey, Henriette, who usually took summer-courses at State University,
had accompanied her instead, distributing campaign literature during
meetings.

“High time,” was the popular phraseology about it to everyone except
those most immediately concerned. “High time” that they did something
about it or quit. If they aren’t married, they ought to be! Oh,
not that I mean it in that sense. Only, it isn’t fair to the girl.
Henriette’s no spring chicken. Not fair to keep away others, if he
hasn’t intentions. Surprised the Old Gentleman would countenance it.
High time....

Fact of the matter was, Henry was not insensible to “high time.” At
intervals of never less than a twelve-month, he was wont to open up
this extremely delicate and periodic discussion with Henriette. Usually
at the Blue Bird, where the privacy seemed less concentrated, than in
Henriette’s own little front parlor, where two equidistant parental
Simpsons, in crayon, looked down and bated one’s breathing.

Almost invariably at the Blue Bird, while Henriette broke up bread
crumbs and squeezed them into dark-gray pellets, they discussed it.
The Blue Bird was an ordinary room on a level with the sidewalk. There
were two plate-glass windows that looked out on High Street, brown
jardinières of artificial and fly-specked nasturtiums in each of them
posed before lace curtains that were draped to shield the diners from
the gaze of the passer-by.

Pasted against each of the plate-glass windows was the day’s menu.
Hektographed. Twelve square tables, each large enough to seat four,
formed three aisles.

Since the opening of the White Kitchen, one block down, there were
those who contended that the old Blue Bird had deteriorated, to say
nothing of the inroads by the Business Men’s Noonday Clubs. But all the
old group from the Renchler Business Block still lunched there, the
Giles brothers of the Tool Works and old Judge Wale, who brought most
of his provender in a tin box from home and washed it down with hot
coffee.

Henry and Henriette’s accustomed table was under a ceiling fan toward
the rear.

Every Saturday, Henriette, who usually came directly from teachers’
meeting, arrived at five minutes to twelve, and did the ordering before
Henry arrived.

Mock-turtle soup for herself; the Blue Bird Noonday specialty, _lamb
with mint-sauce and mashed potatoes_, and a dessert also very special
to the Blue Bird, known as “Berry Swim,” a concoction of noodles with
stewed berries (in season) dumped over.

Henry’s lunch never varied, either. Poached eggs (eyes closed, please).
Stewed corn. Glass of buttermilk (not too cold, please). Bowl of rice,
for dessert, to be covered with cinnamon and cream (don’t forget his
cinnamon, please).

They were, at their respective thirty-eights, a neat pair. Henriette in
her tweed suit with fur tippet, or, in season, foulard, that she never
wore in schoolroom, sprigged over with a small, coral, berry-and-leaf
design. Henry in his gray sack suit of herring-bone pattern that he was
never known to vary.[17]

If anything, the years had improved the angular Henriette of the Class
of ’91 photograph. Her brown hair, graying now, was worn low enough
to cover much of the high, narrow brow that the pompadour had flared
to reveal. The current fashion of draped clothing concealed a certain
spareness of figure. Henriette’s good eyes, golden, kind eyes, were
capable of all sorts of humorous twinkles behind their pince-nez. The
pince-nez, even though they dug in cruelly to the sides of her nose,
far from detracting, gave importance to Henriette’s face. They shone
like a pair of brilliant wings.

As is common enough among girls of her narrow-chested kind of youth,
it could be said of Henriette that out of a girlhood filled with the
agony of her awareness of her lack of so-called physical charms, in her
thirties, a saving sense of humor had sprung full-grown to her rescue.

At thirty-four, Henriette, in her under-bodice, before her mirror,
could smile and try to powder out the knobs of bones at the front of
her neck, where at twenty-four she had stood and watched herself cry
secret tears that coursed down her cheeks and splashed onto these bones.

After the first frightened months of pulling each gray hair out as it
appeared, there was the solace of realizing that as they thickened and
whitened beyond her control, they softened her face and became her.

The children, of her schoolmates, as they appeared from time to time
in her classes, had for years been the source of her secret, gnawing
pain. May Koerber’s (’91) two tow-heads might have been hers, but
for accident of—of—everything. Little Jean Powers, child of Tom
Powers (’91). Children to whose generation of mothers and fathers she
belonged. By right! By right of—of—well, by the same right as the May
Koerbers and the Tom Powers. The right of the secret places of her
heart.

There had been years when carking yearnings lodged in Henriette.

Those particular years of the race were over now. And, with them,
a letting-down. The fingers of the children to whose generation
of parents she belonged no longer stabbed her with secret sense
of frustration. There was something dry and brittle and no little
efficient about Henriette now. Beside her, the May Koerbers looked and
felt a little over-blown.

Henriette hadn’t let herself go. She attended summer sessions at State
University, Morning Choral Society at Middleton, and, one summer,
had taken a course in domestic science and English literature at
Northwestern University. And why not, with no home ties to bind her?
It was well known that Henry Schuyler considered her brainy and for
years Henriette’s papers at the Saturday Morning Club annual had been
outstanding. One had even found its way into print.

Some said they were written for her by Henry Schuyler. Be that as it
may....[18]

The week that Henry’s proposed candidacy for District Attorney was
being noised about, they met at the Blue Bird, come Saturday, in just
the fashion they had been meeting there for the years of Saturdays.
Henriette, in brown foulard and a mink tippet with a head that bit
into its tail, already at table, and a heavy girl, named Katy, who had
served them for all the years, spreading the unvarying meal.

Her orange pekoe tea, strong, the way she liked it, steamed up into
Henriette’s face, softening the rather angular manner it had of
thrusting itself into the light of a High Street midday.

“Are your eggs done enough, Henry?” For these years and years of
Saturday noons, Henriette had asked that question. She was an excellent
theoretic cook herself, and conducted a domestic-science class in the
High School physics-laboratory every Wednesday evening. It was said of
her that while she could direct the baking of a perfect cake, her own
were apt to fall, sadly. And that whereas a pupil of Henriette’s could
serve you up with an excellent meal, Henriette’s own meals were nothing
to brag about.[19]

These solicitous little questionings of Henriette about his eggs, his
cinnamon, the desired coolness of his buttermilk, the rightness of his
stewed corn, apparently pleased Henry, although he never replied to
them, shaking a bit of salt into his palm, mashing his poached eggs
down into their toast, and drinking the buttermilk at one sustained
tilting of the glass, even while she queried it.

“Here’s that Taine’s _Origin of Contemporary France_ I was telling you
about last week, Henriette. Thought you might be interested in reading
it.”

“That’s mighty thoughtful of you, Henry.”

“Don’t block-read it, Henriette. There may be some of it makes pretty
hard sledding, but if you’ll read it slowly, you’ll be well repaid. I
tell you, that fellow had the right idea. Revolution, he points out,
didn’t destroy absolutism and set up liberty, anything of the sort.
France was already a centralized country before 1789, and grew more so
from Louis XIV onward. The Revolution merely gave it new form. Don’t
mean to say I agree with more than two-thirds, but I’d like you to read
that book, carefully—there’s food for thought in his point of view....”

Years of Henry’s intellectual fodder, carefully predigested by him for
her, had strengthened Henriette’s powers of assimilation. She owned,
quite frankly, that it was a privilege to be dominated by another mind,
if that mind was of incalculably better caliber. Therefore she seldom
dipped into a book, since he almost entirely prescribed her reading,
without the crutch of Henry’s preconceived opinion to help her toward
his conclusions.

“I wrote down and pasted in the back of my attendance book, Henry,
something you quoted me from Taine once. ‘Every man and every book can
be summed up in three pages and those three pages can be summed up in
three lines.’”

“That’s me, I reckon, and all this hubbub about the
attorney-generalship. If there’s any special job that I’m cut out for
at all, it’s not to be out in the ring, acting out the three pages. I’m
the fellow on the side lines, who sums it all up in three lines.”

A kind of light came into Henriette’s long, lean oblong of a face. A
pinkness across the bony mold of it.

With no other person in the world, except his sister Bek, would Henry
voluntarily have opened up this subject. Henriette knew that. Something
clutched at her, a little excitingly.

“You know best, of course, Henry. Of course, it isn’t
given to many, Henry, to refuse honors like that—one after
another—alderman—assemblyman—mayor—and now this! Why, there’s no
telling....”

Henriette’s voice slipped a little, causing her to clutch with an
angular hand at her angular throat. It was seldom, indeed if ever, in
all the years of their methodical allotment of so many hours a week
together, that Henriette ever let slip an emotion. She caught herself
up by the slow, measured manner which followed.

“I mean, Henry, you have already refused more honor than comes to most
men in a lifetime.”

There was something particularly pathetic about her half-illumined
face, as if she dared not let the light come, and it was Henry’s
turn, stung by a consciousness of what she withheld, to make his
conscientiously periodic observation.

“I’ve refused the greatest honor of all, Henriette.”

“I didn’t mean that, Henry, and you know it,” she said without the
artifice of pretending not to understand, and colored a wintry, russet
sort of not unbecoming red.

“That is what makes it hard, Henriette. You are above meaning that
which makes the situation difficult and no less true.”

The subject was one which always induced a rush of blood against
Henriette’s heart. She could scarcely breathe. There were head noises.
Secret, raging tragedy of her sparse years beat in blood against her
heart. Under it all, she invariably succeeded in speaking in slow,
measured tones.

“We understand each other, Henry.”

“I could never forgive myself if I for a moment thought otherwise,
Henriette.”

How solid he was. How stolid. Sometimes, as she cried secretly while
she lay in bed nights, that stolidity was almost a presence in the room.

“You have nothing to forgive yourself for, Henry.”

“Maybe not, Henriette. You can’t blame a man who knows the fruits on
the tree are luscious, and yet, by some devilish inhibition, cannot
raise his arm to pluck them. He is the loser.”

“Nonsense. Life is like that. You’ve every reason in the world to be in
love with me, except you aren’t! Now!”

There was an air of surprise to Henriette, as if from what she had just
heard her lips utter.

“No, Henriette——”

“All right then, except you aren’t _enough_ in love with me. No, Henry,
you have nothing to forgive yourself for. Except perhaps making life
a pretty wonderful affair for me, with you to throw the light of your
mind upon the world I live in. Think of the narrow, groping affair it
might be for an old maid in a one-horse town. What would I be without
this friendship, Henry?”

There was something of a cry in that question. The cry of a spinster’s
dread of her loneliness.

“That is the question which sometimes torments me, Henriette. You have
let the years pass by, when except for me, you might have been married
by now and settled down to a home and children and the sort of life to
which a normal, wholesome woman like yourself is entitled.”

“No, Henry, we have been over that hypothetical ground often enough
for you to realize that in all probability things would not have been
different.”

“Not even if no such person as me existed?”

“That, of course, is impossible to answer. But the fact remains that I
am satisfied, Henry. In a way, quite happy. In any event, completely
understanding.”

“I wish I were that—Henriette, about myself. Where you are concerned.”

“It needn’t trouble you, Henry. Ice-cream may be a nourishing and even
a delicious food, and yet there are those who do not like it. There is
not the slightest reason, merely because we have been friends all these
years, for you to feel the responsibility of falling in love with me.
Even granting, for the sake of our mutual amusement, that my friendship
with you has kept off swarms of suitors, don’t fool yourself, Henry. My
destiny in this town would have been just what it is, except without my
friendship with you. And without it, I would be just one more old maid
headed for the pension-list of our public-school system. I know what
contact with a mind like yours has done for me. I’m the best appraiser
of my own assets and liabilities.”

“You’re a thousand times too good for me, Henriette. I’m a fool.”

“If that explanation appeases you more successfully than any other,
we’ll let it go at that. What’s our programme for the afternoon, Henry?”

“Thought we might drive out by the House on Sycamore Street and pick
up Dave. Well, sir, funny thing about that youngster. Never saw the
like, the way his mind runs to pretty nearly everything you put up to
it. Napoleon, The Three Bears, sheep-breeding, and Gunga Din seem to
interest him about alike. Got him all het-up now about his tiger-moth
and its color-reaction to temperature.”

“I know it. I overheard him telling the Igrotte children about it last
week when I took those Mason jars over to your mother. They didn’t know
what he was talking about.”

“Speaking of natural history, other night, sitting smoking up in my
room in the dark, along the time, I guess, when any well-meaning
citizen should have been abed, thinks I to myself, is that something
moving out there along South Meadow? Coyote? Dog? Stray sheep? Man?
Turns out to be Dave, sneaking all the way from his sister Bek’s, where
he was spending the night, to feed a sick lamb down in the kitchen,
which, I figured out, he must have forgotten about. As a matter of
fact, I had tended the little thing myself before going upstairs, and
Trina had minded him too—but for a mite of a kid trudging all that way,
dead o’ night—right queer, now wasn’t it?”

“He was telling me about the ant-hill you’ve made for him, his little
old hiccoughy voice just heaving away and trying to explain their
habits.”

“I think Dave ought to have a good hound-dog. There’s a fellow called
Sweeney out along Pikes Road, breeds them.”

“Yes, I’ve had both the Sweeney youngsters in class. Ragged lot.”

“Thought we’d pick up the boy and take him out there and let him pick a
puppy. Nothing like a good hound-dog to teach a fellow the decencies. A
dog’s got about all of them—honor, loyalty, courage. Thought we’d take
a ride out along Pikes Road to Sweeney’s, if it’s all the same to you?”

Henriette bit her tippet’s mouth into its tail, and rose from the table
with a little backward kick of her long, full skirts.

“It will be the same to me, Henry, wherever we go—together.”


FOOTNOTES:

[17] ... there was something enormously stable and implacable about
my brother Henry, that dates back in my memory even to his first long
trousers when he was in High School. In spite of the dry cackle of
his humor, my memory does not take me back to the time when a gray
kind of reserve did not seem to powder over his entire personality.
How we used to tease him about his suits! Jevey, our tailor up in the
Renchler Block, used to buy the gray, herring-bone cloth by the bolt
and put it away for Henry’s annual encroachments. Long after Jevey had
died and his son, Big Jevey, had rejuvenated the business by catering
to the campus-cut of the younger generation, that herring-gray bolt
continued to lie on the shelf at my brother’s beck and call. I never
remember seeing him in a day-suit of any other cloth, color, or design.
These suits, made in Centralia, were delivered to him, whatever his
whereabouts, arriving by express in a long, brown box, marked JEVEY, OF
HIGH STREET.

[18] ... and the storm of innuendo it brought down on poor Henriette’s
head from a local literary circle when she was invited to repeat her
paper entitled “Whose Mexico?” before the State Federation! Of course,
Henry helped her write it, and Henriette was the first to admit her
source. How, I ask to know, could Henriette, with all her nice, bright
mind, have been expected to contribute the peculiarly thoughtful and
delightfully satirical quality to that paper, which, by the way, was
later published in _Reedy’s Mirror_.

[19] ... funny, but something our town was never to understand about
Henriette was the disparity between her own rather mediocre cookery
and her ability to instruct others in domestic science, after she had
taken work along those lines at Northwestern University. I myself
used patiently to hold forth the example of Miss Lee, our town’s
music-teacher, who could teach our youngsters to play a Chopin Etude
to the note, but was never heard to perform herself. It didn’t help,
though. In the mind of Centralia, there was something irreconcilable in
the paradox of Henriette as a domestic-science teacher and Henriette’s
own rather dismal culinary efforts. Henriette’s brown raisin-bread,
for instance, was atrocious. So soggy! Her recipe for making it, on
the other hand, won my raisin-bread first-mention at every food-show I
entered a batch.




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Eleven_


The hound-pup was named Teddy. David called him that because, when he
came loping out of the Sweeney kennel toward them, his lips tilted back
in a flash of white teeth.

Teddy! Everything somehow tied up to the image that name made against
the brain. Mark Milliken’s old slouch hat on a hall table when he
came over for long-closeted interviews with the Old Gentleman. Dora
Tarkington’s father’s ruddiness of complexion. The huge pair of
eye-glasses in the optician’s window on High Street. The stuffed grouse
on the oval plaque in Clara’s dining room. The drum Emma had sent him
at Christmas. T-t-t-ted-d-d-d-d-dy! You learned to roll your sticks to
that rhythm. T-t-t-ted-d-d-d-d-dy!

And now the little old hound-dog flashing across the Sweeney kennel
yard. Showing his teeth. Batting his absurdly heavy paws by jumping up
as high as Davey’s chest, his tongue dripping-wet, hanging out of the
side of his mouth like a rag. If you were the sort of person who likes
the trusting leap of a dog, it made you catch your breath, sort of. It
did something more. It hurt a little somehow. Not exactly hurt—exactly,
but—but kind of. It made you bat back a little too roughly. “Get
away—you! Hey—get away, you!”

From that moment, however, Teddy was Dave’s, from his dripping-wet
tongue to the wag of his tail. A funny old tail, shaped like a
beckoning finger, and tipped with white. A curious mixture of
Chesapeake retriever and spaniel, this fellow. Squat, long, low,
short-haired, brown body, with rag ears and a sniffing, burrowing face.

A vociferous pup with an expression that yearned excitedly and an
unquenchable eagerness that kept him wagging from the middle of his
broad, low back to the tip-end of his tail.

The last of six, and Henry and Henriette were for holding off for the
yield of a next litter. Strictly speaking, there were points to be
desired in Teddy.

But too late. Dave and Teddy had already clapped eyes on each other.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was a job, that night, in the face of admonitive orders from his
mother to house Teddy in the cellar, to secretly lug him up to his room
by way of the summer-kitchen, water-spout, and to bed with him.

Then, at midnight, didn’t Teddy begin to dig with his forepaws into
the matting and yap so for the accustomed luxury of his straw bed at
Sweeney’s kennel, that, finally, nothing would quiet him but to permit
him to sit squat on Dave’s chest and doze off there.

For eleven years, except for scarlatina when David was nine, these two
were never to fail to sleep together.[20]


FOOTNOTES:

[20] When Dave’s dog Teddy fell through a trap-door in the upper
reaches of the Igrotte barn, where Dave had a secret reading-retreat in
the hayloft, and landing on the upright prongs of a hay-fork, had to be
chloroformed out of his misery, I think I have never seen so sick and
blasted a face as my brother wore for weeks after. Some of that look
was to remain. Not in expression so much as in the dawn of that later
David to whom all pain was to be something as close to his own capacity
for suffering as the nerves in his own body.

My brother Henry had the dog’s body stuffed by a taxidermist in
Cleveland, Ohio. I confess that at first I questioned both the taste
and the wisdom of this, until I saw the curiously comforting effect it
seemed to have on the boy. Strange thing, but after the death of Teddy,
I never heard my brother refer to him in any way, nor did he ever
accept another pet, although dozens of them were offered and indeed
sent to him, from the beginnings of his public life.

The stuffed Teddy, however, has always stood in every one of my
brother’s offices, an unused pen-wiper dangling from his neck, as if to
ward off the onus of any implication of sentimentality.




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Twelve_


The summer that Dave was seven was one of a drought; added climax of a
late frost, and an absolutely unprecedented scourge of caterpillars had
done for several acres of the Old Gentleman’s cabbages.

It was a crop that the old man by unusual arrangement had sold two
weeks before the first seed of it was sown, on a several-hundred-dollar
advance, to a commission company to whom his word was his bond.

It meant not only the loss of the crop, but the doling back, with
interest, of the advance payment. In the end it was Bek who managed
two hundred of the three hundred refund, Mark Milliken’s failure to
meet a certain large note squeezing the Old Gentleman pretty terribly
on cash. Then the forfeiture of the additional six hundred expectancy
on that same crop put a crimp, so to speak, in the entire summer, so
far as ready cash was concerned. Not that there was any crisis, it
simply meant the old land-anomaly of all outgo and no income. Acres of
potential values, but for one reason or another, without yield enough
to pay their taxes.

It meant, with Mark Milliken’s and the Old Gentleman’s reciprocal habit
of calling upon each other for loans of cash and land-collateral, that
cash was pretty usually at low ebb. Often, indeed, for the Schuylers,
at least, it meant an old story of fending off the little crisis of
having to sell a parcel of land. The land-acquisitive Schuylers!
They came by it honestly. In the Austrian Tyrol, generations of
Schuylers had somehow managed to own an acre, even if the only other
property-holding was a sow. Mathilda’s great-grandfather had owned an
acre which was so meticulously tilled that it resembled a colored
geometric drawing. That acre had passed immaculately from father to
son. Mathilda Schuyler’s hands were still horny with her girlhood part
in coaxing and tilling it.

The Old Gentleman’s battered safe, in one corner of the dining-room,
and the drawers of his still-more-battered old desk beside it, and
the stacks of deeds and notes, current and canceled, bore documentary
evidence of the years and vitality that had been dedicated to trying to
make real estate real, in terms of yield.

Bek’s love of land was ingrained. So was Phil’s. Twice in five years
the family’s cash resources, scant beyond credulity, had been rallied
around Phil’s love-of-land ventures, which ultimately were to make
local history.[21]

This summer of fright, threat of hoof-and-mouth disease, and general
money-tightness, Davey, to save an extra hand’s wage, was put to
tending the South Pasture flocks during school vacation.

Long, slow, sun-drenched days, that vacation after his first year in
public school, with the earth rippling under him as he lay flat against
it until he could seem to feel it pushing softly, like a breathing
flank. Days that moved so slowly from the east where they arrived
pinkly, to the west where they departed redly, that they seemed to
stand stock-still for hours during their middle, pouring into him their
warmth, their hot lush smells. They had a taste, too, all their own,
these motionless days.

Sometimes, when he rolled over on his stomach away from the light, as
it became unendurably strong, and all of him seemed gathering the heat
like a disk, the taste of the earth came crawling into his mouth.

The taste of the land rolling, billowing, and riding him along like a
petal upon its current. The toes bit in. The nostrils breathed in. The
body of the boy wiggled down—wiggled in—close to turf and earth.

At twelve o’clock, Trina, who wore a sunbonnet with a starched visor
that buttoned on, came down to South Meadow with a tin pail of lunch.
Good, square chunks of his mother’s bread, smeared with apple-butter.
Strips of bacon and sometimes strips of the rind itself, tough enough
to be chewed the afternoon through for the last squeeze of flavor.

The tussle with Teddy, as he bounded up from keeping tidy the edges
of the flock, to fasten his teeth into that remnant of chewed-out
rind, forelegs squatted, tail high, white-fanged, eyeballs bulging,
ears laid! Then for the grand jerk! Gorgeously futile jerk. Teddy with
his teeth sunk into the leathery morsel and snarls mixed up with his
breathing, beginning to spin!

The boy and the dog. Teddy out on the horizontal. Sustained momentum.
Terrific momentum. Spinning boy. Spinning dog. Riot of sunlit
afternoon, with the dirty sheep grinding their teeth in a low thunder
and nibbling their strange-eyed heads off.

They had no sense. Teddy was better at making them herd neatly than
Grime, the eleven-year-old sheep-dog. All you had to do was to circle
the flock once every hour or so to close them in a little tighter,
Grime or Teddy yapping at the narrow ankles of any straggler, or Davey
flecking at his flock with a peeled switch off a plane tree.

Otherwise, just hours and hours of his flesh close to flesh of earth.
Lying face-up or on a slope against which the sun banged. When it
rained, and the smells that had been baked into grass and tree-bole and
leafage came out in cool breath, there was the hay-rick to burrow into,
the sheep gathered pat as a mat beneath the spread of two maple trees
that sort of linked arms.

There were books, too, which he concealed evenings in a little spring
house down by the Tarkington hedge. Books off of Henry’s shelves.
Sometimes, if a down-pour came along, or a quick, thick thunder
shower, there was a scurrying of dogs and sheep and boy to cover of
the hay-rick and interleafing maple trees, and the books remained out,
usually face-up, and were drenched, and then, as they dried in a quick,
repentant sun, warped.

There were books on Henry’s shelves twice their normal size. Volumes
that bulged from the damp of the spring house or from hasty showers.
_Around the World in Eighty Days_ was as bedraggled-looking as
something the cat might have dragged in. _The Voyage of Magellan_
had a great blister on its cover; and the most exciting book in the
world, that meant everything when Henry intoned it in his slow, careful
voice, but meant so little when Dave tried to pick it out for himself,
_The Life of the Bee_, had a great rent down its cloth binding. A
combination of damp and Teddy’s teeth.

Henry never remonstrated as his shelves of books began to wave and
careen and warp.

He used to plant himself before them first thing when he came home
evenings, regard the new vacancies and inundations with a wide, slow
smile lowering half of his face, so that his jaw hung over his cravat.

Curious relationship, when Davey was seven and Henry was four times
that seven, and more.


FOOTNOTES:

[21] ... I suppose it can be said that the years of our childhood
(years that of course excluded Davey) were Father’s palmy years. If,
with our proverbial family-capacity for land-poverty, there were times
when Father felt actual pinch for ready money, we children knew nothing
of it. Excepting Davey, everyone of us was given the full advantage of
a grade and a High School education, to say nothing of Henry, who took
his Law and Bachelor of Arts degrees at State University.

Phil was probably the most energetic of us all. Restless, ambitious,
impulsive in a dangerous way, up to his fortieth year, he was a
source of constant anxiety to my father, who had scant patience with
his daring land-ventures, and who came to his assistance only after
terrific flares of temper.

At this writing, and while my dear brother lies desperately ill at his
country home thirty miles out of Springfield, I suppose he ranks as
one of the richest men of the state. I actually remember the day that
dear Phil’s tide turned, so to speak. The day that my Stevey, with one
hundred dollars in his pocket, closeted his Uncle Phil, who happened
to be in Centralia on the difficult matter of borrowing twenty-five
hundred dollars from the bank, and put up to him a proposition
for a landing-field and hangar that had to do with an aëromail
parcel-post-delivery scheme.... Ah me, what acorns of days those
were....




_Chapter Thirteen_


The day was like a crystal fish-globe, crammed with light. On all sides
the horizon had a transparency. At noon, when there were no shadows, it
was like lying at the bottom of the transparency, munching thick, white
bread that you had to tear because it was cut twice as deep as your
teeth. It was like the most perfect kind of drowning imaginable. It
was like the piece Dora Tarkington recited so shyly Friday afternoons
from the school-platform, her skirts maneuvered constantly between her
thumbs and forefingers:

  For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams,
    Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
  And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
    Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
  And so all the night-tide, I lie down by the side,
  Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
    In the sepulchre there by the sea,
    In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Anyway, if it wasn’t like that—it reminded you vaguely—of a sep-ul-chre
by the sea. No, not that! This drowning of the long afternoon was in a
sea of blue and silky air that jammed the enormous fish-bowl with the
nicest kind of universe.

If you slitted your eyes and lay on your stomach, down on the green
floor of the bowl were the backs of the grazing sheep. Dirty foam. And
no shadows. Just light. Light. Light. Light was grand. You wished you
were made of chicken-wire. That was to be all light.

And Teddy, while you lay with your eyes closed, panting short and quick
and hot at your side, and taking sudden rough licks at your hands or
wallowing on his back, so that without opening your eyes you could hear
the nice noise his rough coat made against the nibbled grass.

The days were as long and as slow and as big as the eternity they sang
about in the hymn-books of Sunday mornings in the vestry-room where you
“had” Miss Lare in Sunday-school. Eternity was full of God. What was
God full of? The hymn didn’t tell that. Henry would know. Yet, somehow,
that was the one question of all you would not ask Henry. God was
something private. He wasn’t quite that way to Henry. Not that Henry
had ever said so. It was something you just kind of knew.

Henry’s _World’s Almanac_, face-down, rustled when his flung-out hand
fiddled with the leaves. Earth pressing warmly into one’s face made
it difficult to even delve into its panorama that helped so to while
away the hours. The Territories. Descriptive. Hawaii—Territory of.
Area 6,449 square miles. Capital, Honolulu.—The crossroads of the
Pacific—Henry’s map showed the mountains and the volcanoes. Hawaii had
not the right of statehood—Henry said—the right of statehood?—the brain
reeled lazily—life was just a swinging foam of the dirty backs of the
sheep. Of the _World’s Almanac_. Of a blur of last night’s impressions
of Magellan skirting the fringed edges of the Philippine Islands, to
the guiding waggle of Henry’s long forefinger across the page. Of
Lincoln on the rostrum, delivering the Gettysburg Speech that hung
framed over Henry’s mantelpiece. Lincoln’s face was the shape of the
bottom of a foot. Lincoln made it grand to have a face the shape of the
bottom of a foot.

Long, dozy high-noons of munching the deep bread, with your eyes
closed, and high-noon lapping over into afternoon. Teddy squatting
himself flat on your chest, and the two of you, for the briefest moment
while Grime kept watch, dozing off, nose to nose, eye to eye, breath to
breath.

It was in the middle of one of these June-drenched afternoons of
perfect, drowning peace, that Teddy, who was a terror for detecting
sounds, leaped off of Davey’s chest and ran down barking toward the
spring-house.

Once before he had routed out Stevey and Claire, who had been seated
down there without Davey ever having perceived their coming. They must
have strolled along by the creek-banks, where trees, skirting South
Meadow, blotted out a brief moment of sky-line.

That was the time Davey had lain on his stomach at the top of the slope
and shouted to them while Teddy whizzed downhill.

Poor Davey, in the unwonted excitement of having human figures walk
into the lull of one of those long afternoons, had tried to lure them,
with cat-call and shouts, to the top of his slope. But Stevey and
Claire had hurried away so strangely, and not friendly at all, into the
concealment of the bush that lined the creek. And, presently, there
were their silhouettes once more, hurrying homeward.

Now Teddy had found them out again. You could see Stevey’s head coming
cautiously out from the other side of the spring-house and the yellow
that showed beside him was the edge of Claire’s skirt. Stevey was
stooping as if for a stone—surely not—

“Stevey! Claire! You—hoo—come on up. Stevey—come on up—not hot up here.
Come on—up—’s me—Dave!”

Foolish whirligig of Teddy wanting to leap and yap and dash himself
against these friends whom he recognized—pulling at the yellow of
Claire’s skirt—hurling his body against Stevey—yelping....

What was Stevey—what was Stevey—doing? No. No. No!

But it was then that there crashed through the brain of Davey, shouting
from his hilltop, a sort of an insanity. Something locked his breathing
so that it could not get through. A paralysis. Sight became a blur.
Pain became a devil.

Stevey was kicking Teddy. Body-blows. The yelps that leaped out were
kicked out. At first, under the rain of blows, Teddy had started to
run, bellying to the ground, bewildered, full of pain. But Stevey had
followed him up. With terrible, terrifying, careening strides, that
zig-zagged crazily, and now Teddy was lying on his side against a
salt-rock, pinioned there by one of Stevey’s boots, while the other
was kicking that soft spot above Teddy’s ribs that made the yelps
leap out. And the world was gashed with those yelps and the dancing
horror of Stevey’s foot, and the yelps ran into you and then out of
you like blood, and Claire was beating with her futile girl’s fists at
Stevey’s shoulders and still Stevey, with his teeth bared back, was
kicking—kicking—

Teddy’s eyes were being kicked, and the yelps were out of his eyes—that
was how it seemed to Dave in the midst of the insanity of seeing black.

Twice as he tore screaming and strangling down the slope, he fell as if
into the spinning yelps and the spinning insanity that gave him speed.

How Claire screamed! In high, harsh sleigh bells, and by now the yelps
were like a shower of red-hot butcher-knives that leaped out of the dog
and into one’s breathing. And breathing became a delirium that pulled
and roared and exploded in blasts, and you were plunging through high
waters—tears—and Teddy down there, in a crouch beside the salt-rock,
was being kicked into and kicked into.

Then, as he tore up and threw himself across that small crouch of his
dog, one of the kicks intended for Teddy went into David’s thigh, so
that, with Teddy in his arms, he went down flat, winded, gagging, the
color of chalk for the moment, jerking Stevey to his senses with a
suddenness that seemed to make him, too, the color of chalk.

There were only the wheezing noises Stevey made as he stood looking
down at the sprawl of Dave, with Teddy in his arms, and the small sound
of Claire as she began to cry, with her face in her hands.

The horrible, pain-riddled afternoon, where before there had been just
the peaceful translucence of a goldfish bowl filled with niceness of
universe. Stevey, with sweat making his white face glisten with the
strange pallor of an arc-light, continuing to stare sickishly down at
the sprawl of Davey. His lips kept twitching so, as though they could
crawl along through his cheeks and on—away—

Teddy whimpering as though the very yelps had been bruised. That was
what kept the insanity boiling, even after the wind had been knocked
from Dave. Teddy trying to lick his hands, between bruises of whimpers.
Incredible pain of that. It made him leap to his feet. It made him beat
with his fists, claw with his nails, batter with his palms against
the rather dreadful pallor of Stevey’s face, which felt sticky and
sickening, with a clammy kind of sweat that was cold. It made Dave,
with Teddy swooped up into his arms, run hiccoughing and strangling
through the red-speckled, hot afternoon; run blindly, with dust caking
his tongue and his tears, and making the world a slime of horror and
pain.

The destination of Bek was instinct rather than impulse. Somewhere,
in the terror of things, she must be waiting calm and true and cool.
Out of the pain and the chaos, out of the hurt world full of the red
specks and yelps from a kicked dog, there was Bek! It was like lugging
a sheep, his long legs dangling, his head lolling so, that from the
open mouth the saliva spun off the tongue in flying rills. There was
that red, wet spot against Teddy’s side, that kept Dave’s hands sticky.
It was a pain-crazy world. Crazy world of Teddy’s dangling head, as if
he were fainting as he whimpered. Crazy world of stones that bit up
into bare feet. Of up hill and down dale, through strangulation of rage
and horror. Fields that had flowed so placidly about him, all his life,
now seemed to rise up, to throw him, to cut him with lurking stones, to
stretch and to stretch endlessly between him and the haven of Bek.

Dave wanted Bek. Through the strangling passion, the first he had ever
known, that seemed washing away the roots of his small heart, Dave
wanted Bek.[22]

As luck had it, she was striding along the cinder-path to the house
from just having superintended the loading of six calves up an incline
and onto a truck that was to carry them to Centralia Junction for
shipment.

At the scuttling sound Davey made tearing through the cinders, and
the low whimpering of Teddy, she turned in time to catch them as they
hurled against her skirts, foamy saliva streaming from the pair of them.

“Why, Dave!”

She had never seen passion before. She had never seen tears lash at a
face, and that a child’s face, and leave it so rigid and bony. He was a
knot of strangulation; and, for the moment, the fear smote her, what if
his breathing should get too clogged!... “David! What?”

“He—he—he!” screamed David, “He—he——”

“He what, boy? He—who—what? Davey!”

“He—he—he——”

“Stop it! You’ll choke! He what——”

“He hurted him,” shrieked David. “He hurted him.” And thrust out the
body of his dog so that the side which panted and was moist and red
from having been kicked in, was between them. “I’ll—I’ll run him
through with a pitchfork from the barn—I’ll get a pitchfork after
him——”

The screaming, childish voice. There was that constant fear that his
breathing could not get through. The mounting hysteria of his rage. The
tear-lashed face streaked with runnels of mud.

“Dave! Hush, do you hear? Hush, I say!”

“He—he—he—he——”

“Who, Davey?”

“Steve.”

“Steve what?” said Bek and closed her hand over her throat. “Steve
what, Dave?”

“Kicked him! I’ll pitchfork him,” screamed Davey and lunged again, this
time into his sister’s arms, so that she caught and shook him until his
small, square teeth rattled.

“David, behave!”

“I—yi—yi.”

“Quiet. Not another sound.”

“Old Teddy——”

“Lay him out. There, on the grass. Quit your crying. Do you hear? Quit
it! Get me one of those window-sponges under the porch. Dip it first.
Teddy, good dog. Don’t snap, old fellow—I’m going to hurt a little
bit—good old Ted.”

The long, even strokes of the sponge were enough to set him yelping,
and then gamely to subside, with his forelegs held out as stiff as
sticks.

“Dip the sponge again. Wash your own face there at the hydrant. Hold it
under. There—old Teddy—patience——”

“Is he, Bek—to death—”

“No. Broken rib, I think. Flesh-wounds.”

“He hurted him, Bek—with kicks—”

“Sh-h-h! Get me fresh water.”

Stevey had done this unmentionable thing. Stevey had kicked in the side
of a dog until a bloody tatter of his flank hung down. Stevey, who was
supposed to be surveying up around North Dam had been somewhere around
South Meadow instead, and had kicked in the side of a dog. And Davey,
whose heart was as good as kicked in too, had seen him do it. Had not
only seen his dog kicked, but had seen him kicked by Stevey!

The _terrible_ Stevey must have done that! The terrible, secret Stevey
who must be kept from the knowledge of Winslow and of the family, of
the community, of Davey, must be at large again. Stevey, drunk, must
have done this atrocity!

“David, run into the house and fetch me my first-aid bag from the
hall-closet. And, David, you won’t mind if Teddy hollers a little.
Looks like I have to yank this bad old rib into place.”

“I won’t mind, Bek,” said Dave, with a smear of pain across his face
and started running toward the house.

Between them they held Teddy, while Bek poked at the rib with a
forefinger, and Teddy moaned and quivered; and with the dog’s head
locked down between David’s small knees, Bek started winding the gauze.
On the first tightening pressure, the frantic muzzle of Teddy slipped
Davey’s hold and sank teeth into Bek’s arm, above the wrist. A long
ooze of blood appeared slowly.

“Hold firmly, Dave. Don’t move. Teddy didn’t mean that. He thought he
was biting the pain. Don’t mind the blood, Dave.”

“I—won’t.”

“Hold him firmly.”

“I—will.”

“If you faint or do anything silly, you’ll mess things up for Teddy,
now that I’m getting him in his splint all righty.”

“I—won’t—”

“Try not to mind his yelping, Davey. No, No. No. Hold him firmly by the
hind-legs—it’s got to hurt.”

“I will.”

Finally, he was bound and laid under the porch on an old horse blanket
used for covering bulbs in autumn.

Without talk. Then there was Bek’s wrist and arm to be bound. It was
hard to hold the bottle of peroxide properly above the wound and
pour it on and see it bubble in with the blood, and not begin to
feel squeamish all over again. The bottle kept seeming to rise up
and down and the blood to be all running through one’s eyeballs in
threads—except—the shame of feeling squeamish before Bek—one dared
not—before—Bek—

“Now, Davey!”

“I’m all right, Bek.”

“A little more here. His teeth got snagged, you see.” Finally, the
blessed relief of the gauze clamping down. The almost instantaneous
spat of blood against the white made it hard for the moment, but then
the winding covered that—the winding—the winding—and through the
winding, the insistent impulse to slip somehow underneath the somnolent
afternoon that was suddenly so slashed with the yelps of the kicked dog
and the red bands of blood. Then, too, was the sickening background
consciousness of forty-eight sheep with only Grime for guard.

And through the swinging sickness of it all, there suddenly was Stevey,
with his face like a pat of dough before Mathilda flattened it out
beneath her rolling-pin. Stevey standing beside his mother and leaning
against a rain-barrel because he had to sway. It must have been the
dizziness—the wanting to slip underneath it all that made Stevey seem
to sway so.

Just the same, sight of him brought the old impulse back to batter,
except that Bek’s hurt arm was trembling, and one must keep on
winding—winding through all the red impulse——

“You’re drunk, Steve,” said Bek, without the pretense of even so much
as turning her face away from Dave hearing. It couldn’t matter—now. It
was the only way to explain to him that the Steve who had kicked a rib
broken, was a Steve outside of himself. Evenly, and with a cold manner
of appraisal, Bek repeated it, regarding her son teetering beside the
rain-barrel.

There was something of enormous and omniscient calm about Bek, so
casual about her gauze-bound arm, with the red spot widening, skirts
tucked into boots, feet spread, strong black hair with the bluish light
over it, and the enormous levelness of her eyes—the prairie-flatness;
the un-undulating squareness of Bek’s gaze, pouring against the
bloodshot, watering eyes of Steve. It seemed almost to grip him into
standing erect, as something loose and boneless can be grabbed by the
back of the neck and pulled to its feet.

Steve looked like that. Boneless.

“You’re disgustingly, bestially drunk. You’ve done a cruel terrible
thing to a child and to a dog!”

“You—bad devil you,” cried David, and began to dance on his toes and
make lunging, hysterical throws of his body toward Stevey—“you bad
devil you——”

“Sorry—didn’t hurt him, Davey—didn’t mean to, Davey,” said Steve,
trying to fasten his watering gaze upon the white-faced boy. “Sorry,
Davey—shorry, Dave——”

“You bad devil——”

“Davey—go, do you hear? Stay with Teddy beneath the porch. Go!” Finally
he had to be dragged there by Bek, who lifted him by the underneath
of his arms. “Dave, stay with Teddy.” She left him, a silent huddle
beside the silent dog, his lips still sucked back against his teeth
and the flanges of his nose sea-green. And Stevey, watching her retrace
her steps toward him, wavered as she came, tottering a little, like a
scarecrow in a wind-swept field.

“You’re a drunken—sot, Steve.”

“Well—so was Cæsar—the Julius one—many a time. Excuse me, Mother—didn’t
mean—that——”

Her throat ached for him. His young, flawed handsomeness. The black
bang of his hair, down over his eyes. Soft shirt open at the throat.
Legs slim in puttees as he had worn them on the campus at Agricultural
College.

Olive pallor. Gray eyes, with black flecks like his grandfather
Schuyler’s, behind the too-quick batting of black lashes. A slim,
handsome, insolent drunkenness. A fastidiousness to Steve, even in his
cups.

“Where did you get—it?”

“The stuff? For God’s sake, Mother, don’t catechize me like a
revivalist. Where did I get the filthy stuff? Ha! The gin mills have
got your fair-haired boy. The dens of vice. The cesspools of iniquity.
Dens of vice and cesspools of iniquity. Where is my wandering boy
tonight—oh, Lord——”

“I can’t fight it alone much longer, Steve. Your father will have to
know. The family, too. It is getting beyond me single-handed.”

“What they don’t know, old-dear Mother, won’t hurt them. They’re safe
in sobriety. They’re so damn safe in sobriety.”

“Where did you get it, Steve? You promised to come to me when—when you
had to have it.”

“Yah—yah—with my throat on fire, with the lining of me on fire—begging
a thimbleful from the bar of the holier-than-thou.”

“Where did you get it?”

“Em’s.”

“You mean—Claire—gave it to you?”

“Yes, I mean Claire.”

“You got Claire—innocent, unsuspecting Claire to dole you out drink
from her mother’s cellarette?”

“Betrayed the hand that quenched me,” cried Steve, and threw out a mock
gesture.

“Steve, look at me. You and your cousin have been meeting clandestinely
for a month. Ever since you’re home.”

“Interesting way to meet. Hadn’t thought of it that way before.
Clandeshly—clandesthly—clandesh—ly——”

Suddenly Bek’s hand leaped out. The one with the red-stained gauze.

“Hurt your hand, Mother? Been indulging in one of your feminine
pastimes like hay-forking, I take it. Poor old Mum’s hand.” He started
to carry it to his lips on a grand over-balanced bow—and teetered.

“Steve! Steve! Pull yourself together. For God’s sake, Steve—poor
little Claire—you like this——”

“What do you mean, poor darling? She’s as fine and as sweet as gold—if
gold is as sweet as I think it is, seeing’s I’ve never been on close
terms with enough of it. What do you mean, poor?”

“I mean, Stevey—I’ve seen it happening day by day. You two. Grown-up
and cousins!”

“What do you suspect, my dear mother Bek?”

“Suspect?”

“Yes, old dear—you have been suspecting—now haven’t you?”

“Change your manner to me.”

“Sorry, Mother. But you have been suspecting?”

“Only with my eyes. Not with my heart.”

“Well, she’s a darling!”

“Steve!”

“Yes, I’ve been meeting her. Actually seeing my own cousin—how would
you call it in movie lingo—er—ah yes, clandeshtinely. Safternoon. Many
safternoons. Yessir—when everybody in the world, except the canniest
person in the world, known as my mother, thought I was at the dam,
and that Claire was at her this-ing or that-ing, or whatever it is
small-town, young-lady school-teachers do with their late afternoons.
We, we—the darling—guess I’m pretty drunk for admitting it——”

“Guess you are, Steve.”

“Guess I’m pretty damn drunk for saying so.”

“Guess you are pretty—damn drunk——”

“Well, I like her. She likes me. Dammit, a fellow’s got no right to
stay sober. Makes a mollycoddle out of him. Saps his courage. But I’m
not afraid. Of you. Of the family. I’ll march her up to Thanksgiving
dinner in the House on Sycamore Street and face the whole battalion of
you. I’ll tell the family. I’ll tell the world. She’s a darling—even if
she does come from the horse-faced Millikens. She’s a darling. I want
her!”

“Steve,” said Bek, in her foggy voice, and went up to him and took hold
of his teetering shoulders to steady them, and tried to pinion his eyes
with her own. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I’m drunk enough to have the courage to say what I’m afraid to say
when I’m sober. I want her. She wants me!”

“You’re drunk, I tell you. Listen, Steve, Mother understands.”

“Mother doesn’t. Mother’s too damn strong to understand.”

“Steve!”

“Mother’s not human. I am. Claire is. Mother’s noble. From the
too-damned-noble, deliver me. Sorry, Mother. Excuse. Mother’s always
shielding. Mother-the-shielder. Nobody’s got to be shielded from
me. If Father’s going to have hydrophobia over me, let him have
it. If Gramp is going to yell—let him yell! Won’t be the first
time. If the whole holier-than-thou house of Schuyler has got to
be protected from me, dammit, I’m not going to do the protecting.
To hell with this salt-of-the-earth stuff. Where does it get you?
Suppressions. Repressions. Listen, world, I’m in love with my cousin,
my first-cousin, even if it gives Father hydrophobia and Gramp the
screaming yammers. It’s a grand idea, Mother, walking through life
and keeping it as calm as Dickery-dickery-dock, the mouse ran up the
clock, for the whole family. Grand, if you want to make yourself the
go-between—and take the buffs for the whole clan. Strong. Strong.
Noble. But here’s one blow the family’s got to take square in the solar
plexus. I’m in love with my first-cousin. She wants me. I want her.”

Bek took hold of her son’s arm with her own blood-stained one and shook
him until his teeth clicked. “You’re a drunken fool!”

“Tell me that again, darling. Didn’t hear it the first time. Claire
knows it too. That’s part of the infernal glory of a woman in love.
She cannot help forgiving. Mother-love. Sex-love ... both pretty much
alike, when it comes to the quality of mershy.”

“Steve!”

“’Course. Forgot. Sex is unmentionable in a respectable world that has
been created by sex.”

“You and Claire wouldn’t dare to do a thing like that to the family.
Your silly little yellow-haired cousin. Of course she thinks she’s in
love with you. Always has. I’ve known it, only don’t you fool yourself,
she’s too much of a Schuyler to be guilty of——”

“Guilty of what?”

“Guilty of dangerous social behavior like marrying your own cousin.
That’s—almost what the Bible would call——”

“That’s vice! I know it all before you say it. You’re in the
intellectual backwoods, same as the others. You’re no different except
in strength. Intermarriage of cousins. That old myth went out of date
with antimacassars. Ask Henry! Everybody who’s even half-abreast with
the times knows that the horrible thing we used to call inbreeding
needn’t be horrible at all. You’ve seen it among your own cattle.
Can even strengthen the breed. Ask any biologist. Pff! That for the
first-cousin myth. If I marry Claire, you let biology, not the family,
worry about progeny.”

When Bek spoke next, standing with her feet in their wide plant, her
hurt arm gripping her son’s, her face almost touching his so that he
could feel the shape of her low, intense words in breath against his
face, it was as if, through her son’s fogged brain, her force were
blasting itself and staggering him sober. “Biology, piffle. Isms!
Sophomore-twaddle. You’re not dry yet behind your ears!”

“I won’t be made ridiculous!”

“Too late. You’re already very that. Biology. It may be all right
theoretically, and from the laboratory of the guinea-pig. I don’t
pretend to know even your half-baked science. What I do know is that
there are too many examples of its wrongness right here in this town.
You know Jean——”

“Yes, yes, I know. She’d have had imbecile offspring if she’d married
all of Harvard College.”

“All of which is beside the point. The point is now, that you’re drunk.
You’re standing there reeling in the way of my life-long ambition for
my family, in this community, in this state, in this country. But so
far as I have anything to say, this family is going to remain the salt
of the earth, clean straight through.”

“What you going to do with the salt? Sprinkle it on a sheep’s tail?”

“No, I’m only going to maintain the traditions that those two old
people in the House on Sycamore Street have started for us. Your
grandmother and your grandfather literally worked the earth you are
standing on, teetering on, to make it fit and fruitful for you.”

“Yah——”

“Yah! And your aunts and your uncles represent the decent, law-abiding,
upstanding citizenry of this country. We have that heritage to carry
on. And you!”

“Heritage of middle class.”

“Heritage of decency! Decencies that you, as you stand here before
me now—a drunk—are dragging down. As you inveigle a sweet girl, your
cousin, into clandestine meetings with you, because you dare not be
open and aboveboard. Because you know the wrongness of it. You’re
loafing on your job! Betraying my confidence in you. You, insulting by
your dishonor, your grandmother and your grandfather. You, imperilling
your father’s health. And lowest of the low, you kicking dumb brutes.
Offending every decency, and then, when there are none left, you turn
beast yourself.”

“Mother——”

“I’ve lied for you. I’ve protected you against the punishment of your
father and the terrible wrath of your grandfather. If you haven’t any
decency left for me, then, for God’s sake, have it for them. For your
Uncle Henry. For your Uncle Phil. Your aunts.”

He began to cry a little, licking off tears with the tip of his tongue
as they straggled loosely toward his lips.

“That child over there. He’s handicapped as it is, growing up down
there by himself years and years away from the companionship of
brothers and sisters of his own age. I want this great big growing
family of ours to be the finest imaginable for a child like that to
grow into. He deserves it. You can’t smash his heritage. Not while I’m
your mother and his sister.”

The crumpling-up of Steve was more of a collapse than a faint. Perhaps
a little of both. His mother caught him as he tottered.

“Steve. Please. Sh-h-h. There’s your father coming up from the orchard.
He’s been painting. He must not see you this way. Steve, I want you to
walk! Erect! Up to your room. With me. With Mother—Steve—don’t you dare
to stagger——”

“I——I——can’t——make it——”

“You will. You must.”

“I will—I must——”

With the support of her left arm against him, as the figure of Winslow
came up above the rim of slope that led from the orchard, they walked
up the steps, across the verandah, unwaveringly, into the house and on
up to Steve’s room underneath the eaves.

One hour and forty minutes later, Bek came out again. Alone.

“Where’ve you been, Bek?” asked Winslow, who was working away at his
pipe-stems with “cleaners” she kept him supplied with by mail-order.

“Putting my house in order, Winslow,” she said.


FOOTNOTES:

[22] ... seldom, if ever, did I see my brother in the throes of those
rare fits of passion that invariably were to leave him the victim of
one of the black headaches to which he was subject.

Of course, there was the unspeakable occasion of Steve and the
dog. My pen will scarcely drag across the page that memory of the
face of a child torn with anguish. I recall how I trembled for the
pain-of-the-world that must inevitably find its way into a heart
that was capable of suffering as David was the day he came running
to me with a wounded dog in his arms. O Steve—Son—Boy—except for my
unquenchable faith in you which you have so superbly justified, I think
that would have been the sorriest hour of my life.

In subsequent years, I have, of course, seen David control my Father’s
kind of wrath, but only with great effort. There comes to my mind
that memorable occasion of a state dinner to the Queen of Holland, in
the days when visiting queens and royalty were still a novelty to us
in America. At this function an Italian plenipotentiary constituted
himself an ambassador-without-portfolio, and introduced a diplomatic
topic at the banquet-table which threw great embarrassment upon the
guest-of-honor and drew admirably restrained but nonetheless angry
public rebuke from the President. Another time, when my brother’s face
was my Father’s all over again, as it quivered in anger, was when
I happened to be seated in his office, and he overheard, with what
I always call that curious third ear of his, a secretary out in an
anteroom, insolently dismissing a World War veteran, who was presenting
what he thought were sufficient credentials for admission to see the
President.




_Chapter Fourteen_


The Mark Millikens, Senior, lived in a twenty-two-room wooden house,
with a tower at one end where Annie Milliken wintered her geraniums and
rubber trees; a millwork “gallery” ran clear across the front of the
house, with two hardy perennials of rocking-chairs, that in summer wore
linen slip-overs and most of the winters a light ruching of snow.

Originally, the Milliken homestead had stood in the center of a square
block of ground. Now the Opera House nudged it from one side and a
gasoline station from the other. To complete the insolence of this
last, an iron negro boy, with a hitching-ring in his fist, stood
resting at the Milliken curb that was nearest the gasoline station.

Once, some town-wag, (Aloysius Chipman probably,) had hung a pasteboard
tag about his neck, “TAKE A TUMBLE TO YOURSELF, JOE.” But Mark Milliken
had unsmilingly broken the cardboard across his knee and crammed it
into his pocket, to avoid its cluttering up the lawn.

It was estimated that Mark Milliken had made a quarter of a million,
when suddenly the two next-to-the-principal streets of Centralia had
elected to run along two sides of his property.

One of Annie Milliken’s great trials as this situation began to
manifest itself, was the soot-balls that fell from the chimneys of the
three-story brick office-buildings, so that the Milliken wash could no
longer flap itself sun-dry on clothes-lines stretched between two fine
plane trees. In fact, one of the trees had to make way for the Opera
House and the other was jammed up against the gray-brick rear wall of a
Woolworth Store.

So a steam-drier had to be installed in the Milliken basement.

“I know the days when her washing wasn’t fit to be seen on the line for
her laziness about mending,” said Mathilda Schuyler, whose tongue could
be trenchant where Annie was concerned.

A Schuyler had married a Milliken; there was a thirty-two-year-old
staunch, if tempestuous friendship between the Old Gentleman and Mark
Milliken, Senior. The two men, in fact had been business partners
for eighteen years, and even after dissolution were more or less in
constant negotiation; children of the two houses had grown up with the
closest of interrelated interests, and yet, the thirty-two-year-old
antagonism between Mathilda Schuyler and Annie Milliken remained just
about intact.

An anniversary, an illness, or even a slight mishap in one or the other
family was sufficient to bring about tearful reconciliation, after
estrangements of sources too trivial to recall. The marriage of Emma
and Morton had tided them over years of suppressed misunderstandings;
but, at heart, both of them, women of tough endurance and patient
noses-to-the-grindstone of large families; at heart these two old women
were anathema to each other.

The drop of a hat could send them flying asunder. They could quarrel
over the relative blondness of their children, the respective
excellencies of spouses, the clarity of their respective apple jellies,
the complexion of daughters, the fidelity of hired-hands, the relative
consistency of the soft soap stewing in their respective iron kettles,
methods of chicken incubation, the selling-price of butter, the
buying-price of unbleached muslin, the this and the that of quilts,
poultices, grandchildren, resemblances, giblets, sons, pip, county
fairs, cheese-bags, and growing-pains.

Their men tacitly ignored these ructions, their own overshadowing them
in proportion, if not in frequency.

High and terrific words had from time to time raged between these
two. As a cattle-trader, the Old Gentleman despised the methods of
his erstwhile partner. Secretly, Milliken had a contempt for the Old
Gentleman’s virtue in the Fulton Market deal, which he regarded as
virtue only because it had been applied to him. They were ultimately to
disrupt partnership. First as cattle-dealer, later at those real-estate
operations that were to alternately make Mark rich-man, poor-man. There
was never a time when, at the bottom of his heart, the Old Gentleman
did not doubt the Milliken integrity.

And yet, not entirely trusting intuition and the rather insufficient
evidence, even when Milliken was in a position to buy and sell him, he
was constantly in the Old Gentleman’s debt.

The Old Gentleman had been known to sign notes for Milliken that were
up to the hilt of his holdings.

Mathilda cried bitter tears over this. It riled her to see Annie
Milliken ride out in her surrey-and-two, and later in a Cadillac sedan,
on moneys that she knew were made possible by financial cooperation and
maneuverings of the Old Gentleman.

It was a tumultuous feud between these two houses. The women at their
small bickerings, the men waging bitter if more infrequent wars of
deeper portent.

On the day that the Old Gentleman’s sheep were wandering at more or
less loose ends in the pasture that had been so precipitously deserted
by David and Teddy, Mark Milliken, with his long, lean, leather face
showing a peculiar pallor through its tanbark, was huddled opposite
the Old Gentleman in a small room to the rear of the Whittier County
Bank, where depositors were allowed privacy for conference and opening
of safety-deposit boxes.

They were two stricken old men’s faces. Milliken had a long, lean,
Yankee figure and a white goatee that turned up like a Turkish slipper.
The Old Gentleman, looking actually atrophied, seemed to wither as he
stood. Eye to eye, the two of them. Pretenses down. Lean, primitive
fears out. Something vast, and all that vastness stupidly spreading
across the Old Gentleman’s face, turning it into a rimless plane
surface of widening and widening incredulity.

“If—I thought you meant what you are saying, Mark, by God—by God—I’d
ram—your teeth down into your heart.”

The figure of Milliken, with the wattled brown throat throbbing like a
peafowl’s above the soft, low collar, crouched back against the wall,
after a fashion of a figure hugging for shade on a desert.

“I’d sooner be struck dead than live to see this hour, Schuyler.”

“You mean,” said the Old Gentleman, whose head was lowered like a
charging bull’s, and whose breathing came up through his chest as if it
were dragging heavy chains with it, “you mean—you can’t—ever!”

“I can’t, Schuyler! God forgive me! I can’t——”

“Can’t!” said the Old Gentleman. “Can’t!” He seemed to gargle the word
around his mouth as if it were a dry old marble. “Can’t.”

“I could cut out my tongue rather than have to say it, Schuyler,” said
Milliken in his whisper, backing and backing against the wall as if he
would force it to yield and swallow him.

Suddenly the Old Gentleman let out a sort of yell of realization that
banged into the quiet morning.

“No, no! Tell me I’m crazy! Damn you, tell me I’m crazy!”

“For God’s sake, Schuyler, hold yourself together! Don’t shout—don’t
let them—know—yet—out there——”

“I am crazy! I must be! He stands there and tells me I am a ruined man
for going on his notes. I’ve gone on his notes for the last thirty
years. For bigger amounts than I would trust to my own blood and kin.
Every cent between me and ruination lies in his hands,” cried the Old
Gentleman, and began to dab, in the rather horrible fashion of the
frenzied, against his face and his throat. “I am crazy. I am crazy! I
am losing my senses. It can’t be true!”

“Schuyler, for God’s sake, hold yourself together. Don’t shout. Sit
down, Schuyler. Don’t take on, Schuyler. It’s enough to give a man a
stroke. Sit down, Schuyler. I—I can explain——”

“Explain!” cried the Old Gentleman, clasping and unclasping his hands.
“Explain! What else is there to explain? I come to a man, that man
my best friend, I come to him weeks ago, the day my notes are due.
Not an hour before. I’m not worried. Only under a strain. Like a man
will be when it’s the biggest loan he’s ever made and everything is
in one basket. Only under a strain. I must have had the feeling in my
bones. I see it now. Even this morning, you remember I said to you out
at Dittenhoeffer’s farm, ‘Mark, you don’t look so well. Is anything
wrong?’”

“I haven’t closed an eye for eight nights, Schuyler.”

“It is true, then? I can’t believe it. By God, I can’t believe it—if
you’re fooling with me, I’ll make you regret——”

“Schuyler, you have sons.”

“Yes, I have sons. Clean-livered ones.”

“You’d have done as much for yours.”

“You-mean-to say-that you-placed collateral—my collateral—in the hands
of that scalawag of yours in Toronto?”

“You would have done the same for one of yours!”

“Not with my best friend’s money. Not to save a thief!”

“Don’t say that,” cried Milliken as if pleading not to be goaded, while
the right was not his to strike back. “Don’t say a thing you’ll regret,
Schuyler.”

“Regret? What in God’s name is a man to say? Maybe I didn’t get it
right, Mark. Tell me I didn’t?”

“I’m afraid you did, Schuyler.”

“What else—damnation—what else, then, am I to call him? Scalawag,
good-for-nothing thief!”

“Schuyler!”

“Ran away from home twelve years ago to get into one scrape after
another—and now—a thief—on my money—on everything in God’s world
between me and ruination.”

“It’s the old story, Schuyler. But you’ve got sons. Think, if you found
yourself in my terrible dilemma.”

“A son of mine who embezzles, God forgive the thought, would have to—I
can’t think! I’m going crazy. I can’t seem to think.”

“Like a hundred boys before him, he meant to put it back. He saw great
real-estate possibilities in Toronto, just as your Phil——”

“By God, take that back! Don’t mention my Phil in the same breath——”

“I only meant, Schuyler, the same impulse was behind him. He meant to
put it back. Frank’s been a good boy, Schuyler. Wild in the early days,
but married and settled in Toronto these ten years now and cashier in
the town’s largest bank.”

“I see now. I see now. God! Good God! I denied it when Alf Dreffous
told me he saw Frank Milliken and you walking along the railroad tracks
night before last.—He must have stolen down to see you—sneaked into
his home town like a thief in the night—a thief it took my lifetime of
labor to save——”

“He’s desperate—Schuyler! Desperate a boy as ever kept himself from
shooting his brains out to hell——”

“I see it now—I see it now—God! God! God! What is to become of me?
Every cent I can count my own, put back into a Toronto bank to save the
hide of a thief.”

“He meant to put it back. He kept drawing out good money to send after
bad. A land-investment deal. He says he’s sure to realize on it in
time. I’ll be able to meet things in time, Schuyler. But they wouldn’t
give him time. They were watching him three months before he knew it.
They closed in on him, Schuyler. If I hadn’t let him have it—mine—and
your collateral—it would have meant—penitentiary! His mother—your
daughter—and my son—me—my family—yours too, Schuyler—much as mine—your
daughter bears my name—I had to let him have it to save your flesh as
much as my flesh.”

“Why—” said the Old Gentleman feebly, this time like water spluttering
onto a hot stove-lid, “why, I’m ruined. I’m a penniless old man
with a family—my hard-earned—my life-earned thirty-five-thousand
collateral—I’m a penniless old man with a family.”

“So’m I, Schuyler.”

“My woman, who helped me to scratch it together—she’s ruined—my
children—who count on me to help them—cheated—my seven-year-old boy
cheated out of his rights—growing up into a penniless future. God damn
you!” cried the Old Gentleman, and lurched and struck with his knuckles
into Milliken’s forehead above the left eye so that a spurt of blood
jumped out and ran down warm and thick under the Old Gentleman’s cuff.

The red glue of it in the smear across his arm and his eyes made him
rear back squeamish for the instant, and in that instant old man
Milliken had fallen to his knees, and hooking himself to the table-leg,
lifted his face with the blood on it and said:

“All right, Schuyler, hit!”

“No you don’t!” screamed the Old Gentleman. “You don’t get me
thataway.” And as the figure hooked to the table-leg lopped forward a
bit, the Old Gentleman’s arm shot out again and again, and they locked,
the long, lean, Yankee figure of Milliken and the thick, squat one of
his adversary. Locked. Swayed. Tottered. Panted through the noises that
chairs made, scraping as they staggered themselves a path through the
room.

And suddenly the Old Gentleman felt the flesh of his knuckles break and
spout blood from hard steel into which his fist had crashed and there
clattered from Milliken’s breast-pocket something shiny, the something
the Old Gentleman’s hand had struck.

It was a cumbersome old model of a Colt .32, with a black hartshorn
handle and a long pull-trigger of a twenty-year-old make. It made
a clatter falling out of Milliken’s pocket. It struck against the
table-leg and went off with a loud report and a shower of plaster began
snowing down from a new scar on the ceiling.

“Shoot me with it, Schuyler. I hadn’t the nerve to do it myself——”
In the confusion of feet running over the tiled floors of the bank,
of the opening of doors, bustle, hustle, two old men, on the floor
of the small room reserved for depositors, were sobbing arm in arm,
the bleeding face of Milliken dragged up into the embrace of the Old
Gentleman, whose spade of beard was riding up and down like a latch.

“It’s all right, Mark, it’s all right!”

“Finish me, Schuyler. Shooting’s too good. I’d have done it myself. I
hadn’t the nerve.”

“It’s all right, Mark! Everything’s all right—crushed to earth—all
righty—but by God—rise again——”




_Chapter Fifteen_


When Mark Milliken went down, it was a case of the tent-pole toppling
pretty nearly everything with it into a muddle.

And there were more Schuylers to pitch into the maelstrom than there
were Millikens. There were only Mark and Annie and Morton Milliken.
But Morton, who had never known a day’s financial independence of his
father, was, after all, married to and therefore half a Schuyler.
So there it ended for the Millikens. Except, of course, for Frank
in Toronto, who was ultimately, some twelve years later, to build a
twenty-room Tudor mansion on a Toronto boulevard, with a wing for
his parents, who, shortly after the crash, left Centralia to take up
residence with him.

There was, to be sure, an old maiden-aunt Rebba, who had lived with
the Millikens for half a century in dual capacity of cook and poor
relation, but who died half a year after the crash.

In the shadow of quick, cataclysmic events, there crept into furtive
existence a rumor about this old woman. She had really been Mark
Milliken’s half-sister. She had moved with them to the county forty
years ago, under the guise of distant relation. There were certain
stocks and holdings in her name. Rebba, who during her life had no
significance, came, upon her death, to have a sinister one, builded on
rumor that was never to be either justified or discredited.[23]

With the Schuylers it was a matter of interrelationship of affairs that
pulled them all down into a heap, a sprawling, bewildered heap, that
for a time could not be jerked to realization because of the dust of
collapse.

When the Old Gentleman went down, practically to the last acre of his
holding (counting some grazing-land up behind Middleton), every plan of
Rebekka’s, land-acquisitive ones, and the paying-off of mortgages on
her present holdings that were chiefly dependent upon loans from her
father, went up in a puff of appalling smoke. Overnight, as it were,
the Model Farm and hopes for its future slipped out of her hands.

With Phil, for a moment that struck terror to the house of Schuyler,
it looked perilously as if his only way out of the crimp his father’s
catastrophe had put into his affairs, was to let himself slide
non-resistingly into a state of bankruptcy.

For weeks he had been tuning up his courage to approach his father
for the loan that would forestall that already impending event. And
then on the very day that he had steeled himself for what was sure to
be a bitter wage of war with the Old Gentleman against speculative
land-methods, the crash!

The peregrinations by which that bankruptcy-act was ultimately avoided
bear not the telling here.

It was said around town that the Old Gentleman attempted the
incredible device of trying to sell his son Phil’s next five years in
clerking-service to his old friend, Tom Wexler, who ran the Red Trunk.
And on the same principle, his own services to Wexler, capacity and
remuneration to be determined by Wexler.

That news of the Old Gentleman thus peddling about five years of his
son’s and his own future spread like wildfire.

Henry Schuyler, upon hearing it from young Simon Wexler, who retailed
to him the fantastic and embarrassing proposition, was reported to
have cried out, shortly and sharply, as if some one had struck him,
and then, without a word, to have walked over to the peg for his hat,
unhooked it and walked out of his office, leaving young Wexler to his
somewhat stupid self.

In any event, it did not come off that way. Smudgy account-books of
Henry’s saw the light of day. Bills were rendered to clients for legal
services that dated five, six, seven, eleven, even twelve years back.
One statement sent to a Solomon Hilp, Esq., Middleton, Whittier County,
for legal services tendered in the successful settlement, out of court,
of an involved damage-suit, was returned to sender with “party dead
four years” scrawled across the envelope. An expert accountant was
called in to dredge into the dusty, profitless tomes that had lain
moldering along two shelves in Henry’s office for year’s end on year’s
end.

The Howey estate alone was rendered an accounting of six thousand
dollars for legal services extending over years, and because of its
incredible moderation, was paid with alacrity. The Giles Tool Works met
a similar presentation of statement with similar alacrity, for similar
reasons.

All in all, Henry collected a little less than one-fifth of his claims.
And he went about it shamefaced. Not as a man claiming his due.

It netted him out of the twelve years, something less than sixteen
thousand dollars. It made a single purchase. It bought Phil out of
impending insolvency.

Even Clara, off in St. Louis, had for years been looking warily to her
father to make possible that two-story, pressed-brick, seven-room,
Georgian house in University Heights that she had begun to desire from
the day her children crawled their way out of rompers.

The plans for the house, a fanlight over the front door, hardwood
floors throughout, and a bit of formal garden with a bird-bath, were
to repose in Clara’s top dresser-drawer until they curled and yellowed
there.

The Holly children were also expecting a Shetland pony from their
grandfather. A brown, with a cream-colored mane and a basket phaeton
with side seats, like some of the youngsters in Vandeventer Place went
bobbing about in.

Last, but not least, something that had sprung eternal in the narrow
breast behind the spotted foulards of a lean and earnest little lady
engaged in teaching the sprouting minds of Centralia that “we, the
people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union ...”
died that year the Schuyler fortunes were swept asunder.

Henriette, who had hopefully told herself for years on end that there
was no hope, stopped hoping.

To the boy, David, trudging his way in winter to a one-room country
school, instead of the two-story brick structure on Second Street,
herding the sheep in South Meadow through the long, baking, fructifying
summers, only no longer his father’s flocks, but those of a newcomer
from Middleton, named Gus Kelsoe, who now occupied the House on
Sycamore Street, the change had come sharply at first, but certainly
not in the nature of a catastrophe.

Indeed, to the unrooted nature of childhood, there were thrills and the
adventure of disorganization in the move from the House on Sycamore
Street to the bald-faced frame house where Judd Igrotte used to live.

A bald-faced, packing-case of a structure, with its windows distributed
in the pattern of two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, that stood flush to
the road in a one-acre patch one mile and a half south of South Meadow.

Pictures came down during the weeks of that move from the House on
Sycamore Street, that left great pale squares against the walls.
Window-shades, the front ones with painted ovals and lace edges,
dropped rotting right off their rollers, when it came to removing them.
The mahogany sofa of great floriated curves had sunk so deeply into the
parlor-carpet that there were four caster-shaped holes in it; and since
the sofa could not even be moved through door or window of the Igrotte
house, two of those holes, arrange and rearrange as you would, were to
sprawl themselves out, mended two tones too dark, into the center of
the small, square front room of the Igrotte manse.

They were a pair of friendly patches. You were forever aware of the
presence of the two dark objects to trip over, and the consistency with
which you did not trip was something to be perpetually surprised about.

The Igrotte house, as a matter of fact, faintly within David’s memory
too, had once stood on the Schuyler property as a sort of auxiliary
summer-kitchen. Hams, bacons, peppers, packs of dill, hanks of raffia,
drying mushrooms, hung in its upper story; and the downstairs,
entirely laid out in benches, was a wilderness of jars, crocks and
casks of meat salting, corning, and pickling. Cucumbers in brine. Pigs’
feet stacked into cool jars of vinegar. Brandying peaches. Spiced
pears. Stuffed mangoes. Blackberry-cordial. Grape-juice.

Len Tarkington had finally bought the little building from the Old
Gentleman, and moved it bodily onto his own property, to be used as a
granary.

All that week of the moving of the building, as it had ridden
grotesquely and in scarcely perceptible jerks along the open road,
causing horses to shy, tiny Davey had ridden in its upper-story window,
shouting, grimacing, and wild with the novelty of it.

Then Judd Igrotte, known thereabouts as a squatter down near the
Cranberry flats, up and purchased it from Tarkington, and moved it
still another two miles down that same road, using it as a dwelling
until his daughter Helga had married out of it and into a prosperous
Iowa farming-country, and taken old Judd to live with her.

It was to the Igrotte place, then, that the Old Gentleman, disdaining
every proffered scheme of combination-living with his children, moved
with Mathilda, Henry and Dave.

The rehabilitated old box, with Helga Igrotte’s choice of wall-paper
plastered to the wooden partitions, and with neither plumbing, nor gas,
nor electricity, had a set-on-to-land look, as if it had been deposited
there very gingerly, like some one sitting on the lap of another,
without letting his weight relax.

There was a bony look to the land, probably from the way the rocky
ledges ran through it, breaking the flesh of earth and showing in
mica-streaks. A lean, meandering acre, for which the rental consisted
of the yield of its potato-crop.

The day that Mathilda arrived to stay, riding in a rocking-chair to
the rear of the van that bore her household chattels, she just sat on
in that chair, frozen from misery, long after the last of the objects
that surrounded her had been lifted down and carried into the house.

It was hard to begin life in the wooden box. The rocks surrounding it
gleamed up so through the earth. To a woman who loved shade and the
benign, grand bosom of fruitful farm-land, the scene before her was as
lusterless as a lead nickel flung out there under the sun. Not so much
as a maple tree or a plane tree or an arbor to relieve the glare.

What a move it was! The yield of that attic in Sycamore Street. It
spoiled it a bit to have Mathilda sit most of the days with odds and
ends and bits on her knees, crying over them. And the girls too, poking
in among chests and trunks and hampers, and then sitting down to let
a tear fall onto an ordinary afghan or a bit of unearthed muff, all
mangy and moth-eaten, or one of the Old Gentleman’s buffalo-robes from
sleighing-days, or a thread-lace baby-cap, stained yellow.

It was strange. The wet kisses that were suddenly mumbled against his
neck, or the quick embraces into which they caught him, as he darted in
and out of the wealth of those chests brought suddenly to daylight.

Smell of old harness. Rifle with a rusty lock, that hung broken.
Pleasantly-chilled pungency of camphor-balls. A brown gavel that had
been Henry’s in the days when he was president of the High School
Debating Society.

“Ladies and gentleman!” cried David, when he came across it, banging
against the window-sill that opened out from under an eave out upon the
chicken-yard, “—out there—world, you! Listen! Listen, world!”

“Stop that banging, Davey!” said Emma, who was shaking dried
rose-leaves out of the foot of an old white-lace stocking she had worn
to Clara’s wedding.

“Let him be,” said Bek from the depths of two huge feather-beds crammed
onto the top shelf of a closet. “That’s right, Davey. Make them listen.
Gracious, listen to the quiet—even that big, gray rooster stopped
crowing—I do declare he’s made all outdoors listen.”

“Bang! Bang! Bang!” went David with his gavel, from the pulpit of his
window-sill overlooking the world of summer farm and fowl, and then
paused again for the fancied silence, “Bang! Bang! Bang!”[24]

“Davey, stop! That’s my old golf-cape. Oh dear! Remember, Bek, when
they were wearing golf-capes and rainy-day skirts? I’ll never forget,
Mother, how I prayed for rain the first day it came all the way from
Montgomery Ward and then because it really did rain you wouldn’t let
me wear it, for fear of spoiling it. Oh dear——” cried Emma; and because
tears were too close to the surface, the three women worked in silence,
among the yesterdays.

To Dave it was like Henry’s picture of “Washington Crossing the
Delaware” to stand in the center of the billowing old horsehair sofa,
wrapped in golf-cape, and peer off into a corner that contained the
stooped figure of Mathilda dragging gunnysacks of hickory-nuts out from
under the old washstand that used to stand in the girls’ room before
they married and left the House on Sycamore Street.

There was another cape, a black-plush one, with shaped shoulders and
chenille ball-fringe, that Emma cried into. Then came along a boxful of
albums, with tin-types of the girls, their panties showing, and Henry
and Phil, with their ears very large, standing on either side of a
small table, with a toy steam-engine on it. One of Mathilda, when her
face was much rounder, holding the infant Bek against a black-brocade
basque. There was another of her, when her face was rounder still
(“Mother dearest, in this daguerreotype you’re beautiful!”) a small,
black-velvet bolero spanning a swell of timid young bosom. Mathilda, in
her teens, in the Tyrol.

More and more clothing tumbling out of trunks and bags. Every possible
graduated size of trousers. Little-girl frocks. Yellowed. Two more
rifles with rusty locks that would not budge. A fine old hand-carved
musket filled with shot. A carpetbag crammed with the identical costume
of an Austrian peasant-girl that Mathilda wore in the picture. That was
the day pretty Claire plaited her taffy-colored hair into a braid over
each shoulder and slid into the voluminous skirts of her grandmother’s
dress, and Mathilda laced up the black-velvet bodice; and when she
stood there with something of Mathilda’s gone prettiness to her,
Mathilda began to cry feebly, and then Emma, and finally Bek, who did
not cry, but held the two of them in the fine width of her embrace.

Strange days to the boy David, when even through the incomparable
thrill of the move, his throat was somehow aching most of the time ...
mostly when he looked at his mother. She ran hither and thither so. As
if doors had been closed against her and she wanted to go in.

Those were the days of a suddenly-promoted sense of importance and
a sturdy sense of standing by. Days home from school to help hammer
cases closed, rip off the tops of barrels and boxes for the adventure
of seeing them yield their strange content of feather beds in striped
tickings. Family albums. Plush panniered dresses. Basques.

Boxes of the Old Gentleman’s papers. Deeds. Bills of sale; bills of
lading. Packets of canceled checks. Notes. Stubs. Cattle-pedigrees.
Henry’s high-school diploma rolled in a tubular tin case. Clara’s
certificate of election to the Girls’ Good Deed Club, dated 1891. A
group-photograph of the family, when Bek was in pigtails and Emma was
in arms, taken against the side of the House on Sycamore Street. A
riding-crop. A small pair of antlers, unmounted. A half-finished piece
of embroidery, on linen, of Betsy Ross at making the flag.

There never were such days of loot. The unpacking of the cases of
Henry’s law-books and miscellaneous collection, and of sitting beside
him in the clouds of dust while he solemnly sorted them over, pausing
for full half-hours at a time to pore. Once he read aloud, sitting
there in shirt-sleeves, hunched under an attic-eave, part of _The
Letter to the Sheriff of Bristol_. It was blunt reading, the words like
hammers from a sledge. Some more of Burke’s books Davey had spelled
out on a shelf in Henry’s office, a labeled _History of Political
Philosophy_. Sometimes, in his room, evenings, Henry had talked to
David of Burke. Thinking out loud, Henry called it. When Henry told you
about Edmund Burke, or read parts of the conciliation speech, his eyes,
under their deep eaves of brow, brightened. “Here was a man [Burke]
pass-ion-ately and un-theatri-cally for freedom and justice.” That was
a heavy phrase Davey had memorized from Henry. When Henry read Burke,
as he unpacked him in the attic, there was something fine and rolling
in his voice, that even, when David did not understand the lugubrious
text, held him fascinated.

Henry must be like God. Henry knew everything. It would never do to say
that out. Henry would begin to laugh. Silently. In the way that rumbled
through him. And laugh. And laugh.

There were hundreds of these books of Henry’s to be pounded free of
dust and stacked, tied with twine, into sixes, and then carted down to
Henry’s office in Bek’s car. There was not room enough for them in the
Igrotte house.

When Henry explained this to David, he kept his eyes averted as if he
were guilty of something. There was not to be room in the Igrotte house
for books to live under the same roof with them. Why, in books there
lurked some of the great thrills that had come into seven short years
of a life. It made Davey feel the elusive sort of tightness at his
throat. For himself, but mostly for Henry, who handled books as if they
were live things.

The Old Gentleman was the stoic of this move. He stalked among the
upheaval of things, some of which had lain quiescent under thirty-five
years of dust. There was the ax, rust crusted, with which he had hewn
the first timber for the roof over his head. The roof that was no
longer his. There was a large carpetbag into which his sole earthly
possessions had been crammed the day he first set young eyes on
Centralia. An old lantern he had swung through the dawn-darkness of
the terrific winter of ’88, when his cattle sickened and froze in his
barns, and his credit gave out about the same time as his winter-supply
of feed. Bitter days that had crawled in wrinkles across the Old
Gentleman’s face, to remain there. And now that the chimera of those
old, lean days was lifting its head again, the Old Gentleman was
unbroken, or so nearly simulated it, that there was something a little
terrifying about his stride. The women dried their eyes and made wide
détours at his approach. He barked with his manner, and the members
of his family, eager not to seem to notice his over-emphasis, barked
back. He was full of bluster, those days, moving men scurrying up and
downstairs to his order. Bek’s light two-seated Ford, laden with such
intimate chattels as chip baskets filled with dishes, boilers, crammed
with percolator, awl, clothes-wringer, soup-tureen, hose-nozzle,
vinegar-cruet, lamp-base and coffee-mill, rattled under the Old
Gentleman’s orders, back and forth along the rutted three miles from
the House on Sycamore Street to the Igrotte place in Pessimines Lane.

The Old Gentleman clung to his huge baize-top desk that had to be
forced in through a window and placed under the stairway in the
first-floor hall where the sole light and ventilation came from the
transom above the front door. It was more of a closet than a room,
scarcely larger than one of those under-stairs affairs for goloshes and
wraps. In vain Mathilda expostulated, and Henry proffered the room over
the rear porch that was to be his.

No siree! There, under the front-hall stairs, the Old Gentleman
caused to be installed this baize-top desk of his that had stood
for thirty-odd years in the window-embrasure of one of the towers
of the House on Sycamore Street, adapting himself at once, by the
vehement gesture of hanging above it a colored lithograph of the
1901 Cattle Fair at Sandusky. And if it must be admitted, providing
his usual cuspidor of a cigar-box filled with sand, and hammering-in
his pipe-rack of nails, which he drove into the wall himself at
carefully-calculated distances to correspond to the respective sizes of
the bowls of his meerschaum family.

It was a dingy hole of an office, that was to immediately become foul
with smoke that permeated the entire lower floor. To the Old Gentleman,
who for the years he could have afforded better, had swayed through
town in the mangy phaeton and the chewed-looking old reefer with the
dangling lining, it might not have been so much of a hardship. Except
now, suddenly, and with a pathetic streak of the psychology of the
needy, one of the first acts of the Old Gentleman, under the new
régime, was to furbish up the phaeton, paint it a livid ochre, jack up
old Jennie’s twine-tied harness, and venture forth into town in the
brave trapping of a man who could no longer afford to be shabby.

That almost broke Mathilda’s heart. Her needle repeatedly jabbed into
her fingers as she sewed up the reefer over which she had vainly
expostulated during the well-to-do years, and which he now voluntarily
handed over to her for repair.

The Old Gentleman was sprucing up to meet vicissitude. Not one of his
adult children but what nursed secret heartache over the pathos of that.

Once, when she came across the refurbished reefer hanging in the
hallway, Bek secretly smeared it with some dry dirt out of one of the
potted geraniums Mathilda scrupulously kept on either side of the one
front step that led to the hallway. Foolishly enough, she admitted to
herself, the Old Gentleman’s reefer, mud-streaked, made her ache for
him a little less.

And yet, to Davey, fickle with youth, filled with the wild, shy
imagings of a mind vigorously and unprecociously beginning its
unfoldings, the bald-faced house took on almost immediately, all the
aspects of home.[25]

David’s room, where originally the garlic and peppers had hung drying,
was little more than a pocket up under the slant of roof, that you
reached by ladder. A snug enough little pocket, with a soda-pop bottle
on the table beside the cot, and a candle stuck in. The candle in the
bottle always ran down over itself in elaborate blisters. It was a
flickering light to lie on one’s stomach and read by. It gave the page
a crazy, breathing quality.

Down in Henry’s room, with a reproduction of a bronze bust of Benjamin
Franklin by Houdon on the bookshelf, and a steel-engraving of a naval
engagement between Paul Jones’s _Bon Homme Richard_ and the English
man-of-war _Serapis_ against the wall, there was a student-lamp and
a gouged-out armchair and a carpet hassock upon which to squat while
Henry read aloud. There were long hours spent thus at the feet of
his brother. But even longer and rather curiously dreamy ones spent
alone in the room with the walls that were scarcely taller than he
was. Teddy, who slept at the foot of the cot, usually snored through
the flickery gloom. It left the boy alone to the crocheting shadows
which, as the book in his hand might suggest, were armies, or navies,
warriors, maidens or red-skinned Hiawatha, who was full of wrath when
he came into the village.

The printed page loomed with him and stalked, and the soft hiss of the
candle was the roar of Marathon over the plain where Miltiades saved
Greece.

Henry’s telling the saving of Greece by Miltiades! It was something to
listen to, and then, word-for-word, to store away like nuts, and later,
up in the privacy of his attic, take out in the flickering shadows into
which Teddy snored, and lo, the attic was the plain and the plain was
Greece! A blazing Greece, because, in summer, the tiny room up there
gathered heat unto itself like a sun-glass. Evenings, with the rolling
meadows breathing out as if in an enormous sigh of relief, the room
could seem to spin of the heat-waves. But the roll of the heat over
the small nude body of David as he lay on his cot was, mysteriously
enough, life-giving to him. He loved the thick and plushy quiet. The
pulling mysterious sense of growth through the hot, black silence. The
sun-soaked, vast outdoors of meadow-land and field, fructifying. Sense
of squirm of life.

All of his life he was to carry that immunity to heat.[26] Those
summers, drenched in the heat of that attic-room, were baptism of fire
all right, his square boy’s body, as he lay there, pouring from every
pore.

Yes, it was smaller and meaner in the Igrotte house. Even Davey, while
the sense of novelty and adventure were still high, sensed that. It
was something else, too. Something sad in the Igrotte house. And yet,
within a month, every stubble in the lean little pasture, every lark’s
nest, every winding of Pessimines Lane, every hidden spring, every
rabbit-patch, was home to him. A home into which his adaptability
fitted him with the same perfection that his bare boy’s body slid into
the swimming-hole.

  Author’s Note: See David Schuyler, the Man, the Statesman, the
  Geographer. _Athenaeum_ Vol. XXX. Timothy Tyker, M.A., B.S., Ph.D.,
  Fellow Magdalen College.


FOOTNOTES:

[23] ... once I remember hearing Phil make a slurring reference to
what he called the stocking National Bank of old Rebba, which was
supposed to have helped retrieve the Milliken fortunes. He was sternly
rebuked by my father. In all the years of stress and strain which were
to follow this catastrophe, no member of our family was permitted to
refer at all, much less slightingly, to Mark Milliken. If my mother
rankled when she heard of the twenty-room house in Toronto, she rankled
silently. If my father owed the twist that had come into his face since
reverses due to the betrayal of a friend, he bore it silently. Probably
out of deference to Emma and Morton, who were to come in for bitter
times. And just as probably out of the fine, high pride that was part
of Father’s many-sided, but always inviolate personality.

[24] How well I remember a day in June, when David was about seven. A
bitter, heart-aching day, as days go. I was over helping Mother move
from the House on Sycamore Street. I can see us now. Emma, Mother, and
I, in and out among the boxes and chests of that priceless attic, so
filled with memories for us all, and Emma hot and blowy and perturbed.
Poor dear, it was to be the beginning of many a hot and perturbed year
for her. Mother full of tears. Davey, a squirrel in and out among
us. Here. There. In hamper. Out of trunk. Little nuisance. Suddenly,
pouncing upon an old gavel that had been presented to Henry by the High
School Debating Society. David leaped to the window, hammering with all
his might. “Listen, world!” he shouted—“listen here, world—out there—to
me!” and ’pon my soul, it suddenly seemed that through the drone of
that June afternoon, lowing with cattle, crowing with cocks, buzzing
with insects, there did descend a silence. Fantastic, of course, and
yet in the light of subsequent events—that child hammering his gavel
up in the little window that overlooked his universe, was not just any
child hammering his gavel for the world to heed him.

[25] It was about a six-month after the move to the Igrotte house that
my brother Dave, a quiet and rather thoughtful child up to then, asked
me a question that surprised me with its observation. There had been a
labor-strike among the men who were laying the new-paved road between
Centralia and Middleton, and one of the so-called scabs had been struck
by a rock thrown by a union man. When old Jessup told me of this
happening, I was salting out weeds between the bricks of a garden-walk.
Helping me at this task, Davey, digging away, looked up to remark, as
ants scurried from the path of his trowel, “Ants run their world better
for themselves than folks do, Bek. Bees too. Bees and ants all work
together. Why are folks always trying to crowd each other out?”

I sometimes wonder if right then and there was not planted into his
heart the unconscious resolve that much of his life-effort must be
waged against man’s inhumanity to man.

That day he was just a kid, faintly perturbed with his first awareness
of injustice....

[26] On his tour of the deserts of the world, in behalf of his
reclamation-theories, it was said of him that at noonday, when the
natives lay scattered about the tents like so many meal-sacks, he
remained at his desk throughout the siesta-period, reviewing in map and
diagram the morning’s observations.

Midsummer campaigns across desert-country in the close density
of sleeping cars, when members of his party succumbed to actual
prostration, were not to faze him, nor for that matter, the terrific
onslaught of mosquitoes the year of his famous Alaskan tour in behalf
of his long-sighted domestication and cultivation of the ovibos, when
the eyes of the dog-teams were literally bitten closed, and the motors
of the aeroplanes, as they left the ground, were clogged with these
pestiferous insects.




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Sixteen_


The most radical changes seemed to come so imperceptibly, that within
the year it was as if there had never been a time when the spacious
front verandah of his sister Emma’s, at the far end of Sycamore Street,
had not been cluttered with boarders seated on round straw mats. A
Max Juss, overseer of the Tallahassee Tobacco Factory, his wife, and
two children. Old man Clotillo, a county-clerk. The Misses Breen,
Daisy and Sachet, milliners, with a shop in the Renchler Block, and
Miss de Lisle, who taught violin and guitar, a sign in Emma’s right
parlor-window to that effect.

Even the disintegration of the outward appearance of the house had been
too gradual to disturb the perception of youth, to whom years are long.
The scarred, nicked places on the verandah-paint, where before the
white and green had shone. Starchy lace curtains had become strings.
Weeds and dandelions had cropped up between the bricks of the sidewalk,
to say nothing of Emma’s once famous reception-hall, the first in
Centralia, now always agog-looking with boarders’ letters stuck into
its mirror.

In no time at all, it was as if Davey could not remember when his
sister’s house was not the rather derelict-looking affair with the
front shades all at cross-purposes and the Misses Breen’s handkerchiefs
drying against the window-panes.

Claire, who taught kindergarten, and frequently came home with her
tired, pretty hands filled with colored-paper mats and putty pigs, used
to spruce bravely, after school hours, at the littered rooms, with
the dining-table always half-set now, Mr. Juss’s bottle of iron-tonic
and Miss Sachet’s box of Kay’s Komplaint Pills huddling around the
catsup-bottle. But it was not much help to putter. The Millikens’ was
an out-and-out boarding-house now. Emma served five prunes to the dish,
and the sign over the bathtub read: “Please scour. Do unto others as
you would wish to be done by.”

Poor Emma. It was hard to be a Milliken and a Schuyler. Morton’s mouth
was bitter with it, too. The name of his father or of his brother never
left his lips. Secretly, he wrote occasionally to his mother. After a
while, what was practically inevitable happened. Morton, whose business
connections had been solely with his father, lost his position as agent
with a local realty company, and then one that Henry procured for him
as collector for the Ice and Coal Company. Not through anything more
than just mild inability. Gradually, Morton became just a putterer
around home. Oiling locks. Mending rugs, fences, china, rain-spouts and
pocket-book clasps. A handy-man-about-the-house. The Schuylers quailed
over that; and as he lost subsequent position after position, just of
mild inability, every time, they became extra nice to him. Emma most
of all, who meticulously ended all household disputes and difficulties
with boarders by stating that she would talk the matter over with “Mr.
Milliken.” As a matter of fact, Mr. Milliken, as time marched on, could
more and more frequently be found sitting in a basement room that had
been fitted up as office, whittling on the wooden toys that Claire had
brought home from the kindergarten, for some mysterious reason known
only to himself, whiling away his time by making them leaner.

The change at Bek’s had come perhaps as more of a shock; and yet, in
some ways, it had probably the least perceptible change of all.

Bek still strode the farm somewhat terrifically, with her skirts
tucked into her boots. The perfection of cattle still stood in rows in
her model barns of asphalt gutters, running water, and electric light.
The clean-clipped acreage of yellow mustard, alfalfa, and grazing-land,
scattered with salt-rock, silos, red roofs, stone hedges, flowed out to
the horizon.

Winslow still smoked his pipe on the side porch and sketched his
afternoons away down in the lower meadow. Steve strode about the farm
now, doing such solitary odd jobs as breaking a colt or drilling for
artesian water.

The great difference that was not on the surface was what changed the
aspect of Bek’s farm so that about the entire place there was the
feeling of something having died.

A dream had died.

Ex-Governor Howey now owned the Bek Renchler place. For the modicum
of one hundred dollars a month, Bek remained on the farm as overseer,
occupying the house as formerly, except during September and sometimes
part of October, when the Warrington Howeys, from Washington, came on
for their annual visit.

Then Bek and the family moved into the rooms over the garage. They were
four, firm, square, bright rooms, with running water and clean new
paper and yellow floors.

The Howeys were extremely nice about this, and urged Bek and her little
brood to remain in the left wing of the house.

This Bek refused to do. The Howeys and Schuylers had never been on
that sort of social plane. The Howey girls had been away in the East
at school while the Schuyler girls were growing up. The Howey boys had
been scattered since their days of Military Academy. Then, too, the
family had lived in the state capital for eight years. The enormously
wealthy old Ex-Governor himself, a widower for twenty years, spent
two-thirds of his time in the East or abroad, negotiating all the
while, by proxy of agent and telegram, in land and cattle deals back
home.

Frequently, during his two terms, the Governor had called Henry to the
capital for conference. Bek had stumped the country in behalf of his
second campaign. The Ex-Governor, through his agents, had negotiated
mortgages and sale of cattle and land with Bek.

The families mingled in this fashion, except, come to think about it, a
Howey had never crossed a Schuyler threshold on social visit bent, and
_vice versa_.

It is doubtful if Bek ever thought about it consciously. But the idea
of remaining to occupy the left wing of the house, while Warrington and
his French wife and three little girls flooded in, was unthinkable.
She never batted an eye about the annual performance of that move
into the flat over the garage; but from the first time that it took
place, when she had sat up all night, placating Leslie, to whom the
new sleeping-conditions were terrifying, some of the light went out
of Bek’s face. The pages of her diary, into which she wrote with
consistency, are blotchy in through here.

All this, the year that Davey was eleven and the World War broke out
with a clap over what had seemed to all thereabouts, except Henry, the
clear noontide of Peace on Earth.




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Seventeen_


At first, Mathilda cried secret tears over Davey’s having to attend the
county school.

She cried secret tears over pretty nearly everything these days. That
was why her face seemed to wear an almost constant smile stretched
across the surface of her glassy teeth.

It was as if she had erected that smile on a stick and carried it about
before her face as you would a lorgnette.

They were slightly larger than the life, these artificial teeth
of Mathilda’s, with a dazzling-white lifeless glaze to them, and
pink-celluloid gums that had an air of detachment from the unsullied
porcelains.

The girls had remonstrated for years against this blazing dentistry,
and once, on one of her visits to Springfield, Rita had decoyed her
mother-in-law to the office of one of the town’s most eminent dental
practitioners. But it was no use. Mathilda would not so much as mount
the chair.

The great strip of smile, cutting so blatantly through the lean, bony
structure of her cheeks, was a barrage behind which she could cry more
secretly. It hurt her so terribly for the Old Gentleman, almost as much
as for Davey, considering the school taxes her husband had paid into
the town of Centralia. Davey, because of the move, obliged to receive
his schooling in a little one-room county structure that was no larger
than a shed!

Second Ward School in Centralia, where David had enjoyed only three
months of primary grade, was a three-story brick structure, as
regular-looking as a biscuit-tin. Henriette Simpson taught in that
school. Every Schuyler youngster had at one time or another carved
initials into its desks. Second Ward School was somehow David’s
right! sobbed Mathilda, bitterly, to herself. David’s right. The Old
Gentleman’s right!

Of course, there would have been a way to obtain special dispensation
by establishing Davey’s residence, nominally at least, with the Morton
Millikens in Centralia. Mathilda was all for that. Dave could leave
with Henry each morning and return with him at night. But the Old
Gentleman would hear to no such arrangement. No favor of any man! His
back and his head were up, so far as his habits in adversity were
concerned.

Besides, with the early-morning and after-school chores that were now
falling to Dave, county school, only one-half mile distant, offered
advantages.

At six o’clock, as early in the spring season as March, Davey used
to help Tarkington’s old black Nemo drive a herd of about sixty
Tarkington cattle to pasture, and then drive them home at dusk. Winter
mornings, long before the stars were gone, with a black crocheted
scarf of his mother’s tied over his ears, which he removed well before
coming in sight of the lantern hung in Nemo’s barn door, Dave used to
lickety-split over to the Tarkington place to help Nemo mix bran.

For this he received eighty cents a week. Sickeningly often, the winter
that Davey was eight, Mathilda, secretly from the Old Gentleman, who
even though knowing its inevitability would have yelled about it, was
obliged to accept from the boy this eighty cents every Saturday night.

He gave it so blithely and yet a little furtively. No spoken word
between him and his mother, and yet guarding the transaction from his
father, even as Mathilda guarded it.

“I’ll make it all right with you some day,” Mathilda was in the habit
of saying to him, as the coins slipped hands.

“Make it all right!” Why, as it was, the days were packed with being
all right. All-too-fleet days, for the doing of the many, many things
to be crammed into them. Even the ones of rising in the chilled dusk to
the light and heat of the candle stuck into the bottle, or to perhaps a
bit of gleam thrown in from a last great isolated star showing through
the frosted design on the window-pane.

The names of those last stars of the cold dawns were “Procyon” and
“Sirius.” “Castor” had a green fire in her. There was a way, with
Henry alongside, to figure the distance from the earth of certain
constellations. They had run across an old volume of Henry’s during the
move, called _The Geography of the Stars_, and another old text-book,
_Handbook of Astronomy_.

When it was not too cold in the room to have an arm out from the cover,
there were volumes to pore over. _The Relations of the Planets._
Pictures of them. There was a precision about this business of the
stars, once you were able to figure it out a little for yourself. There
was beauty in precision. Soldiers had precision. Stars. Funny, even
Dora had precision. The way her eyes made you want to look and look,
because they were set at exactly the right equidistance and were just
the precise blue of perfection.

There was an array of books which Davey had routed out of the attic for
himself. _Canterbury Tales._ _David Copperfield._ _Around the World
in Eighty Days._ _Black Beauty._ _A Condensed History of England._
_Peck’s Bad Boy._ _Golden Treasury._ _Forestry and Fisheries Report
for the State of Maine, 1901._ _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde._ _Treasure
Island._ _Essays of Elia._ _Franklin’s Autobiography._ _Æsop’s Fables._
_Burke on Taste._ _Boy’s Æneid._ _Voyage of the “Beagle.”_ _Gilbert’s
Voyage to Newfoundland._ _Don Quixote._ _Gil Blas._ _A Study of the
Diseases of Chickens._ _Circus Tim._ _The Jungle Book._ _Hoosier
Holiday._ _Course in Telegraphy._ _Jesse James—The Boy._ _The Red Badge
of Courage._ _The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew_, with “From
Henriette to Bek, with best wishes for a Happy Birthday, June 6, 1889,”
in angular script on the fly-leaf.[27]

A jungle of books picked hit-or-miss. For the lure of a title. Or
because, as in the case of the _Boy’s Æneid_ or _Burke on Taste_ or
Charles Lamb, Henry had paved the way. Or just because.

_The Red Badge of Courage._ Spelling out the title under its coating
of dust, it came through at one so! _The Red Badge of Courage._ Years
before he was ready to read it, that book was always lying around
somewhere in his room. For a long time it propped the unsteady fourth
leg of the small white-pine table. Once it was used for pressing
mint-leaves and left on a window-sill all night to be rained on and
warped. Motley of books, chosen for a motley of reasons or lack of them.

No, these were not days and nights to mope over, or to have Mathilda
dry her eyes over. Each and every one of them was a key-hole to which
you glued your eye and saw something of the great, grand, alluring
tomorrow.

The schoolhouse, a one-room frame building with a fine-bellied stove
on a tin mat in the center, adjoined the pasture where Davey helped
old Nemo to herd the Tarkington stock. One of the fascinating aspects
of the Tarkington pasture was that the city-limits imaginary line ran
through its middle, cutting a salt-rock in two.

The school windows overlooked all this. There were blackboards around
the four walls, and carved and whittled desks in sizes sufficiently
graduated to accommodate seven grades.

Small Miss Hassebrock, who the winter that Davey was eight was
beginning to sicken of a bone-disease that was to almost ossify her
and keep her ridden to a slanted bed for the next eighteen years of
her life, carried across her narrow shoulders the burden of that
ill-equipped schoolhouse.

There was a handful of children, seven grades and first year High
School entrusted to the tutelage of the gallant, ill-trained, underpaid
and undersized little person who seventeen years before had graduated
from the equally inadequate High School of a town called Ideola.

In the course of her seven-hour school-day, Miss Hassebrock taught
two-plus-two; Ohio-is-bounded-on-the-North-by; James-Monroe’s-
Administration-was-the most-serene-and-yet-one-of-the-most-important-
periods-in-the-life-of-the-nation;

  (2_x_ + 3_y_ = 8)
  (3_x_ + 7_y_ = 7);

This-is-the-forest-primeval;
The-battle-of-Bunker-Hill-all-things-considered-is-the-most...;
Listen-my-children-and-you-shall-hear; Friends, Romans, Countrymen;
How-many-yards-of-50-inch-linoleum-are-required-to-cover-a-floor-27×34;
all interspersed with drawings of geometrical cubes, spheres; rhomboids
in red chalk; and antiquated relief-maps of Europe and Asia.

It meant that in that small room of graduated desks and conglomerate
subjects, there was allotted to each child about twenty minutes of
direct instruction out of the day. Twenty minutes of Miss Hassebrock
tilting her little brain, like a spinster at the old gesture of tilting
her teapot, to let trickle the stale, small array of academic facts and
near-facts of the vintage of Ideola High School Normal Course, 1897.

The schoolroom squirmed with this ill-assorted conglomerate of
children, waiting or dreading their turn for the trickle. The mornings
were riddled by their spit-balls, hacked up by their penknives,
whispered into; hissed into; scraped into by their restless feet.
Often, during the drone of these days, with his mind sliding and shying
away from the chief exports of the Argentine Republic and “In 1066,
William the Conqueror invaded England,” David would become part of a
fast and furious spit-ball barrage taking place beneath desks.

These occasions could reduce Miss Hassebrock to a state of helplessness
that sent her rushing and dodging pell-mell about the room, usually
ending in tears, the poor pug of her hair lopsided and every pupil in
the room suddenly subsiding into a state of repentant and aboveboard
beatitude.

There was something a little horribly pathetic about her, as she stood
there defeated.

Once Davey, who sensed that more strongly than was comfortable for him,
let a few of the spit-balls lie conspicuously in his open palm, thereby
offering himself up as victim to take the edge off her somewhat
disquieting defeat. But if Miss Hassebrock saw them, she did not let
on. It was simpler, somehow, just to take up her pointer and indicate
on the map the point where the Suez Canal becomes the north outlet of
the Red Sea.

That meant the spit-ball barrages must to her seem something
appallingly outside her control. As a matter of fact, she used to
cry over them after school, bitterly and privately humiliated by the
realization of her lack of disciplinary powers.

Davey sensing that, kept out of future spit-ball encounters rather than
endure what the sight of her, standing there with her hair sliding, did
to him.

There were nine pupils in all. Ross Tawkett, a great lanky
sixteen-year-old fellow in the seventh grade. How he could confuse and
bully and intimidate poor Miss Hassebrock with questions specifically
designed to trip her up. Thus:

“Now Ross, name three of the eight planets of the solar system.”

“Mercury-Venus-Earth!”

“Excellent. That will be all, Ross.”

“No, now you name the rest of them to me, Miss Hassebrock, ’n’ then
I’ll know them all eight for next lesson.”

“Why—Ross, that’s not in our today’s lesson. Be seated.”

Poor Miss Hassebrock, sufficient unto the day were the facts thereof!

Once Davey found himself in the position of prompting his teacher.

“How can Thomas Jefferson have died on July 4th, 1826, Miss
Hassebrock,” sneered Ross one day, “when you just told me John Adams
died that same date?”

“Why, Ross—did I? Now did I? How come? Let me see—guess I must have
meant—now how come I made that mistake?”

How well Davey knew that they had both died on that date exactly fifty
years after they had signed the Declaration of Independence. Henry had
read him that long before he had ever entered a schoolroom.

“They both died on that same date,” mouthed David; hissed David to Miss
Hassebrock behind Ross’s back. And then when she continued to regard
him helplessly, held up two fingers in emphasis. “Both. Both—died.
Same—day!”

“Of course,” said Miss Hassebrock, rather coldly. “It is a well-known
historical fact that both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on the
same date. David, come to order or take a demerit.” Ross was a class
terror, all right.[28]

Six out of the nine pupils were primaries, besides David, who fitted
into third grade because of certain precocities resulting from the long
evenings with Henry, and a girl named Flora Wohlgemuth in fifth, whose
father ran a flour-mill. A great flax doll, with the loveliest lips,
that adenoids kept rather breathlessly apart.

Knowledge of that educational boll-weevil, the adenoid, was not part of
Miss Hassebrock’s teaching-equipment. She daily instructed little Flora
to keep her mouth closed, and struggled to crash the principles of long
division through the two greatly enlarged adenoidal impedimenta to
Flora’s alertness.

Later, still without benefit of surgery, Miss Wohlgemuth was in turn to
teach school, through those same two, even more deplorably enlarged,
impedimenta.

There was something about Flora’s round little smudge of a face that
one day impelled David to yield to an old temptation to wash it roughly
with a snowball. There was an hour after school of writing “The Good
That Men Do Lives After Them” fifty times down foolscap; and Mrs.
Wohlgemuth, who ran a butter-and-egg stand “at market” in Court House
Square, complained to the Old Gentleman in Low German.

For it, the Old Gentleman stood David up on the edge of the kitchen
table and gave him three wallops against the seat of Henry’s cut-down
trousers.

It was almost a pleasantly reminiscent chastisement, recalling
the satisfaction of feeling the snow squash up against Flora’s
boneless-feeling little face, which had to it the feel of mashed potato.

Years later, from the vantage of a private hospital room, made
possible by the annuity of her one-time pupil, Miss Hassebrock used
to strain her tired old hack of a brain for anecdotes of Davey. She
was too conscientious to invent, even where anecdotes would have been
treasures, but as she used to say, there was just nothing to be said
about Davey as a youngster, those primary-years, that could not be
said of the average run of them who had shuffled their small-boy days
across the routine pine floor of that schoolroom. Nothing, except the
certain precocity traceable to the home-opportunity of reading with an
older brother, and the intent quality he had of listening and sucking
in, well in advance, the work of the classes ahead of him. And then the
funny additional precocities that contact with the older man’s mind
had given him. Rag-tags of odds and ends of information that clung to
his mind like fuzz. At six, he had already begun to hoard books in the
secret library of the spring-house.[29]

Once at Friday afternoon platform-exercises, when a small boy named Ike
Mintz, the son of a dealer in old iron, began to sniffle and shuffle of
inability to remember his allotted recitation, Davey volunteered with
the following:

  Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
  Shades of the prison-house begin to close
      Upon the growing boy.
  But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
      He sees it in his joy;
  The Youth, who daily farther from the East
      Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
      And by the vision splendid
      Is on his way attended;
  At length the Man perceives it die away,
  And fade into the light of common day.

Henry frequently read this poem aloud to himself, evenings. It is
doubtful if, at the time, Dave took in its meaning as much as its
music. It is certain he did not know its source. Neither did Miss
Hassebrock.

No, he was scarcely a memorable pupil, except for his sturdy little
personality thumping in so dependably every morning. Never tardy.
Seldom unruly enough for more than a passing reprimand. Seldom
brilliant. Never remiss.

There is this little incident, which has to do with Teddy. All of
the school-day Teddy lay in the vestibule that led into the small
section where the children hung their hats and coats, or wandered the
countryside of the vicinity, usually showing up at recess or lunch
period for the droppings from Davey’s lunch-basket.

There was an old feud between Punt, a fox-terrier that belonged to Red
Kelsoe, and Teddy.

Their masters had bitten the dust together more than once over the
mangled ear or the torn flank of the conquered. Teddy was half Punt’s
size, but an eye-to-eye fighter. Punt, on the other hand, had a trick
of hurling himself from the rear, taking his adversary unawares. Teddy
bore scars that had been inflicted by a rearward adversary.

One day, just as the children were filing out of school, a series of
yelps split the tired, four-o’clock air.

Teddy’s moment had come. At the very threshold of the building, his
teeth into the rear of the terrier’s neck, Teddy had Punt pinioned in
the bloody dust.

Through the cries of excited children, as they formed a tight circle,
the air thickening and blurring with more dust and yelps, there mingled
the squeals and the high admonitive tones of Miss Hassebrock.

There was a red trail across the school-yard and with his teeth all of
their depth into the terrier’s throat, Teddy was shaking him like a
rat, releasing him only to prove further the glory of his sure vantage,
by leaping at him for fresh clutch.

It was a one-sided struggle this time, and David had finally to pull
Teddy off by the scruff of his neck, while he still leaped and yelped
for more Punt-flavored blood.

It was Davey’s and Teddy’s moment, as Punt, limping, slunk off
tail-down past his master, the children applauding the turning of the
tables of this old feud between dogs and masters.

It was Davey’s moment all right, when Red, instead of leaping at him
with his usual taunt of victory, stood grinding his toe in the dust.

Except that Davey knew what Teddy knew! Teddy had conquered his foe
with his foe’s own despised methods. Teddy had leaped on Punt unawares!
Davey knew, in his heart, that was the only way Teddy could ever have
gained that particular first strangle-hold over an adversary twice his
heft and cunning. Teddy must have leaped at Punt as he lay sleeping at
the threshold, waiting for Red. It was in the half-slink of his tail,
as he crept up to his master. It was in the fawning lick of his tongue.
Davey knew! And Teddy knew what Davey knew, and victory was as dead-sea
fruit.

And in that instant, as Davey stood looking down at his dog, and shame
of shameful conquest lay in the eyes of both, the belated flash of
understanding was transmuted to Red.

“You’re a dirty little sneak!” he shouted, and batted David sideways on
the head, so that he saw things in waves. “He sneaked up on Punt—yer
dog’s a dirty little sneak, too!”

“Red,” said Miss Hassebrock sharply, stepping forward into the ring,
“that blow was a cowardly act. Either you apolog——”

“No,” said David, a little dully, “Teddy did sneak up. His winning
don’t count.”

That evening, after the supper-things had been cleared, Mathilda,
who had pains in her legs from having done a day’s washing in the
damp Igrotte cellar, set about the unsavory task of stewing up some
asafœtida in an old tomato-can.

This she sewed up into a small bag and hung about David’s protesting
neck, for what she termed his right peaked look.


FOOTNOTES:

[27] I remember walking across the Tarkington pastures one day and
encountering Davey, with Teddy and Grime minding his sheep, lying
stomach-flat on a rock, reading an old book of mine which he had dug
out of gracious knows where, and which seemed to be causing him some
bewilderment and no great entertainment. “Five Little Peppers and How
They Grew?” he said, looking up at me with his small, square, intent
face, and a quality of eye-strain in his gaze that was later in life
to cause him bad headaches, “Gee—I thought this was a story of the way
pepper grows—and here it’s nothing but the name of a lot of folks.” He
had picked the book on the assumption that it was on botany. There were
years, watching Davey grow, when I sometimes thought of him as becoming
a horticulturist.

[28] ... Honorable Ross Tawkett, who was probably responsible, more
than any other individual, for my brother’s first candidacy for public
office, made the introductory address. He did not, as many believe,
first come into David’s life when they were fellow members of the
International Board of 1937. On the contrary, Ross had lived in our
county for one winter when he was sixteen, then his father, who was a
dairy-farmer, moved to the outskirts of Springfield.

[29] I think that David’s library, begun, I always say, back in the
days when Father accidentally stumbled across a whole nest of books he
had secreted in the spring-house, is probably the greatest commentary
of all, upon his kind of intellectual curiosity. On two important
occasions, it has fallen to my lot to superintend the moving of his
library. First from his home in Springfield to the State Mansion.
There were then, as I remember it, about fourteen hundred, exclusive
of law-books. Many years later, in the move to Washington, there were
over again as many to be recatalogued and boxed. Nor were these volumes
books with uncut pages. A book never reached his permanent shelves
until its contents had been either read or “duly noted.” Insatiably
curious, the headings under which his books fell into catalogue were as
grotesque as varied.

He loved and revered lyric poetry, although modern verse was on
his shelves. The only soothing agent ever discovered for one of
his blinding headaches was curiously enough, Dora’s low and rather
sing-song voice which she had cultivated to a monotony that could
fairly drone him to sleep on the word-rhythms that he loved.

His personal collection was catalogued under such headlines as
Horticulture. Electronic Theory. Soil Chemistry. Parasites in
Central American Tropics. Geographies. Organic Chemistry. Evolution.
Psychiatry. Aeronautics. Physics. History. Greek, American, French,
Russian, Scandinavian Literatures. Drama. Sociology. Church History.
Heredity. Determinism. Behaviorism. Anthropology. National Parks.
Deserts. Travel. Genetics. Shorthorn Cattle. Morphology. Race. Essays.
Philosophy. Waterways. Radio. Theater. Birds. Chess. Dogs. Population.
Fundamentalism. Astronomy. Public Health. Theory of Relativity.
Fisheries. Astronomy. Furniture. Architecture. Journalism.

Senator Harmon once said of my brother, that he knew so well the secret
of surrounding himself with brilliant minds on every subject, that he
had only to press a button marked Coinage, Immigration, Mexico, or
Techno-Psychology, and lo, a specialist on that subject appeared before
him.

That, of course, is an amusing exaggeration. It could more truthfully
be said of my brother’s library. Books were literally at his elbow by
the thousand, on call for almost any reference.




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Eighteen_


A man down at Wohlgemuth’s mill was enlisting. He was a fellow with a
receding chin and a reddish birthmark seared across his cheek, who had
drifted in on a freight-train from Kansas City, and who claimed to have
walked it overland from San Francisco.

For over a year he had been working about the neighborhood. First as
herdsman at the Howey farm, for a while doing chores for Bek, and
finally running a truck for Ed Wohlgemuth.

He was a gangling, big-jointed fellow, full of the lore of the
open road, and with a quid as big as a nugget protruding from one
cheek or the other. He had fought in the Boxer Rebellion and in the
Spanish-American War, and “guerilled,” as he put it, in Mexico and done
six years’ navy-service. A soldier of fortune in the literal sense of
the word. Anybody’s fight was his fight.

The boys, for miles around, clustered about Pete (the only name by
which he was known thereabouts) along about sunset-time, on the row
of barrels that flanked the Wohlgemuth Mill. He had the knacks that
delight boys. He could spit straight, and twice any competitor’s
distance. He could lure a rabbit out of a hole by a jargon he knew. He
could also, by another mysterious jargon, entice grasshoppers to the
back of his tattooed hands and make them spit tobacco there without
so much as touching them. He could tie a sailors’ knot with one hand,
cause hairs from a white horse’s tail to stand straight on end at the
tip of his nose, pull a cork from the inside of a narrow-necked bottle
with a bit of twine, bring down one blackbird to every shot and do a
snake-dance that he had learned from the Pueblos.

And now Pete, who was an Australian by birth, was about to set off
for Montreal to enlist under his own flag. It was the closest that
remote thing, the World War, had penetrated the uninterrupted rhythm of
Whittier County.

To David, racing home that dusk, from having sat about on the row of
cider-barrels with Pete and his cohorts, the fuzz of the day’s heat
was a taste up against his tongue. Cattle lowed. The winding of smoke
from his father’s chimney curled languidly against a torrid sky, and
out of all this gentle trance, something a little terribly alien seemed
suddenly to have come to life off the printed page of a history-book.
War had come to life.

Pete, some one who was as casual to the countryside as—why as the very
barns, the meadows, the silos, the hedges, the farmers themselves, was
going to war. War had come up off the history-pages into reality.

Pete was going. The tidings made Dave’s bare feet send pebbles spinning
from under them. He was panting when he reached home, from the dual
consciousness of being late, which always grated against the Old
Gentleman, who was more easily irascible than formerly, and with the
burden of his news.

His mother and Henry were just about to draw up around the supper-table.

Supper served as near as possible to the range, even in summer, made
dishing-up an easier matter for Mathilda, who no longer kept help.
Trina, poor distressed creature, at the catastrophe of the family-move
from the House on Sycamore Street, had been obliged to accept another
position in Centralia, for the support of the two invalid old sisters
she cared for.

Besides, it was cheerier in the kitchen than in the little aperture
of a room off the parlor that was jammed, except for a narrow rim
for slithering around with the dishes of food, with the heavy,
grape-and-leaf-design, walnut dining-room set from the House on
Sycamore Street.

There was no prevailing upon the Old Gentleman to let go of that
ponderous “set,” even to the antique-dealers from Springfield, who came
sniffing.

There was a lamp with a green-paper shade burning in the center of
the kitchen table; and Henry must have been reading _War and Peace_,
by Tolstoi, because it was hung now, to keep his page, over the lower
rung of his chair, and his place was rumpled, and his unused plate
pushed center toward the sugar-bowl and castor. The exuding heat of
countryside, mingling with the blazing breath of the range, was like
steam, and had the cling to it of a hot, wet blanket.

“Father, Pete’s going to war!”

The Old Gentleman, seated on the kitchen porch, with his shoes and
socks on the floor beside him, and his hot feet dangling to the ground
and soaking in the dew of the small surrounding plot of grass, screwed
around a face that had been jerked from the intent observation of his
dozen or so wyandottes taking roost.

“War?”

“What war?” asked Mathilda and began tilting a skillet of steaming
okra-and-tomato stew into a bowl.

“Why, Mother,” said Henry gently, and rising to take the dish from her,
“you know what war. We’ve discussed precious little else at this table
for weeks.”

“Of course I know, Henry,” snapped Mathilda, and turned toward him with
a flick of her cup-towel. “Don’t speak to me as if I were a baby!”

“I’m sorry, Mother!”

Mathilda’s memory was beginning to lapse on her, more and more.
Sometimes in stretches that were impossible to ignore.[30]

In the beginning, the family met these lapses in pretty much Henry’s
wise fashion, usually succeeding in jerking her back to an injured,
if resentful air she always employed to cover up these hiatuses that
bewildered her and made her constantly afraid of the next.

“Of course! Of course! And what’s he going to war for?”

“He’s going to fight for his country, Mother. His country is—the
Brit-ish Empire. A fellow’s got to fight for his country, Mother, if
his country’s gone to war.”

“Stop talking like a parrot, Davey,” said Henry with rather an
unheard-of-for-him kind of brusqueness and jerked his chair closer to
the table.

The Old Gentleman was pretty apt to become excited and shout at his
mild-mannered son, if these supper-table controversies led to certain
political topics that had particularly to do with the situation in
Europe, and upon which they differed.

Conscription was one of them; and here was Dave running home with a
subject perilously sure to lead up to it. Be it said for Henry that he
made a gallant effort to divert it.

“While I think of it, Mother, here are those washers you’ve been
asking about for your faucets. Ed Ryan, whom I defended way back in a
horse-thieving case, gave me a pocketful.”

“Thank you, Henry. I can do with them nicely. Seven washers for
defending a body against a horse-thievery charge. Ah me, that’s why
you’ll remain a poor man all your life, son. Fine a lawyer as there is
in the state, and taking washers for fee. ’Tain’t dignified, son.”

The Old Gentleman ambled in then, his attention persistently snagged by
the subject Henry had tried to divert. “Who should stop talking like a
parrot? It’s high time the boys of this country should begin talking
like parrots, from the look of yesterday’s _Enquirer_. Wilson can’t any
more keep this country out of wa——”

“Puppa! Now Puppa!” trebled in Mathilda, herself tired to death of
these supper-table reiterations between father and son. “Taste, Puppa!
Bek sent Stevey over with this okra special for your supper. Stevey’s
not looking well, Puppa. Sometimes I think he must have caught some
kind of a slow fever up there at Agricultural School, where he was last
year for that spell.”

“And if talk don’t do the work,” bellowed the Old Gentleman in
immediately argumentative key and starting to swirl the coffee in
his cup with a gouging, angry spoon—“if talk don’t do the work—then
I say _conscription_! And the man who don’t favor conscription for
the salvation of his country in time of need, don’t deserve to have a
country to defend. If you’ve been through what I’ve been in a country
where they demand the best years of a young man’s life, war or no war,
a little conscription in time of need shouldn’t be necessary, and if it
is, by God, I’m for it.”

“You are talking the phraseology of militarism, Father. You’re the
parrot! Go out and train cigar-Indians on such flimsy logic, but not
men who think. Besides, if it is your patriotism that is so aroused,
the modern doctrine of neutrality is an American idea that Washington
conceived and Jefferson phrased in 1803. You can be equally American by
adhering to them.”

“Doctrines of neutrality don’t change the natures of men. Men are men——”

“Except when they are hyenas.”

“Even a hyena will fight for his——”

“Only a hyena should——”

The Old Gentleman began rapping the table with his fork. “I won’t have
sedition talked in my house, where I’ve got a future citizen growing up
to fight for his country, right or wrong.”

“When Decatur said that, Father, he was in love with the magic of a
phrase, not its meaning.”

“He was a brave man and a patriot.”

“He was both, Father. But there is a valor born of hysteria.”

“I talk facts. Not high-sounding phrases.”

“Just the reverse. You talk phrases. The phrases of the immemorial
cant of warfare. Embroidered banners of phrases, made to cover up the
stinking realities of greed and war.”

“Hen-ery! Use nice words.”

“I’m sorry, Mother. Please, Father, there is no use going over it all
again. Whom do you think I ran into on High Street today? Remember Al
Hopkins——?”

“There is this much use,” shouted the Old Gentleman, working himself
more and more into the luxury of an orgy of rage, “I won’t have
a—pacifist in my house! I haven’t raised two sons, and a third one
growing up, to say nothing of sons-in-law and grandchildren, to have
sedition in my house in my old age.”

“Puppa!”

“Let him rave, Mother. My hope for him is that he will never have
anyone in his house with more seditious thoughts against country than
I.”

“I don’t know about that. When a man questions another man’s right to
fight for his country——”

“I question every man’s right to fight. To shed blood. To splatter out
of a man’s heart, with bullets, the life that women go down into hell
to bring forth.”

“Hennery!”

“And I say a country’s honor comes even before that!”

“Puppa, your biscuit is getting cold.”

“And I say no country’s honor can be raised or lowered by shooting the
blood out of human hearts.”

“Such talk is traitorous. I won’t have it talked before Davey. You’re a
traitor. Damnation, you’re a——”

“I won’t be talked to like this, Father.”

“Hennery! Puppa!”

“You don’t deserve the benefits of the country you live in. You don’t
honor it. You don’t know what it is to come like I came, penniless,
and after years of an empty belly, into the country that gave me my
everything. You don’t honor the country that honored your parents and
gave you a full belly. A country whose cobblestones you should kiss as
I kiss them. Traitor!”

There shot along Henry’s slowly mobile face the first quick flash
of heat-lightning David had ever seen cross it. Small areas around
his nose turned jade-white and quivered. Sweat sprang out across
the considerable bulge of his forehead. His lips moved as if trying
to moisten themselves and his neck began to beat. Regarding him,
Mathilda sprang from her chair. Once, in his childhood, she remembered
a paroxysm like that. His sister Bek had dared him to fight a
debt-of-honor over a slate-pencil, in the yard of the House on Sycamore
Street, with a town-boy named Cutty Ditweiler, who had been killed a
year later by the accidental side swipe of his father’s scythe.

Henry had stood by and let himself be bullied, sooner than fight. Bek,
unable to endure it longer, had sprung on Cutty, raining blows, until
the weaker man of the two went down before her. It was then that Henry
had turned sick and run indoors to Mathilda, his face locked in the
same kind of paroxysm that his mother beheld there now.

“Hen-nery!”

His whitish lips were pulled across his face like strips of adhesive
tape, and Davey could not keep his fascinated eyes off them.

“We won’t go into that, Father,” said Henry and swallowed with such an
effort that you could hear his throat click.

Mathilda, frantic at what she saw gathering in her husband’s face,
tilted the whole of the okra-bowl, noisily scraping the last of its
viscous contents to her husband’s plate.

“More okra, Father. Bek sent it over by Stevey. She raises the best I
ever tasted. Stevey isn’t looking so well. Sometimes I think he must
have caught a slow fever——”

“We won’t go into that, won’t we!” exploded the Old Gentleman, his
face a darkening blur, through which he could not or would not see the
darkening face of his son. “We won’t? We _will_ go into that. I’m an
American citizen, grateful for the benefits such a country has given me
and my family, and even the bad times I am in now can’t change that.
I’m an American citizen, willing to give every grandson and son I got,
if, God forbid, the country gets into war. When you talk as you do in
front of your brother, even if he is only a child, I say it again, you
are a traitor. A traitor to your country, sir! A damn traitor!”

The Old Gentleman was launched into his rage now. He shouted. He
screamed. His voice came leaping over his lips, plunging into choking
incoherence.

“God strike me—down—before I should have a son—a—damned traitor!”

It was then that Henry rose to his feet. He had the look of a man whose
blood might have stopped in his veins, and he walked over to his father
and took him up by a loose handful of the shoulder of his coat, and,
for an incredible moment, it looked as if he were going to strike him
down. Only he did nothing of the sort. He just began to shake, gently
at first and then a little more furiously, until the Old Gentleman was
half-off his feet.

“Don’t you dare say that, Father!” To Davey, it scarcely seemed Henry’s
voice. Only something thin, as if some one were clapping two tin
plates. “You—with your bombast! You don’t know what love of country
is. You only love your country enough to die for it, on a battlefield,
the martyred death that gets monuments to it for the spilled entrails
that have fertilized the earth in the name of Hate. You don’t love
your country enough to crucify yourself for it in the name of Love.
You hear me, I do! Yours is the easy patriotism. The patriotism of the
band-wagon. The patriotism of the self-flagellation of feeding the red
dramatic jaws of war with the flesh of your flesh. Of feeding your
sons’ entrails to the bawdy, uncontrolled passions of men of power.
Yours is the easy patriotism. The patriotism that gets its name smeared
across tablets in public squares. I—oh God—what do you know about love
of country?” said Henry, and suddenly, incredibly, released the bunch
of his father’s coat-sleeve and went sobbing from the room.

Davey crept after, but then only after long minutes had
elapsed. Minutes of a silence that was punctuated by the great,
unnatural-sounding ticks of the kitchen clock, with the nosegay painted
on the glass door before its pendulum.

After a while, Mathilda began to cry softly into her apron, and the Old
Gentleman began to swing the low contents of his coffee-cup and drink
it down in slow, untasted gulps.

When Davey crept into his brother’s room, there was the bulk of him
across the red-and-white Paisley quilt of his cot, his head buried in
his arms and his body as felled-looking as a tree.

“Henry,” said Davey, and touched him timidly on the arm, “you’re not
a—a trait-or.”

“No,” said Henry, and jerked himself up and walked to the mirror to run
a runty old hartshorn brush over his baldish spot. “I’m only a damn
fool, Davey.”

“You—you’re great—Henry——”

“Yes, a great ass, Davey,” said Henry, and lifted his small brother by
the armpits and set him down again and walked down into the kitchen,
where his father, in a wilt, still sat in his chair beside the table,
swinging the last dreary contents of his coffee-cup.

“Forgive a fool, Father,” said Henry, and walked up and held out a hand.

“Forgive an older fool,” mumbled the Old Gentleman, taking the hand
without glancing up.

“Hennery,” quavered Mathilda, “will you eat your corn pudding now?”

“A big helping of it, Mother.”

The lamp burned like a round and gracious eye into the thickening gloom
of the kitchen. There were a dozen and one after-dinner chores to be
done, the two men and Davey scattering for them after the meal, and
Mathilda lifting the dishes in clumps and carrying them to the pan of
hot water on the stove.

Out in the hen-roost, where Davey scuttled to count up his wyandottes,
first stars could be seen through the square little window in the roof
of the chicken-house. Lovely Vega, which Davey knew by name, popped out
even as he stared. Curious, that men could bicker unashamed beneath the
placid enormity of stars....

There was water to be carried. On the crest at the back of the house
where the pump stood, the billows of the miles of meadows, peaceful
under the whitish night, ran out to horizon, the occasional farmhouses,
barns, silos, and hay-ricks, looking like frail boats riding a gentle
sea.

The pink patch of kitchen window, against which the hooked figure of
his mother moved now and then, swam disembodied from the rest of the
dark house, and might have been a window to the sky.

Across the silence, a figure, dangling a lantern, moved more deeply
into the gloom. It was the Old Gentleman stalking past the barn down
toward the pig-wallow.

It was deep night. Almost as if the evening were holding its breath
before exuding a deep sigh of satisfaction.

Curious, that this peace had held the turmoil of men’s passions that
had raged in that little room down there behind the pink patch.
Passions that must even now be whirling in its timbers.

The pump squeaked as Davey leaned his lips to the spout for the first
cool gush, Teddy standing by to lick the overflow with more greed than
thirst.

How cool it was! It seemed to Davey he could feel it run along his
throat down into a spot against his chest that hurt.

The country stretched out before him as he lifted his head and ran his
tongue around his lips. Tides of country that seemed to emanate from
the spot on which he stood, appearing to rise and fall, even as his own
breathing, and making the flesh of earth feel almost the same flesh as
the soles of his feet.

“My country,” said Davey, in the recitative voice of Friday afternoons,
and standing there with his bare toes oozing into the cool, thin
mud around the pump—“my country—my country, right or wrong. Mr.
Hen-nery—you!—smartee—’tis anyhow!”


FOOTNOTES:

[30] ... even though, as old Jessup used to say, “I says it who
shouldn’t”, if ever a mother was blessed with children who adored
her, that mother was ours. Not only Davey. My sisters were her
obedient little girls to the end. I can still see Phil, on the very
evening that a business venture with which he was concerned took on,
overnight, as it were, proportions that caused us all to gasp, sitting
in the drawing-room of his new Springfield home; telephone jangling,
messengers arriving, reporters and friends in and out, trying to
make Mother, whose memory, as time went on, became paler and paler,
comprehend the dramatics of the thing that was happening all around her.

Dear soul, her dim eyes wanted so to understand what it was caused his
hand to tremble as he told her the same thing in every imaginable form,
trying to penetrate the thick, cruel fog, beating about in his brain
for ways and means to help her.

As for David—I cannot write it clear-eyed—long after he had passed out
of our family jurisdiction, so to speak, and had become the property of
the people, he was at her beck and call. I have seen him sit beside her
for hours on end, patiently trying to answer her feeble and insistent
questions. Tides in the affairs of state and nation beat up around the
very room in which they sat with a terrific imminence, but they never
budged him from her side while she wanted him there.

Poor Mama—yet who am I to pity her!




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Nineteen_


No, it was not the same at Bek’s any more.

The family was only visiting itself, so to speak.

For instance, Davey never returned home from the Model Farm any more,
bearing big, yellow-toothed ears of corn, or pats of Bek’s inimitable
sweet butter, or an occasional squab, all picked and plucked and
wrapped in cheese-cloth for the Old Gentleman’s supper.

The squabs on the farm now belonged to Ex-Governor Howey, and so did
the sweet butter that came out of Bek’s churns just a little sweeter
and creamier than any butter Davey was ever to know.

In some respects, Bek’s scruples seemed a bit beside the point.
According to her interpretation of what was actually a rather loose
arrangement with the Howeys, board and lodging had been allotted to
herself, Winslow, Steve, and Leslie. Therefore Paula, on those few of
her vacations that she spent at home instead of doing summer work at
normal school, slept on a sofa in the dining-room at her aunt Emma’s in
Centralia.

Davey never slept at Bek’s any more, either. His old room at the top of
the house was once more occupied by Stevey; and besides, the old, easy
generosities of being permitted to straddle bareback the pick of Bek’s
stables, or of scuttling into the cool, dark cellar for dill-pickles
stewing under juices and vine leaves, were of the past.

They were Howey property now. Even the pail of huge dills that had gone
annually to Clara in St. Louis was a thing of the past, although Bek
still did put up one private crock of the dark-green beauties. And a
dozen for old Senator Allen, a gentleman farmer forty miles to the
north, who admired Bek and always referred to her as the finest woman
in the state.

Howey property! The very side rails of porch upon which Winslow loved
to prop his feet and tilt back for hours with his eyes closed and his
pipe drooping, were Howey property now. Feet off. Hands off. The old,
easy household, with the enormous bounty of Bek, her largess, her
come-hard but go-easy, were of yesteryear. Even Leslie, who liked to
dig holes and bury such inconsequential addenda as bits of wall paper,
empty spools, playing-cards, was now confined to a fenced-off little
bit of dirt that Bek nightly spaded back into place. Howey dirt.

The overseer of the new Howey holdings, up with the first streak of
dawn, stalking the barns of prize-cattle, riding on the running-board
of trucks, as they rumbled out to field where the threshing-machines
loomed, superintending the installation of new Howey machinery,
inspecting feed-troughs, cattle-hoofs, water-drains and chickens for
pip, had the hard precision of one of the new machines themselves.
Ephraim Howey could have rented out the main house at good profit, and
installed an overseer in the flat over the garage. Bek knew that. It
kept her mouth straight and a little bitter with her scrupulous sense
of obligation.

Anybody’s foot on the rung of a Howey chair, even though that rung
were hidden from sight under the dining-table, grated a message
to her alert nerves. Winslow, who used to paint on a Windsor chair
which he toted about with him from one to the other of his five or six
landscapes, tried and true, had to lug a stool instead now, which Bek
herself built him out of pine-wood and a strip of canvas.

It was a tight, constrained household of conscientious economies.

It is doubtful if the Howey family ever came into much realization of
this fanatical conservation of their interests.

It was ground into Winslow, all right, whose meek inefficiency under
the rigors of the régime seemed to blow him out, like a candle. Bek no
more realized this! On the contrary, she tried with every ounce of her
grim energy to conserve him against the impact of their reverses.

Largely through her insistence that his work be served first, Winslow
still painted throughout the long mornings of Bek’s drudgery, puttered
at picket-fences or lawn-mowing as his share of the farm chores,
trembled and got ague at the mounting problems that had to do with
Steve, and started to execute Bek’s occasional request for further
assistance in a low-geared fashion that almost invariably caused her
to brush him aside and accomplish the task herself, with a power which
never failed to amaze and further reduce him to impotency.

They never ceased, these two, to hypnotize each other by these
temperamental divergencies. They made him precious to her, in the way
that her children, in the first years of their life, had been precious.
As Davey was still precious to her.

She liked to hurl the bulwark of her body between Winslow and the
workaday things that would somehow have made him less dear to her, had
he been able to cope with them.

She lifted from his shoulders, or rather never permitted to descend
there, the burden of so much as the responsibility of choosing the
color of his suits or the weight of his underwear, never realizing that
she doused him with every breath she breathed, as she had done from the
first day she met him and wooed him and married him.

She kept from him as much of the truth about Stevey as she dared. Not
even Bek knew all of that truth. Davey did.

In the crammed routine of his workadays, he used to be sent twice and
even thrice a day, scurrying over from the Igrotte place with a batch
of his mother’s muffins or a fowl for broth, that winter that Stevey
was half-sick most of the time, with pains throughout his body that
made even the light work outlined for him by Bek more than he could
drag himself about to do.

Davey knew the furtive thing about Stevey. He had known it since the
day that Teddy had lain before his eyes with a kicked-in side.

To Davey, in the fretful, pulled, nervous face of his grown nephew
Steve, there was no longer mystery. Only a certain horror that not
improbably played its part in what was to be a life-long aversion to
the taste or smell of spirituous liquors.[31]

Not that anything in David’s experience had prepared him for
realization of anything that had to do with Stevey’s plight. To be
sure, he had seen old Jessup drink, and the Tarkingtons had once had a
gardener who used to come staggering home from periodic Saturday-night
trips to Middleton, to sit under the spring-house and crazily play a
mouth-harp.

But the slaked throat and the burning eye of a member of the family,
that was another matter. Davey knew that, with his intuition.

One dusk, coming across from the Igrotte house with a pan of his
mother’s clabber for Winslow, who yearned for it, now that Bek
meticulously either fed it to the Howey hogs or sent pails of it over
to the Howey farm, Davey came across the strange spectacle of Stevey
standing in some knee-high grass beyond South Meadow, with the figure
of a girl in his arms, one of her hands hanging limply into the grasses
and her head dangling back and showing a great arch of white neck.

“It’s Claire,” said Stevey almost with relief at seeing David, whom he
was given to avoiding since the incident with Teddy. “She’s fainted.
Can’t seem to revive her. Help me home with her, there’s a fellow.”

Davey had known of these meetings. Two or three times, on that
short-cut across the lower rim of South Meadow, he had heard their
voices and skirted a rock-ledge to avoid being seen or heard.

One somehow did not run tattling to elders about knowing this—and
yet—more than once, waking into the quiet of his room underneath the
eaves, something that was not entirely right about his remaining silent
smote Davey with the kind of depression that can overtake in the small
hours of night.

It was quite a job getting Claire to the house. She was in the dead
weight of a swoon from which she did not seem to want to emerge.


FOOTNOTES:

[31] Following that 1920 prohibition-fiasco of America’s, I often
think that my brother’s enormous influence as author of the famous
Modification Bill, which is already beginning to sweep the civilized
world in its application, stands as a particularly fine example of his
unparalleled capacity for balanced middle-man’s judgment.

His personal aversion to drink, dates back, I feel sure, to an incident
that had horribly to do with my own son. Throughout Dave’s boyhood,
it existed to such an extent that I have seen him turn pale from
squeamishness at the sight of someone drinking a cup of cider.

As Police-Commissioner, as Senator, as Governor, he was consistently
austere in meting out punishment to the man whose family suffered of
his intemperance.

And yet, almost marked from childhood, as it were, with an aversion to
drink, this was the man who ultimately was to draft out a compromise
bill that was to save the face of the ridiculous America of the
Volstead Act.




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Twenty_


There were seldom family-conferences now, at least not in the old
sense of the word. Except when Phil came down, (never with Rita or the
children, because of lack of space to put them up) he spent the night
on the curlicue sofa in the Igrotte house.

When Paula came home, she stayed at Emma’s and slept on the day-bed
in the dining-room alcove, and always left her board-money under the
fruit-bowl on the sideboard, over which Emma wept.

Phil worked for an automobile concern in Springfield now, on a
commission basis, and lived in a little two-family bungalow at the
opposite end of town from the one where the boom was taking place.

Every month or so, Phil sent the Old Gentleman a check for ten or
twenty dollars. These, knowing to what extent the Phil Schuylers were
reckoning to the penny themselves, his father never cashed, causing
confusion in Phil’s small banking-matters. Incredibly enough, however,
on the margin of income that forced him to reckon in terms of car
fares, he was already manipulating on the side again, and one month
along with another automobile salesman, had turned over with profit,
two hundred dollars in a speculative land deal.

But the gathering of the clan, even for the festal purpose of
Thanksgiving dinner, was no longer comfortably possible in the little
house in Pessimines Lane. Eight people would have jammed any room in
the house to capacity, and the kitchen range, bought from old man
Igrotte because the one from the House on Sycamore Street would not
fit in, had a top scarcely large enough for a pot, a kettle, and a
skillet.

Mathilda, who was accustomed to six and eight pots seething at once!

And yet, by the mysterious sounding of some sort of a clan-cry, there
did crowd into the stuffiness of the little old Igrotte packing-case,
more Schuylers than had convened together since that evil day brought
down on them by one Mark Milliken.

A little over a week after Davey had helped Stevey carry the limp and
fainting body of Claire from the edge of South Meadow to the Model
Farm, there gathered, in rather muted fashion, most of the family.

Even Clara, who made a great ado about leaving Sam, who was sure to
play penny-ante poker in her absence, arrived this time from St. Louis.

A good baker’s-dozen, counting Dave and Leslie and Stevey and Claire,
were crowded into the Igrotte dining-room that Sunday for the
plate-lunch that Mathilda, with the aid of her daughters and Trina,
who came out to help on her every day off, passed in and out among the
company.

The smattering of grandchildren on an occasion which ill-befitted them,
complicated things a bit. Leslie was there, mild and patient, but a
little timorous even among his own. Grown to the great gangling height
that had not yet reached its full development, it was difficult—it was
grotesque, to seat him among the children. And yet.... Finally Bek,
with the most drawn look anyone there had ever seen on her face, placed
him on a chair between the open folding-doors, so that from every
vantage, as she hastened about with a coarse, white sort of butcher’s
apron the Old Gentleman used to wear into the smoke-house on Sycamore
Street, she could observe him.

Indeed, this austere occasion revolved around grandchildren. A dark,
defiant-looking one, who sat out on the stoop, smoking cigarette after
cigarette, and throwing them away only half-puffed. In a corner of the
dining-room, seated white and silent and absolutely impassive, sat
Claire. A flaxen-haired snow-maiden of imperturbability.

It was a wretched “lap lunch” of restraint, ill-balanced plates, and
buzzing noonday heat that crowded into the little clapboard house. The
Old Gentleman, whose face could be so sly with humor, clamped-looking
and grim now, seated like a troglodyte at the end of the table.

There were no preliminaries. Before Mathilda, followed by Emma, had
carried out the last plate of Brown-Betty-with-hard-sauce, the Old
Gentleman came out like a cannon at his grandson, pointing him out as
he sat twirling his spoon around an untasted dessert-plate.

“A Schuyler,” he boomed at him, “has disgraced us!” and began shaking
his pointing finger and beginning at once to rise to the dreaded climax
of his dreaded wrath.

“Oh, Father,” called Bek, “don’t begin it that way! Not before the
children——”

“Dave, run along.”

“Leslie, darling—come, Aunt Emma will take you out and get you a pail
and let you pick some string-beans for grandmother’s and grandfather’s
supper.”

“If Grandfather does begin that way,” said Steve, rising and kicking
his chair back savagely, “I’ll walk out of the house in the very
beginning and stay out. I was a fool to let myself be dragged here
anyway, like a head of cattle.”

“Stevey,” said Bek, and walked over and placed her palm against his
forehead, “what did you promise me?”

She was a mountain of calm, standing there between her son and
Winslow, who had receded into his chair as if it were sucking him in.

“I won’t be bullied, Mother.”

“You won’t be bullied,” shouted the Old Gentleman. “You _will_ be
bullied! Into honor.”

“Father,” said Bek, “I won’t be bullied, either. This situation has got
to be talked out in calm, or Winslow and Stevey and Claire and Emma and
I will walk out.”

“Oh, dear!” sobbed Emma. “Oh, dear! _oh_, dear!”

“For God’s sake, Pap,” said Phil, “can’t you keep your head on your
shoulders?”

“At least,” cried Mathilda, in her fluty, dry-lipped tremolo, “Davey
don’t need to be here. Shoo, Dave!”

“Davey,” said his sister Clara, who had a futile, rather antagonizing
way with children, including her own, “run out with Leslie and play.”

“I want to stay,” said Davey stubbornly, and sat with his hands
clinched into the sides of his footstool.

Suddenly Claire, collapsing from her imperturbability, began to sob
violently, her aunts forming an immediate barrage around her.

“This is an outrage, Father!” said Henry, rising in disgust from the
window-sill where he had been sitting looking out upon the bare patch
of chicken-yard and puffing at his pipe. “Good Lord! they never did it
this brutally, I’ll wager, when they used to settle tribal disputes by
torture! What is it, Father, now that you have the tribe around the
fire? On with the council-meeting.”

Poor Claire! At her uncle’s words, she crouched and sobbed the more,
Emma fanning her with one of the Old Gentleman’s tape-bound, palm-leaf
fans.

The Old Gentleman began to cry then, in dry sobs that split his voice.
“A child of my family. A child of a family that has not so much as a
speck upon its honor. Two children of my family.”

“Two children of your family what?” snapped Henry. “Swept off their
feet by a law of life stronger than they are. Well, what’s to be
done about it? Crucify them? Quit your crying, Claire. Come out here
and face the situation. Come to a sane conclusion and end all this
unnecessary and nauseating clan-panic. What’s on your minds about it
all?”

“Answer Uncle Henry, dearest,” said Emma. “Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Open the
window a little, Morton. I don’t feel right well.”

To Claire, whose worshipful admiration of her uncle Henry had long
been a family-joke, the moment was simply not to be borne. Her lips
shuddered up and down like window-shades sucked inward. Sobs came that
made the noise of a window-shade flopping in high wind.

“I——can’t!”

“The thing in a nutshell is this, Uncle Henry,” said Steve, stepping
forward and shaking the hair back from his sheet-white face. “It seems
I’ve been a rotter.”

“You’ve been a low life,” screamed the Old Gentleman, breaking loose
again from his daughter’s detaining hands.

“Father,” said Henry sharply. “One more outburst like that, and I’ll
join Stevey and Claire and walk out, too!”

“Nobody’s to blame in this, Uncle Henry. But if the family insists
otherwise, I’ll take it all.”

“You used to have her meet you secretly, Stevey,” sobbed Emma, “you
know you did. I see it all so clearly now. My Claire away from home so
much after her teaching-hours. You encouraged her to meet you secretly.
Claire was not the girl to ever——”

“Oh, Mother, please! Please! Stevey never made me do anything I didn’t
want to do.”

“Let’s not go into that now,” said Bek. “Whether Steve encouraged
Claire is not the issue here, Emma.”

“But Bek—he did——”

“I take it that the point is,” said Henry drily, “Claire is going to
have a baby. What’s to be done about it?”

At the brutality of that presentation, a series of bleats and short
cries rose about the room.

“Henry,” said Clara, and made a dive toward Dave, “at least you might
realize that a child is in the room. Davey, go out and help Leslie pick
beans.”

“I won’t,” said Dave, and sat with his large, dark eyes on his nephew
Steve, and his hands clinched tighter than ever into the footstool.

“Let him alone!” said Henry. “Good Heavens! why start out making
shameful to him the most fundamental fact of life!”

“Oh! Hen-nery—son—shame—oh! oh!”

“You mean,” cried Emma, “you want to hold up to him the example of his
elders as something noble!”

“No, I don’t mean a damn thing except that all this mewling makes me
sick, and I don’t want to saturate the fact of birth for him with
nastiness by being furtive about it.”

“Oh, Stevey, Stevey! Oh, Claire! How could you?” cried Mathilda
suddenly, and began to clasp and unclasp her wisps of little hands, and
to regard them with the tears running, “How could you?”

“Grandmother,” sobbed Claire, easily susceptible to the pitiable
spectacle of the sobbing Mathilda, “we know it’s no excuse but we
didn’t mean to—it’s not anything you think out, Grandmother.”

“God knows it isn’t,” said Steve, his pallor suddenly aflame, “or do
you think we would have let ourselves in for this!”

“By Gad, if I weren’t hand-and-tongue-tied by women-folks,”
shouted Morton Milliken, suddenly, the Morton who was so strangely
subdued where a gathering of Schuylers was concerned—“if I wasn’t
hand-and-tongue-tied, I’d horsewhip the cur who’s responsible for
this—my daughter——”

“They get married,” shouted the Old Gentleman, wresting free of
restraint this time, “before another twelve hours passes over the heads
of this family. So help me God!”

“Father,” intoned Bek, standing like a mountain, “they’re
_first-cousins_!”

“That’s what makes it so terrible, Father,” whispered Clara, to whom
the situation was as fascinating as it was horrible, and her face with
the scallops of chin seeming to shrivel into loose bags of flesh, “even
if they want to do right—they’re _first-cousins_!”

“Cousins or no cousins, one sin has got to invite another this time. A
grandson of mine who does wrong to a girl marries her, if she is cousin
ten times over.”

“That’s terrible, Father,” said Bek. “That’s terrible.”

“It’s a sin, Puppa. A sin on top of a sin!”

“Cousins beget dwarfs—and monstrosities, and—and—oh, I don’t know
what,” sobbed Clara.

“And hop-toads,” said Henry with solemnity. “And pollywoggles.”

“Henry!”

Seated once more in the window-frame, one knee high, the smoke he blew
toward the kitchen yard curled off curled lips.

“Good Lord,” he said, and rapped his pipe empty, “one would actually
have to sit in on this scene to believe it could happen. You people
cling to a worn-out old superstition, when you could have a brand-new
truth in exchange for it. Cousins! Suppose they are cousins!”

“Hennery!”

“Don’t you know that much of that is just old-wives’ tale! Go into
any library and read even a fairly modern book on biology. Good Lord,
what is so reluctantly accepted by the human brain as truth! Study
your statistics on the progeny of cousins. Face facts. For a woman
as up-and-coming as you are, Bek, and who’s had as much ordinary
stock-breeding experience as you have, you amaze me. Poppycock, that’s
what you’re all talking! I’ve no patience with old-wives’ science.
Apparently the two youngsters love each other. It probably would not
all have happened this undesirable way if they hadn’t been kept apart
through ignorance and prejudice. Let them marry. There’s your problem
solved. Come, I move that this unnecessary painful session adjourn.”

“But, Uncle Henry,” said Steve and shot to his feet—“but Uncle Henry,”
his eyes rolling, like an ox in terror toward Claire—“I mean,” he
said—“nothing”—and sat down.

“Why, Stevey, what?” cried Claire, her sweet, moist eyes roving and
probing his face—“why, Stevey, what?”

“I—I—” said Steve and began half-rising again and wiping his dry mouth
with the palm of his dry hand, in a way that was somehow horrible—“why,
I’m nothing. I don’t want—I mean—we—not that!”

“Exactly,” said Claire by this time, whose blue eyes, as she regarded
Steve, had grown suddenly black and round and flabbergasted, “if Stevey
doesn’t want it—I mean if I—I—. If he doesn’t want it—I don’t want it
either.”

“Doesn’t want what?” roared the Old Gentleman.

“Claire knows I’ll abide by any decision she reaches in this matter,”
said Steve, standing very straight and very calm beside his mother.
“And if Claire for one reason or another doesn’t want it—she—knows
best. I understand——”

“Why, Steve,” said his mother, regarding him with her level eyes and
her voice incredulous, “are you trying to let it appear that Claire is
the one who doesn’t want—when—it seems to be you?”

“No, no, Aunt Bek. He isn’t. You see, Grandfather,” cried Claire,
turning to him, her blue eyes very dark under the light tinge of
her flaxen hair, “I—of course Stevey will go through with it if he
has to—but, Grandfather—isn’t there some way—please—couldn’t I just
go away? I could, Grandfather, if the family would only cut out the
dramatics about it—us. Stevey doesn’t want—I mean I—I don’t love Stevey
any more, Grandfather. I’m not afraid—alone——”

“You don’t what?”

“It’s a lie!” said Morton, rising with a stride toward Stevey. “She’s
trying to save his damn hide.”

“It’s not a lie, Father!”

“She means, Grandfather,” said Steve, deadly white, “after all that’s
happened—oh, what’s the use beating about the bush. Claire would rather
go off and have the thing over without marriage, because—because—oh,
I’m not hedging, Uncle Morton! When she came to tell me about it—I
guess I—did feel pretty sick. I guess that scene down there in South
Meadow the day she first told me about it—is what cured her of me—I’m a
cad.”

“No, no, Steve!”

“I’m not the marrying sort, but not for a cad’s reasons——”

“By Gad——”

“Oh, hold your horses, Uncle Morton! I’ll go through with it. Simply
trying to explain my position. I hadn’t wanted it to happen this way.
Claire’s sake, more than mine. Mother and Claire know what else I
mean—I’m not fit to marry any woman. Tell them, Mother.”

“Stevey! Stevey! I can’t bear it!”

“Aunt Bek,” cried Claire and beat her hands, “don’t you tell them
_that_!”

“Yes, Claire, the time is here,” said Bek, in tones that were as
monotonous as hoofbeats on wood, and pinioning Winslow, with that
powerful, level gaze of hers into a huddle which might have been a
faint. Whatever it was, it kept him crouched in a deathly pale silence
back into his chair, until the scene wore itself out and Bek was
daubing cold coffee on his forehead. “Steve and I have been fighting
out something. We’ll win all right, but—in the light of events,
best—you should know. You see, when Steve came home so suddenly from
college—well, I guess a better way to put it is——”

“Oh, Mother, come out with it. I was fired from college for
drunkenness, Grandfather! The dean stumbled across me under a bench on
the campus one night—gollywogged. Spiflicated. Soused.”

“Steve!”

“First taste I got of it at college set me wild. Couldn’t lay off the
stuff. Can’t always—now. Right here—practically under your very eyes,
Mother has walked the floor with me night after night.”

“Bek!”

“Sister!”

“She’s written to Cures for me. She’s dropped the stuff into my coffee.
I’m a rotten no-account drunk. I am. Now throw me into the gutter, if
you’ve a mind to. I don’t care. At least, you must see now—Claire and
I—can’t——”

With a cry that had been gathering in his throat as if to crack it,
the Old Gentleman made a flying leap across the inert form of Winslow.
“I’ll show him!” he shrilled, struggling again and again, only to be
rudely pinioned backward by Phil. “He’s trying to think up a sniveling
way out!”

“Good God!” said Henry, and rose slowly from the window-sill and stood
looking at his nephew.

“Grandfather,” chimed Claire faintly, “if you go on like this—I can’t
stand it. I’ve known that all along. It’s a fight he’ll win some day. I
just can’t explain it, Grandfather, only—except that if he doesn’t want
it—I don’t want it either. I just can’t explain.”

“I can!” shouted Morton. “I can explain. She’s showing him a way out.
The damn white-liver. He’s resigning and she’s sheltering him behind
her skirts—the God-damn——”

“And I tell you,” screamed the Old Gentleman, strangling, “that if he
is fifty drunkards and fifty times more the low life that he is, no
grandson of mine wrongs a girl and doesn’t right it!”

“And no son of mine!” sobbed Winslow, half under his faints as Bek
daubed on the cold coffee.

“Before another twelve hours goes over his head, he rights it!”

“Are you mad?” cried Henry, “every blamed one of you!” his beetling
brows drawing together like portières. “Here are two young people. One
of them confessedly an alcoholic. And yet you want to tie them together
under revolting circumstances to beget children that stand ten times
the chance of being maimed that they would were they merely born of
first-cousins. You dare to want to tie these two unhappy young people
together for life?”

“Yes, by Gad, yes, just that! So help me, I’ll see them both dead, if
they don’t make it right.”

“Then, Father, you and the entire family that countenance it are crazy
criminals.”

“No Schuyler born out of wedlock comes into this world. We’re a family
with strong honest roots down into the soil of this country....”

“Yes, yes, Father, we’ve been over that before. Don’t scream.”

“Let Father alone, Henry,” said Phil, trembling. “He’s right.”

“I _will_ scream,” screamed the Old Gentleman. “I know I’m right. Those
two have got to marry. I don’t want to hear the ins and the outs. I
don’t care that they love each other any more, or don’t love each
other. They should have thought of that first. That’s something that
they’ve got to work out after marriage. You two marry! You two marry!
You don’t pull the name your Grandmother and I have built out of our
blood and our sweat down overnight. You two marry! You two marry!”

“I guess Father’s right, Steve,” said Bek, standing pale as a statue.
“If you’ve lost your nerve, that’s your misfortune. It’s all too late
now.”

“Yes,” echoed Emma, Phil, and Clara, “Yes.”

“Yes, by God!” said Morton, who was all sweating, and then over and
over again, “Yes, by God! Yes, by God!”

“And I say,” barked Henry, “that to make these two children marry under
these conditions is just as criminal as if you took their lives in your
hands and broke their necks for their mistakes. Break their spirits.
Break their morals. Break their hearts. By God, you get away with that!
But I say you are just as criminal as if you broke their necks.”

“Those two marry!” yelled the Old Gentleman, whose shaking finger never
stopped pointing. “You with your new-fangled notions that don’t fit in
with the world you live in, are responsible for where you are today. A
one-horse lawyer in a one-horse town, where you should be first in the
state. No new-fangled notions here now! Those two marry, if I have to
drag them to it through the streets of Centralia to have the ceremony
performed.”

Through the tenseness something snapped into the expression of that
circle of faces. Relief. As if a verdict, dreaded, had none the less
brought solution by the very virtue of being pronounced.

Even Claire, slipping back, almost as nerveless as Winslow, seemed to
relax to the sentence. Even Stevey, who stood facing his grandfather
without blinking.

All except Henry.

“Well,” he said finally, knowing how complete was his defeat in that
circle of acquiescence and giving out one of his short, sardonic
laughs, “maybe it’s for the best. Doubtless you two are sufficiently
cowed to the yoke of the fear-of-living to adjust yourselves to the
servitude you have just had sentenced upon you today. But this fact
still remains. The scene that has taken place in this room today in
this year of our Lord, is as mediæval as hell——”

“Hennery!”

“Excuse me, Mother.”

Suddenly David, most undramatic of youngsters, who had been seated
crouched to his footstool like a bit of lichen, ran toward his nephew
Steve, and pulling him by the wrist toward the languid figure of
Claire, crouched back in her mother’s arms, tried to weld their clammy
hands in a clasp.

“See!” cried Bek, struggling to keep her voice dead-level, and
regarding Henry a little triumphantly, “even a child would lead
them—together.”

“And a little child shall lead them,” said Phil, on a snigger. He had
not meant to snigger. The sound had just jumped off his lips. Tension,
perhaps, but to horrified family-ears the room seemed to roar of that
snigger.

From his long, lean height, Henry stood regarding his small brother, a
slow laugh shaking his shoulders.

“Maybe you’re right. The kid’s got the trick-combination of
leadership. Imagination tempered by a level head and a level heart.
Man-of-the-people stuff!”

“What’s man-of-the-people stuff, Henry?” piped Dave.

“You!”




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Twenty-one_


The winter America entered the War was a lean one on the farm, even
in a neighborhood where foundries were changing their tunes from the
production of safes, tools, and castings, to the grim grinding-out of
arms and ammunition.

Young men were being conscripted or leaving the farms to enlist. A
hoof-and-mouth disease was rampant among the horned cattle. Old man
Igrotte, from the vantage of Iowa, raised the rent one-third on his
mangy little place at the expiration of the first year of the Schuyler
tenancy.

Frequently now, and with a bitterness that rankled him into constant
and aggravated irritability, the Old Gentleman was obliged to cash one
of Phil’s less and less frequently-sent checks.

He even accepted, with none too much grace, the gift of two sacks of
corn flour from the Howey farm, which one of the overseers rumbled up
with on a truck one afternoon with the compliments of the Ex-Governor
who was wintering in Florida.

The Old Gentleman realized, with the terrible, gnawing bitterness
which ate so at his heart, that word must have leaked, even as far as
Florida, that the Schuylers were hard-put. One of the Howey girls, on
a visit to the paternal winter home, had doubtless let slip that the
Schuylers had fallen on bad times.

There was etched in acid into the Old Gentleman’s mind a picture of the
portly figure of the Ex-Governor and the largeness of manner with which
he must have given the orders for the distribution of the occasional
offerings at the Schuyler door.

Every month, after a time, with galling and yet welcome regularity,
there arrived these offerings. The impersonal kind of gift that stuck
in the Old Gentleman’s craw, as he put it. Gifts that almost savored
of charity. Commodities like a fat goose. A twenty-five-pound sack
of coffee in the bean. Ham, smoked on the Howey place, sometimes the
cuts off the very killings Bek had that same week sent over to the
Governor’s place.

It helped. For instance, the barrel of corn flour meant that every
morning, when the lanterns were swinging in and out of the barns for
miles and miles around, Dave, as he started off on his lonely hike over
to the Tarkington place to help Nemo with the chore of bran-mixing did
so with a big, hot square of pone under his jacket for the heat it
poured against him, and that later was to slide down into him in warm,
grateful chunks.

Sleet came down many of the black dawns of that winter, slanted
against him in long javelins, and made the roads and the roofs and the
hedges to shine. Mornings filled with the glass music of hitting ice.
Sometimes everything took on a crystal coating, making it a fairy-land
of white, stretching arms of trees, the glitter of hedges, and the
splendor of frozen breath.

Great, crystal chandeliers of morning, like the big one that hung in
the Howey front parlor. It was warming to turn around, now and then,
for a glimpse of the lighted kitchen window of the Igrotte house,
against which he knew his mother to be moving at the business of
preparing Henry’s breakfast and the collapsible tin box of lunch he now
carried in with him to his office in Centralia.

Those were the shivery, silvery mornings all right, when the ice formed
in a mask against his face, and the gleam of light from the Tarkington
barn was something to stumble gratefully toward.

Old Nemo drove a close bargain as a taskmaster. It was scarcely ever
before ten minutes to nine when he released the boy from his chore,
allowing him exactly ten minutes to cover the mile to the schoolhouse.
He had never failed, however, to arrive there before the first tick of
nine, with his heart seeming to beat against his neck and up into his
ear-drums.

There was a pride about never having been tardy, even though Miss
Hassebrock knew the condition and offered to grant him fifteen minutes’
indulgence in the matter of arrival, as she did to other of the
farm-boys.

That was the winter, too, of only half-day sessions for Dave. The class
of Colonial History came in the afternoon. Dave was eager for that.
It was one of the classes he was sure to shine in, the result of long
evenings with Henry. Geography, too, came in the afternoon. Gee!

But the Old Gentleman fell ill about then of a sciatic torture that
kept him chair-ridden all of that winter and that meant having to
call half a session a day, in order to be home by noontime for the
accumulation of chores.

It required a letter to the county superintendent for that special
half-time dispensation, which Mathilda patiently, and to Dave’s
dictation, penned through her tears.

Later, in that first month of the Old Gentleman’s disability, when,
against every admonition, he was hobbling about sooner than his
sciatica permitted, down he went on a slippery runway that led to the
hen-house, and twisted a ligament in his thigh. That virtually laid him
up the remainder of the winter.

Then Dave just remained out of school the entire session, secretly a
little exultant over some aspects of it, and again hankering after the
panorama of the Geography, the Colonial History, and the Physiology
courses.

Poor Miss Hassebrock, sciatic herself, once and sometimes twice a week
that long, dark winter managed to get a lift in the Ford truck of the
farmer-family where she boarded, as far as the Igrotte house; and while
the boy who drove her, great shy boob, waited in the kitchen, she would
coach Dave in a gallant attempt to keep him up in his classes.

But usually, the boy was tired. So deadly tired that once, during a
problem in square-root, he fell asleep with his cheek down against the
page upon which her hand happened to be resting.

Bird-like little person, she sat there over an hour, with the Ford
truck waiting and chugging at the door, before she could force herself
to shake him awake.

Twenty years later, and in the most far-fetched, accidental fashion,
David Schuyler was to learn that the little woman paid the farm-boy
who drove her twenty-five cents for these trips and fifty, the evening
that Davey fell asleep against her hand and kept her waiting the hour
overtime.

It was the very next day that Miss Hassebrock’s annuity began. Poor
dear, she lived only bedridden years to enjoy it.

That was practically the beginning and the end of any sustained
schooling for Dave, those scant, war-ridden years, when Henry put up
a partition down the lean-enough length of his office, and rented the
other half to an osteopath, and the “Furnished Rooms, With or Without
Board” sign flashed all too frequently in Emma’s window, and when Bek
sat in Henry’s office, talking over Phil’s troubled affairs, every time
she brought Leslie to town for osteopathic treatment in the office next
door. Lean, hard days when, somehow, the faces of the Schuylers seemed
to grow longer in actual bone-formation.

But with the end of the sustained schooling for Dave, Henry still read
to him, and with him, through the long, quiet evenings. The great
embroidered legends of King Arthur. _Canterbury Tales_, of a Knight
there was; About Ben Adhem who awoke one night from a deep dream of
peace! _Letters of a Self-Made Father to His Son_; _Boy’s Iliad_;
_Wreck of the Hesperus_; _The Ancient Mariner_; _Bird Lore_; _Deserts
of the World_; _Arabia Deserta_; _Faust_; _Our National Parks_;
_Prisoner of Zenda_; _Compleat Angler_; _Golden Treasury_; _Peck’s Bad
Boy_; _Canalse Interpretation of Perjury_; _Land of the Midnight Sun_;
_Bee Culture_; _The Philippines_, _What of Them?_ Months of evenings,
and years of months of these hours of Henry’s intoning beneath the
green eye-shade. It was his way of resting. His way of relaxing.
Sometimes the boy on the stool at his feet nodded and slept against
his knee, as he carried him along beyond his depth. But more often,
Dave, who was a good listener, sat with his small, square chin propped
in his hands, staring off over the shoulder of the reader. Those were
the years of magnificence, all right. Napoleon gazed from Elba in the
small stuffiness of that room in the Igrotte house. And the island of
Elba was an atrocity of a hearth-rug with the figure of a dog woven
in. Leander swam the Hellespont of that room, and the Hellespont was
Henry’s single cot, with Teddy usually asleep at its foot, with his
nose tucked into his forepaws. A knight there was shivered the timbers
of that room. Don Quixote tilted lance there. Through its eight-by-ten,
the desert flowed into parched vastness, and William Tell stalked, and
Catherine the Great.

These evenings stacked up into practically all three hundred and
sixty-five days of the year, except the semi-occasional ones when Henry
remained in town to attend a Bar Association banquet, or to escort
Henriette to the rare musical event that found its way into Centralia’s
Opera House.

His Ford runabout, along with the House on Sycamore Street, was a thing
of the past, so that the evenings, in town, Henry spent on a leather
sofa in the back of his office.

Twice a day for two years until he made an arrangement with the owner
of a dairy-truck to carry him to town and back, he walked the three
and one half miles from the Igrotte house to High Street. The actual
distance could be lessened a half-mile by a détour that led past the
House on Sycamore Street. But from the day he left it, bag and baggage,
chattel and what not, Henry could never bear to look at it again.

Never once, in all the years he was to live in the vicinity, first in
the Igrotte house and later back in Centralia, was he known to have
been seen within seeing-distance of the House on Sycamore Street.

In Davey lurked no such ache. There came the day when the first
contingent of Centralia boys marched the entire length of Sycamore
Street, then back again halfway, to swing into Court House Square.

In the hours of waiting for the parade to take place, Dave, astride the
cupola of the old front porch he knew so well, perched himself like the
figurehead of a ship, directly in front of the window of the room in
which he had been born.

The Kelsoes, who occupied the place now, were easy, good-natured
folk of ready welcome. Tony Kelsoe had a large and paying wholesale
fruit-store on Miami Street. The day of the parade, the lawn and the
front of the House on Sycamore Street were thrown open.

The Kelsoes had improved the place, although Emma said it made her
“positively sick” to pass its pinwheel flower-beds, its splotched old
iron deer painted a bright chrome-yellow, and a triple coat of white
paint on the house that smote and smote the eye.

For the merest second, it seemed strange even to the child, shinnying
up the front porch that had been home to him, but a strangeness
immediately to be forgotten in the strangling excitement of the
spectacle of the boys in khaki marching down-street under the spreads
of the elms of Sycamore Street. Bare elms now, with branches that
rattled in the light wind like bones.

Why, those boys out there, practically every fellow of them, he knew
by name. Spike. Minty. Jeb. Off to war. There was Joe Lowenstein, with
his puttees wound crooked. And Ed Slayback who sold screw-eyes and
rubber-tubing in the hardware-store under Henry’s office. Paul Koerber.
Lynn Chipman, who lived in the largest house in Centralia, and whose
younger brother, Kenneth, just two years older than Dave, had a whole
wireless-set on the roof of his home. There was a long-legged fellow
named Tad, who used to drive a dirt-cart out Bek’s way. He was much
heavier than the run of the boys, and seemed to mind the weight of his
pack. There was Gum Lewis and Bennie Cohen, and a fellow whose name
used to be Berlin and who had changed it to Brayley since the War.

And there was Steve! He and Lynn Chipman carried themselves the
straightest, and somehow with the most bearing of them all.

“Hi, Steve!”

From the vantage of astride the cupola, they seemed like so many pairs
of animated scissors tramping down the street with a hollow sound that
was crashed into every so often, by a small brass band that sent the
spectators along the curbs into cheers.

It drove Teddy, down on the lawn, wild with excitement, and kept him
yapping up at Dave and imploring his descent from the cupola.[32]

Every inch of the march down Sycamore Street, after the boys had passed
Kelsoe’s the second time, Dave ran alongside.

There was Stevey, second from the end, with his white face set immobile
to the front, and his shoulders flaring and his waist receding, and his
puttees wound the tightest and the rightest of them all! Not a glance
to the right or the left.

Hoh, and how Minty kept darting his head and neck in and out like a
turtle. Not a glance from Steve though. Stevey marching off to war. The
boys of Centralia marching off to war.

War was waste, Henry said. War was Nature’s bungling trick for
weeding out the over-production of the race with the blindest kind of
non-selection. But just the same, tramp-tramp-tramp, to sit as Henry
was sitting, up in his office, with his eye-shade on and his fingers
pressing against his forehead, while the boys marched beneath his very
window, was impossible, if that curious rhythm of tramp-tramp-tramp
had you by the throat. Tramp, tramp, tramp ... my country, right or
wrong—Stephen Decatur was a hysterical woman. My country, right or
wrong. Well, anyways—anyways—it was! No matter even what Henry said. It
was a fellow’s country, right or wrong.

And Stevey, right or wrong, was going! “My nephew, right or wrong,
is going to war,” shouted Dave to himself, as he ran on his short,
squarish legs, breathlessly, alongside. Cæsar had crossed the Alps,
Washington had crossed the Delaware, in the name of War! Well—well?
Henry hated war. And Henry was always right except when—except when the
tramp-tramp-tramp made “my country, right or wrong” sound right! Right,
you bet your life!

Stevey was too front-face to know that Davey ran alongside, almost, it
might be said, too stern-faced to care. Minty darted his head sideways
and said, “Hi, Kid,” to Dave. So did Bennie Kohn, Beulah’s brother, who
finished his words in “ink” instead of “ing.” “Hi, Kid, we’re goink!”

Tramp! Tramp! Tramp-tramp-tramp. Even in the cold, damp air the
moisture formed rivulets and ran down Dave’s neck in his effort to keep
up with the adult strides; and along toward the end Teddy, too, began
to lope with his tongue hanging out sidewise.

My country, right or wrong! You betcherlife, Henry, you! To be as smart
as Henry was to think too much and not to feel enough.

At the other end of Sycamore Street, in Emma’s house of the peeling
paint and the “Music Teacher” and “To Let” signs in the window, were
grouped most of the lodgers, and Mathilda, and the Old Gentleman, with
a Paisley shawl draped across his remonstrating shoulders against
the sciatica, and Bek and Winslow, and Leslie waving a banner, and
Henriette Simpson, and Paula, home for the week. There they were all,
out on the porch and along the steps. And in the parlor window, with
the stringy lace curtains pinned back, was Claire, looking as white as
a flower, clutching her beet-red nub of a baby, which she held up and
dandled, as the automatons, hay-foot-straw-foot passed the house.

Long after the footsteps had died down, Claire stood there, waving her
baby aloft, for the husband and father, Steve, who had not looked, to
see as he passed by.

When they all came in, a few moments later from the porch, it was hard
to coax Claire away from the dandling of the baby before the window
that looked on the now-deserted street.

His perfectly-formed, beautiful baby that, as he passed, Stevey had not
turned his head to see.

It was in vain that poor Emma, whose flaxen hair had developed wide
gray streaks, tried to comfort her. A good soldier would not, could
not, turn his head. Just see, there was Lynn Chipman’s little brother
Kenneth, crying after him and sobbing, and not even a glance from Lynn.
And see, old lady Mintz, poor old dear, reaching out empty arms after
her boy. Shame, Claire—for shame!

Keyed to a pitch of pride that made him bumptious, the Old Gentleman
stumbled about the house, with the Paisley shawl forgotten and dangling
and tangling about his feet. Stevey was justifying some of the torment
he had caused the family.

Stevey was going into war. For country. It was like paying a debt of
gratitude with a coin that had been minted from the living flesh of his
own side. Ecstasy of self-flagellation, as it must have burned in the
eyes of early Christian martyrs, illumined the Old Gentleman. He stood
by and watched, glorying in pain.

Besides, Steve’s going to war would make a man of him. Or as the Old
Gentleman put it, would break him, by Gad! And even the latter was no
worse than the mess he had made of things up to now.

A Schuyler was in the ranks that were marching from Centralia!

Bek’s eyes were blazing with that, too, and Winslow’s and old Trina’s
and even Mathilda’s, whose, however, like Claire’s, were at the same
time crucified.

And while Dave was running breathlessly alongside the moving phalanx
of the khaki, up in his office, over the hardware-store, to the
rat-a-tat-tat of the marching of feet, sat Henry, with his dry fingers
pressed against his eyeballs.


FOOTNOTES:

[32] The day that my Stevey marched away, we drove into town for a
point of vantage from Emma’s front windows. As we passed the House on
Sycamore Street, there was our Dave astride its cupola, just like he
still belonged there. I can see him now. Small and square and firm, as
if the old house were a mare, and he were riding it, straight and sure
and calm, into the maelstrom. And yet how little he suggested to any of
us, as he sat there gazing thoughtfully into the confusion, that one
day he _was_ to ride out into that maelstrom ... a leader of leaders.




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Twenty-two_


When Dora Tarkington was on the threshold of her ’teens, she was about
an inch and a half taller than Dave, with long honey-colored curls
that lay in a wide fan across her shoulders and a curved fringe of
bangs. These bangs, old Mammy, whose hand quivered, invariably cut a
little crookedly, because she kept one copying eye glued to a lovely
daguerreotype of Dora’s mother propped on the washstand beside her.

Dora used to study that daguerreotype herself. The sweet, straight
eyes, the elaborately high, honey-colored hair with the curve of
bang that Mammy tried to imitate. The fitted basque, with the heavy
festoonings of gold chains and brooches. The tapering waist, supporting
the little, urn-shaped swell of bust and shoulders.

Dora was of sturdier heft than this mother who had died at her birth.
There was more of her father in the molding of her longer, lither legs
and torso. But at eleven, the bright gold prettiness of the mother, who
had dashed through her youth on the spirited horseflesh of a Kentucky
farm, lay over Dora like pollen, conjuring memories before her father’s
eyes, in a hundred ways.

Every year Dora had a birthday-party and a cake with pink candles
and colored-tissue caps that popped as they were pulled open. For
these occasions old Mammy, relic from the days when the girl in the
daguerreotype had ridden bareback through Kentucky grass, made large
batches of cup-cakes with pink icing; decorated the round birthday-cake
in “red-hots”; froze the vanilla ice-cream in a home-made contrivance
of galvanized bucket and chopped ice, and then set about fluting Dora’s
neck-ruffles and cuff bands, as well as the edges of her own cap and
apron, with a hot-point iron.

Dave had attended these annual events, up to the time the Schuylers
moved to the Igrotte house.

He had been meticulously invited to every subsequent one, in fact
so meticulously that to Mathilda, unreasonably enough, the courtesy
savoured of patronage.

Dave was never to attend one of these functions after the move from
the House on Sycamore Street. To begin with, he had a particularly
fierce kind of pride where Dora was concerned, and besides, his
mid-afternoons, those subsequent years, were scarcely a matter of
girls’ birthday-parties and candles.

Then, too, since the crash, the Old Gentleman had taken on what
amounted to an unreasonable animosity to Len Tarkington. A resentment
that the gentleman-farming methods of his old neighbor should lead
to the gradual growth from the scrawny acres Len had inherited from
his grandfather, to the present more than triple and vastly prolific
pasturages.

It was the Old Gentleman’s contention, never beyond his own fireside
it is true, that Len Tarkington was “God’s laziest white man,” working
three hours a day as compared with his own fifteen.

Len’s doings rankled in the Old Gentleman. His politics! He had never
forgiven him for voting Bryan in 1896. Len was a negligent farmer,
an indifferent judge of cattle, and notoriously slow pay. One of
those devilishly likable fellows who get results out of two-thirds
personality and one-third efficiency.

Beware of a man who lets his rail fences go; who votes a mixed ticket;
who will borrow your pipe off you; who could sit on his side verandah
and whittle a clothes-pin into a doll for his daughter, with his hay
still outlying, and clouds lowering.

It rankled to have Dave help at Tarkington early-morning chores, except
that the deal was one strictly between old Nemo and the boy and there
was no getting around it—that eighty cents a week helped!

That, probably more than any one other thing, was the realization that
used to cause the Old Gentleman, lying beside Mathilda in the ponderous
old bedstead that filled their room, to hide his screwed and suffering
face into the crook of his arm and lie with his toes climbing over each
other with the pain of frustration, until the crack of dawn, when he
rose. Eighty cents a week mattered!

At the first of her birthday-parties that Davey did not attend, Dora
had clouded up and cried tears all over her birthday prettiness, while
Davey, with a throat that hurt him the long afternoon through, went
about the business of leading a foal, for a consideration of fifteen
cents, from one pasture to a two-mile-distant one, for a petty farmer
known as Rocky Toe.

It was the following week that Davey, emerging from the Tarkington
barn on Saturday morning, from helping Nemo at currying, beheld
her making grimaces, by darting her little pink adder of a tongue
in and out, as she stood on the safe side of her hedge, and struck
outlandish attitudes at a boy called Desmond Riley, whose father was
new superintendent of Giles Tool Works and who had just moved into the
neighborhood.

There was, about Desmond, a precision both of manner and of dress that
was antagonizing. That verdict, after his first weeks in the Centralia
Second District School, was the cruelest of all for a child to bear.

What antagonism Desmond excited was the kind to relegate him to
oblivion. Desmond became what you might call permanently unnoticed. The
children shunned his selfish little moon-faced complacency. Not a boy
offered to fight him.

The awful failure of obscurity was his.

Not so passive, however, was Dora’s animosity. His sleek, brushed,
brown ball of a head sat in front of her throughout the school-day. He
chose the best pen-points and wet sponges, just before the monitors
reached her. Desmond had fat, soft little cheeks that quivered like
jelly; and that too, infuriated her.

She was sticking out her tongue to the jell of those cheeks the morning
that Dave beheld her across her hedge-top and paused, as if to study
the facial contractions by which she achieved her magnificent effects.

“Dare you to wallop him!” cried Dora to Dave, as the small, square
figure hove in sight. “Land him one for me! Dickery, dickery, docks,
his mama makes him wear socks!”

So she did. Tan ones, with plaid tops that reached just below the knee!

“Dare you, Dave—wallop him! One for me and one for good measure.”

The wallop had its time and place. Somehow, Desmond, standing there
hypnotized and not belligerent, offered neither.

“Aw—no!”

“Scared? ’Fraid-cat. If I was a fellow and afraid to wallop another
fellow!”

Bitter. Bitter. Standing there, barefoot, his fingers curling into
palms, anger smote Dave. A slow anger. Not at Desmond. But at the
shrill little voice of his tyrant. If she were a fellow and afraid to
wallop another fellow. What kind of talk was that? Why wallop Desmond?
His animosity would not rise to it.

“’Fraid! Snidey! Poof! ’Fraid. Poof! Poof! Poof!”

Suddenly Dave’s arm shot out and banged Desmond one in the stomach so
that he doubled and ran.

The wallop had not been for Desmond at all. But for the circumstance
of naughty, adorable Dora up there, meting out injustice. That was the
dreadful part. The blow had been for Dora.

And before he could rush to Desmond, to right it with him, there was
the wonder and the glory of small Dora screaming upon him from her
vantage. Having goaded him on to attack the stranger, and now turning
on him with a fury that had probably never had counterpart in her small
breast.

“You didn’t need to hit him thataway. In the stomach. Oh, you! Oh,
you! Why didencha listen—I only meant—just to hit something. Not him.
I meant—hit out against what’s no good—oh, I don’t know what I meant,
but why didencha listen?”

Suddenly, in the blind rage of relief and the shock of the identical
quality of their impulses, he was over the fence and pummeling Dora
until her teeth shook. Until her eyes popped and saw twice.

“You—you!” she said on the breath that was jerked out of her, and sat
down flat, like a doll-baby.

       *       *       *       *       *

And yet, in the end, that scene confused David.

Dora had a mind of her own only where trifling things were concerned.
She would wrest from him an inch of concession, and then, with her
matchless capacity for sweetness, give him back an ell.[33]

The second time that Dave did not show up at her birthday-party, it was
almost six of the hard and wearying months since they had met.

She had run out one lovely clover-smelling summer dawn, while Davey,
in denim jumpers, and Nemo were currying down a filly which Tarkington
sometimes still drove before a light gig.

She was in her nightgown and bare feet, and she and another girl, named
Minnie Ryan, who had been spending the night with her, were tearing out
toward the clover-field for the early-morning lark of a dash through
the dew.

  Walk, fair maiden, through the morning dew,
  If you crave beauty and a sweetheart true!

That was the phrase Dora had drawn from a fortune-telling gypsy girl,
whose green parrakeet on a stick had plucked the slip of paper from a
box.

  ... crave beauty and a sweetheart true!

Dora and Minnie craved beauty and a sweetheart true.

At the sight of Dave, currying away there at the near flank of the
horse, the two girls turned squealing and scurrying back toward the
house. Dora last, her lovely long curls flying back in a banner, her
body flashing, and the rosy soles of her feet repeating themselves
again and again as she fled.

This was the most disturbing thing that had ever happened to David.
His heart seemed to fly out of his chest, leaving him standing like
an empty meal-sack. Then the rest of his body seemed to rise to his
throat. To congest his breathing and blind him so that the currying
became merely a series of strange motions over which he had no control.

Once, on that run down Sycamore Street beside the boys that were
marching down it into the lanes of war, the blood had beaten that way
in his ears. But to the roar of drums and of hoarse throats shouting.

It was probably the beginning of the normal adolescence of his
awareness of Dora. Suddenly, just Dora, who was undoubtedly the
nicest of all girls, but who could stick out her stomach and make
ugly grimaces and slide belly-buster down a hill, was something as
lovely, as remote, as an angel on the merit-card you received in
Sunday-school if you were Desmond Riley. Flash of Dora in her sweet
muslin nightdress, with her hair flowing and the lovely insinuation of
her rosy young body flickering through.

And yet she was not as remote as one of those picture-card angels with
trumpets and soaring bodies that rise on a slant through ether. Dora
was warm and beautiful and naughty in an adorable way that was not
angelic.

Dora was beautiful. The soles of her pink, flying feet that you
saw over and over again as they flashed, were beautiful. There was
something sweet and rosy about them. They were Dora’s.

That was the way his adolescence came in. A fastidious worship of the
beauty that flashed to him that dew-drenched clover-smelling sunrise.
It was to remain that. A curiously delicate and perfect love-life for
a man born to a destiny of tempestuous and dramatic and world-shaping
events. But withal, a man born into his time as snugly as a bug into
his rug. Forward-looking. Backward-heeding. Un-neurotic. Normal.

Cross-currents aplenty were to riffle the course of the true love
of David and Dora, torturous ones, but from the day that he was
thirteen, and had looked upon that flash of the innocent sweetness
of Dora-in-nightdress flashing from his sight, she was installed and
remained the woman of his love and his life and his reverence.[34]

For a six-month after this morning apparition of her, with her
loveliness across his eyeballs as he went to sleep nights, and his
first waking-thought of her, he did not so much as again clap eyes on
Dora face to face. Dodging her, if he happened to be errand-bent in
Centralia and saw her coming down a street, avoiding the lanes she
frequented and attending the little Sunday-school at Seven Mile, sooner
than run the risk of encountering her in town.

Countless the asafœtida-bags that Mathilda hung about his protesting
neck these days.

Dave, with the immemorial gesture of young love, paled, and secretly
observed but outwardly ignored by Henry, retreated uncommunicative
within himself. Took on a pinched look about the mouth that prompted
Bek to comment privately and worriedly to Winslow, and acquired a
nervous habit of cracking his finger joints that was enormously
irritating to the Old Gentleman.

The change of Sunday-school was a matter of some argument, since, on
fair Sundays, the Old Gentleman and Mathilda rode into Centralia in the
phaeton, hitched to a pasture horse rented from Rocky Toe for fifty
cents the morning, to Second Avenue Rock Church. For thirty years the
Schuylers had paid pew dues there, and even now, when those dues were
no longer sent by check, but sparsely dropped into the contribution
plate, they occupied the same seats by the insistent courtesy of
everyone connected with the church.

But Dave, privately conscious that his shoes, even when blacked, were
nicked, had reached the stage where for want of long trousers, his legs
felt long and gawky. Besides, Dora with her hair in the spread of curls
and a red cap that had a pompon, rode to Second Avenue Rock Church,
either in her father’s light spider-gig, or in the new Chevrolet
roadster.

That in itself, made one feel more of a gawk than if she too had just
walked.

So in the end, every day of the six-month that intervened, Dave, with
the torment of the desire to see her hot within his heart, carefully
avoided her.

Then one day, crawling out from under a runway in the hen-house
which he had been whitewashing for Nemo, bespattered, even his heavy
thatch of hair with a white smear across it, he came upon her, face
to face as she came out of the kitchen door with a small pan of fine
white-bread-mash for her sick pet of a hen, a prize leg-horn “Smooty,”
which her father had once brought her from the Lexington County Fair.

It was ignominious beyond anything he had ever dreaded, her unexpected
dashing out in this fashion from the house. Scarcely a day that he
did not reckon with the possibility of her happening to rise at
five of a mornning, timing his appearance meticulously to avoid its
happening. And now here he was on all-fours, calcimine-stained,
daub-faced, crawling out from under, like a rabbit from a hutch, into
the very path of Dora, so fresh in her blue percale with three white
bands of tape around her slim waist and the hem of her skirt, and all
the morning-light there was, caught in the curls that lay along her
shoulders.

“Smarty, Smarty, gave a party, and nobody came,” was the incredible,
the panicky phrase that flew from his agonized lips, while Dora,
with the pan of warm mash in her hands, toppled a little forward, of
naughty, simulated surprise, as if she had not expected him there.

With what was more of a reflex than a desire, she shot her tongue
at him in reply to this, and her stomach too, in the old absurd
contortion. Dora, who was almost thirteen now and would no longer
shinny trees, for fear of showing her panties.

“Smarty, Smarty, didn’t want you nohow at my party.”

There was a stunned flash of silence between these two, to whom David’s
absence from that party had been, to each, a little agony; a flash
of silence filled with the noise old Nemo made pouring water into a
pig-trough, and with the floating fragrance of Mammy’s breakfast bacon,
and with the echoes of Dora’s mockery. For six months she had been
slowly gathering courage to burst this way upon David. And now, the
whirlwind of that ruse accomplished, there she stood puckering, and
trying not to cry.

“Out in county school, where I used to go,” said Dave, “you skip stocks
and bonds and then go right from algebra to geometry.”

“Honest?” said Dora, as if his remark were relevant to her innermost
thoughts.

It was a master-stroke. He was never to know, delving into his
psychology later, just how he achieved it. This bit of floating
information, springing full-grown to his rescue at the moment of his
almost complete immersion under lime and humiliation.

It broke the ice. It broke the ice of Dora’s startled, frozen lips. It
broke the ice of the long months that had lain chilled, without the sun
of her presence, against his heart.

“We’re on the Monroe Doctrine,” said Dora.

“The Monroe Doctrine,” began David, his eyes focusing as they always
did from his trick of visualizing the page from which he memorized, “is
the principle of non-in-ter-ven-tion of European Powers in American
af——”

“Oh lookie, Davie, you’re all tangling yourself up in Queen Anne’s lace
handkerchief.”

Wretched David. It was his ruse, standing there spouting his erudition,
to kick, as if casually, the frail, pale stuff growing in profusion
outside the barn door, in an attempt to cleanse his bare legs of the
lime.

Who could have thought, after the years of childhood they had played
through together, Dave most of the time in a single garment of blue
jumper and Dora with her neat skirts flying to reveal her little
pantie-clad legs, that lime spattered across Dave’s legs could matter
so to him. Matter so that his tongue began to dry and swell in his
mouth like a rusk.

“I work.”

“That’s nothing.”

“’Tis, too.”

“’Tisn’t.”

“’Tis.”

“Puf!” She was still flushed with shame at the atavism of having stuck
out her tongue and her stomach.

“I know something I could tell if I wanted to.”

“What?”

“About ants. Me and Nemo watch ants same as you and Henry.”

“Me and Henry have a red-ant-hill now! You know what, there’s a species
of——”

“There’s ants in our pantry. Mammy can’t keep sugar there any more.”

All this, savoring doubtless to the uninitiated of slight irrelevance,
had bearing upon hours they had spent in the days of the House on
Sycamore Street, lying belly-flat, with their noses close to the
performance of ant-hills. Sometimes Henry, who had a magnifying glass
that stood on a little tripod, had come down under the grape-arbor
and observed with them, and read aloud out of a book called _Communism
Among Ants_.

Davey knew those ants to the habit, many a time remaining stretched
on his stomach long periods after Dora had danced away home. Now it
was her little device for wriggling her away back into grace on this
particular one of his hobbies.

“The little ants in our sugar haven’t got any an-ten-næ at all.”

“They have so, Dora!”

“Well, anyway, none that you can see without Henry’s magnifying glass.”

“I work,” resumed Dave, stubbornly, and still kicking into the Queen
Anne’s lace handkerchief.

The reiteration scarcely penetrated her conciliatory zeal.

“We’re on frogs in physiology, Dave. If you pull one leg, the other
thinks it’s getting pulled too. Toads give warts, frogs don’t.”

“I work.”

This time, her sweet eyes glittered at him, making his eyes seem to
smart, as they did when he stared at the sun.

“I work, or I’d ’a’ come to your party.”

“I’d rather had you at my party, Dave, than anybody.”

“Would you?”

“I cried.”

How sweet she was in the early morning of that beauty of hers;
a freshness of beauty which the years were to find absolutely
unquenchable. The sparkle of world-sweetheart was over her that day.[35]

“I cried, honest.”

“Dora! I—oh—last tag!”

Presently they were tearing through the Queen Anne’s lace handkerchief,
as if into foam.

At home, in the Igrotte barn, a half dozen rather scrawny rams were
pressing their none-too-finicky noses to the crack of a door, bleating
and waiting for their young shepherd to release them to the joys of
pasture.

Finally, the Old Gentleman, who was weighing a heifer on a scale, had
to hobble and do it himself.

“Drat that boy, where is he?”

Davey was wooing.


FOOTNOTES:

[33] One afternoon, on my way home from an auction of shorthorns, I
came across the two of them seated on a sort of stile that divided
the southeast corner of Tarkington’s from the Rileys’. Even then, the
future little first lady of the land was giving voice to some of those
amenable qualities that were later to make her the most unrivaled of
helpmates, as well as probably the most dashing hostess of the longest
and most glittering régime in the history of the capital. Scraps of the
overheard conversation across the stile, that day, ran like this:

“Lookie, I’ve got a Martin Schraft button to wear. Papa says vote for
Martin Schraft.”

“Puh, Schraft nothing. Vote for Tom Connors for mayor. He hates
mono-poly.”

“Wouldn’t vote for a mayor that hates mono-poly.”

“You would, too. Mono-poly’s not fair. My brother Henry says so.”

“Mono-poly’s not fair. All right, Davey, I’ll not vote for mono-poly.”

“Say, Dora, know what?”

“What?”

“Not so very far away from here, know what?”

“No, what?”

“The Wright Brothers flew the first aeroplane at Kittyhawk.”

“Kitty-who?”

“Kitty-hawk’s the name of a place. Don’t you even know that?”

“Davey, you know everything.”

“Not everything. Just nearly. Woodrow Wilson, huh, he won’t let Teddy
go to war and fight.”

“Huh, he won’t let Teddy go to war and fight. I won’t vote for Wilson
neither, if you don’t want me to, Dave.”

“Huh, Henry says he wants to make the world safe for demo-cracy.”

When my small brother mouthed the phrase then current the country over
(I can see him yet, straddling that stile!) his words were absolutely
devoid of any of the sardonic import Henry’s older lips gave them.

“Safe for demo-cracy! Yip! Yip!”

“Safe for demo-cracy,” repeated the blessedly sweet Dora, to whom they
were just words. “Let’s make the world safe for demo-cracy!”

[34] I wonder if in the history of the presiding couples at the White
House, from Dolley Madison who so brilliantly heightened the dark days
of that régime to Angelica Van Buren, and on down through the devotion
of the McKinleys, if one of them ever approached the beauty of the
ideal love and compatibility that existed between my brother Dave and
my sister Dora.

[35] There hangs a portrait of my sister Dora, enlarged from a
photograph of her, taken when she was about twelve, in the drawing-room
of the beautiful house, Phil Schuyler, Junior’s, in East Sixty-sixth
Street, New York.

It is a favorite story of my nephew’s, that the first day it was
hung, Dora herself, who was on a shopping tour in New York for the
week, entered the room and exclaimed, “What a lovely portrait of Mary
Pickford.”




_Chapter Twenty-three_


Farm-hands were scarce, that winter of 1917. By 1918, with ten thousand
troops a day, for over a period of five months, being transported, it
was practically impossible to get men to handle the heavy chores.

It was said of Bek Schuyler, and she did not deny it, that for want
of herdsmen, she personally drove as many as a hundred head of Howey
cattle to Ivorydale, which was within a dozen miles of The City, by
night, appearing tailor-made and in the stern habiliments of the kind
of togs she affected, at the Statfield Hotel for breakfast the next
morning.[36]

Dave had accompanied her on several of these night-drives as far as
Ivorydale, taking a local train back to Centralia, after he had given
over his horse to one of the men who came from the Yards to meet them.
Then Bek, and the small wicker suitcase which she had carried like a
pack on her horse, continued via an early-morning trolley for The City.

Nothing to suggest in the big, tailored woman having a generous
breakfast in the spacious dining-room of the Statfield Hotel, that she
had ridden horseback the night through behind a drove of cattle.

They were memorable rides alongside his sister, those winters when
the farms were stripped of men and the foundries were humming to the
strange, new tune of the manufacture of munitions. Her great figure was
like some heroic study in bronze of horse and rider, as she loomed
behind the dark, moving cloud of the cattle.

She taught him to swing his whip lariat-fashion, and to curl, with a
quick turn of wrist, the rope over the horns of a steer. She taught him
the secrets of good points in cattle, how to estimate within a pound or
two the heft of a sow or a bull, and some of the laws of breeding her
observation had taught her.

It is doubtful if she had ever heard of the Mendelian theory, or of de
Vries, but she expounded with beauty and accuracy to Davey, as they
rode through those strange and often resplendent nights, to starlight,
distant baying of dogs, lowing of cattle, and the dim, etherealized
outline of farmhouse, hedge, and tree. Expounded, in the terms of her
own observation, of certain pure breeds of live-stock; of mutations in
the peach, the chestnut, the strawberry, the sweet potato, without her
ever knowing, probably, the meaning of the word mutation, much less of
its technical application.

Asparagus-cutting, reproductive cycle in the rabbit, analysis
of certain pure breeds of live-stock, heredity and milk-yield,
cross-pollination, inbreeding of dairy-cattle, inheritance of
black-stripe in China-Poles, inheritance of shorthorns, elementary
evolution, dairy-cattle, breeding, genetics, were the tune to which
some of these night-rides were taken.

It was out of these long discourses with his sister, that his early
inclination veered first toward biology, then natural history and for a
brief while, medicine.

The great natural fount of Bek’s unerudite but accurate first-hand
observations poured itself in long, lucid strain through these nights.
Some of the glory that was the old Bek’s might have disappeared with
her pride of ownership, but none of her kind of mental magnificence.

She sat on her idea as squarely as she sat astride her horse. It was
generally said of her, and always refuted by Henry, who would never
grant you that mentality had sex, that she thought like a man.

Be that as it may, restricted to the penny, stripped of every freedom
of action that might have corresponded with the scope of mind, her
mind’s eye continued to sweep the horizon in the manner of one who
reckons in big stakes.

“If I could lay hand on five hundred or a thousand acres, Dave, then
I’d show you a thing or two about stock-farming!” Or, “See old Conrad
Gronauer’s place over there? Falling to pieces of dry-rot. I wrote in
my diary about him last night, and I’ll say it to his face. Gronauer
stinginess and lack of vision are to blame.”

“Does stinginess mean lack of vision, Bek?”

“Most of the time. If old Bek Schuyler had Gronauer’s place, mark
my word, it would be a going concern in three years. I’d have five
thousand bushels of potatoes off it the second year.”[37]

“Gee, all that in potatoes?”

“Never play small stakes, Dave. The reward is proportionately small,
and a small loss hurts as much as a big. Play the game high and
straight.”

Those were strangely exhilarating rides. Pearly, quivering horizons.
The sense-of-power of his mount under him. The cloud of the cattle
thundering softly to the crack of his whip and his will. Bek, seated so
squarely on her enormous sixteen-hand-and-a-half chestnut.

It was as if the soil had its beginning in the heart, and then flowed
through one, and then on out from the horses’ hoofs and became meadow
and dale, hill and meadow.

Something in Dave, kinship of the flesh of his body with the flesh of
the land that was warm with the thunder of their passing, would seem to
unlock, and out of the secret and reticent places of his mind and heart
would march the desires and unsaid things, made suddenly sayable.

“Geeminee, Bek—the stars! Those little fellows up there are as big—as
big as anything! And we little things are more wonderful than they are,
because they can’t think and we can.”

“That’s right, Dave. The stars never make me feel little and
insignificant the way they do lots of folks. They just make me feel
wonderful, for being made by the same divine hand that made them. Do
you ever think of God, Dave?”

“Aw—yes. Sure I do. Say, if I could be a star, guess what star I’d want
to be?”

“Don’t know as I even know the names of enough of them to venture a
guess. Morning Star? Evening Star? North Star?”

“No, Vega.”

“Vega. That’s a new one on me.”

“She’s not out now. Vega’s the one toward which the whole solar system
is supposed to be traveling.”

“Great human qualities, like strength and courage and loyalty and
wisdom, can be lights that attract humanity just as much as Vega
attracts the solar system, Dave.”

“That’s what I mean. I want to be wise. Henry’s wise.”

“Yes, but Henry is a little too wise for his time, Dave. To be a little
too wise for the times in which you live, is as bad as not being wise
enough. They crucify you for being too far ahead of your time, Dave.”

“Henry says most fellows would rather face the machine-guns over there
than face a new idea.”

“It’s all right to be wiser than the fellow next to you, Dave, but just
enough so as never to let him know that you are wiser.”

“Is Woodrow Wilson wise?”

“I’m afraid he is one of those whom they crucify for being too wise,
Dave.”

“Is Teddy wise?”

“Just wise enough not to let the other fellow know how much wiser he is
than the other fellow.”

“Know what, Bek?”

“No, what?”

“I’d like to see an elephant-stampede.”

“Kipling says it’s one of the sacred sights of the earth.”

“Know what, Bek?”

“No, what?”

“I’d like to be a policeman at Loop Square in The City.”

“What on earth put that into your head?”

“He stops everything with a lift of his hand. That’s more than Woodrow
Wilson is doing. He can’t stop the War.”

At the mention of war, Bek’s throat had a habit of beginning to beat.

“Wish to God, dear, he could.”

“Stevey is in the Argonne.”

“Yes, Steve is in the Argonne.”

“There’s five Schuylers in the War now, counting Uncle Phil at
training-camp.”

“That’s the law of war, Dave. To give.”

“If I was old enough, you’d give me.”

“Thank God you’re not.”

“I’d give myself.”

“Surely.”

“Is there a law of war?”

“It seems so.”

“Who made it?”

“Human nature.”

“Is it better to know the laws about human nature—or the kind of law in
books, like Henry?”

“That’s one of Henry’s difficulties. He knows more logic than human
nature.”

“Ain’t human nature—logi-cull?”

“You cannot build up theories, like Henry does, on the assumption that
it is, because it never comes out that way. Everybody agrees with Henry
that war is sin and evil. But there’s one big element in the way of
making it practicable.”

“Human nature?”

“Yes.”

“Henry says....”

“I sometimes suspect your brother, Dave, of being a great person with
his eyes gazing too far ahead of the ship to see the immediate reefs.
Those kind of people don’t get anywhere in life.”

“How do you get yourself anywhere?”

“By being true to yourself, of course.”

“Henry’s true!”

“Yes, but don’t you see, Dave, Henry happens to have the kind of self
that he can only be true to at the utmost pain and suffering to himself
and those who love him. Henry lives in one kind of world and behaves
as if he lives in a much more idealized one. A true leader of men,
Davey, must be just far enough beyond the foibles and weaknesses of the
average man to understand, not to despise him.”

“Say, Bek, you know what?”

“Don’t begin every sentence with that, Dave.”

“Well, _do_ you know what?”

“What?”

“When I’m big—I—when I’m big——”

“Yes?”

“Aw, I can’t say it.”

“Say it, Dave.”

“Well, when I’m big, you know what?”

“Didn’t I just tell you not to begin every sentence thataway, Dave?”

“Well, you know what? You know the way Ulysses rode at the head of the
Trojan War and all in Henry’s _Odyssey_?”

“No.”

“Didn’t Henry ever read it to you?”

“No Davey, your brother never reads to me out of the _Odyssey_.”

“Well, anyways, when I’m big.... Oh, I dunno, I can’t say it—but when
I’m big....”[38]

“Go on, say it, Dave.”

“When I’m big—I—aw—can’t. Lookie—oh, lookie, quick! There went one of
those ’possums I was telling you about, Bek. That’s one of those woolly
kind that have no pouch and carry the little ones on their backs. I
think that’s pretty funny, don’t you? You know what, Bek? A ’possum is
a marsupial. Know what a marsupial is? Well, Henry says——”

“Curve in those heifers, Dave. Here’s Ivorydale.”

The dawn began quivering up above the horizon in a fancy little shimmer
of silver.


FOOTNOTES:

[36] ... we never referred to the great metropolis within thirty-one
miles of us, in any terms except “The City.” It is surprising, even
after the automobile had jerked us to its very flank, how seldom we
visited it.

[37] Long years before the existence of the Lucy Stone League, which
upholds the right of a married woman to still use her maiden-name, I
continued to be known after my marriage as Bek Schuyler, except where
it came to signature.

My brother was always to the fore in giving his sanction to the
unrestricted legal privilege of woman to decide for herself the matter
of name.

Theoretically, I agree that a married woman should have the legal right
to the use of her maiden-name. But law me, it is one of those questions
difficult to feel keenly about. As I always say, for the professional
or business woman, whose name is her asset, well and good and fine.
But for a plain country woman like me—don’t know as it makes much
difference what they call me.

[38] ... one of these rides in particular stands out in my memory. We
were six hands short on the farm, all of the second winter of the War.
With the cry going out everywhere for conservation, forty head of my
heifers were eating their heads off waiting for market, to say nothing
of hoof-and-mouth disease, and shipping at a standstill, owing to
quarantine.

Dave and I drove these forty in as far as Ivorydale one clear November
night.

I can see him as plainly as if that night were before me now, astride
his paste-board-looking filly (one that usually did sister work at the
plow beside a heavier chestnut), loping through the milk-and-pearl
fore-glow of a dawn about to break. Head back, the wind before the dawn
lifted his bangs to reveal squareness of brow, and his shabby heels dug
into the patient old horseflesh with the fervor of the vision he could
not get said.




_Chapter Twenty-four_


To David’s generation of boys, the World War was little more than a
remote, a magnificent circus, toward which perpetual parades were
pouring the older fellows but which never, as a big tent, came within
even brass-band distance of town.

All of the circumstances of life were to be altered by that war; and
yet, to the generation who were children through the years of its
duration, khaki, and gold-star mothers, and Huns, and Big Berthas, and
hysteria belonged to the scheme of things, as waterfall belonged to
Old Mill Road. Here was a generation born into a phraseology that was
new only to the adult. Imperialism of Central Europe. World Safe for
Democracy. Over there! Hoch der Kaiser. Russian Revolution. The Poppies
Grow in Flanders Field. Conscription. Liberty Bonds. Argonne. Doughboy.
Buddy. Transport. Treaty of Versailles. Patriotic cant of this and
that propaganda-source, calculated to raise the nap of the flesh of a
nation, even while the only palpable results were an impoverished and
desolated world.

Many who marched down those languid streets of Centralia as Dave and
Teddy ran after, were not to come back; but even that, to children who
had seen it consistently happening, did not bring the catastrophic
reality of war closer.

If a fellow came home with one leg—well, fellows were always coming
home thataway. And still the circus of war remained strangely removed,
except one day Pete came home, and a small and suddenly rather
sickish-feeling boy, who was lugging a pail of sour clabber from Bek’s
place to the Igrotte house, came face to face with him in the open road.

The lower half of Pete’s face had been blown away and replaced with
sort of a nickel-plated jaw. And his eyes were still looking as if they
had frozen there of what they saw.

“Davey, b’God! Hi, Kid!”

“Hi!”

For the first time war became a horror then, stalking with stiff eyes
and rigid jaw through those lanes of peace.

David was sick that night, and feverish. “Upset stummick,” diagnosed
Mathilda, and plied him with castor-oil.

Every Schuyler came home. Phil, who saw ambulance service. His eldest
son, who drove a truck under bombarded skies for sixteen months.
Clara’s boy, who lied about his age to qualify for enlistment and who
saw service as far front as Amiens. Paula, who did canteen service in
France. Stevey, who fought at Argonne, and whose eyes had seen the
horror of the splashing of human entrails across fields.

The war, which had crashed with such terrific interruption into the
more or less organized scheme in which David had spent the first few
years of his life, came to its portentous conclusion, the world held
the brief pose of a chastened, spiritualized humanity that had gone
down in blood that it might be cleansed, and then relapsed.

In later years, there seemed to David to be a certain subtle
demarkation in human beings. Those born before the Great War and who
stood astride the chasm of it, as it were, with one foot in each world,
and those born to the curious, old-eyed youth of a post-war world.

It was a fantastic phase of human experience to have lived through,
even as a child.

Around Davey’s head, while he was a youngster, Russia cracked her
shackles, France bled white, the Near East, the Far East scrambled
and squirmed free of chains that carried the rust of centuries. His
own country flung a faltering gesture. A man named Mussolini thrust
his hand down into the throat of Italy, gagged and then rode her,
magnificently. Czars and Kaisers galloped out of the human scene like
Sancho Panza on mules. Forensic peasants came into world-power, their
followers crawling like armies of worms out of darkness to live in
the Kremlin. One fine day in Davey’s boyhood, Great Britain handed
portfolio to its first labor-government.

Supper-table discussion between the Old Gentleman and Henry made the
light along the lamp-wick buzz and flare in the gale of explosives.
Tariff. Woodrow Wilson. Lloyd George. Reparations. Rasputin. Rheims.
Stanley Baldwin. D’Annunzio. Irish Free State. Colonel House. Henry
Ford. Prohibition. Joe Cannon. League of Nations. Mexico. Trotsky. Jim
Reed. Muscle Shoals. Eugene Debs. Borah. Senator Moses. La Follette.
Nicholas Murray Butler. Wells’ _Outline of History_. Fascisti.

Time and time again, off the rather weary sill of Henry’s lips,
there dropped sparks that set the dry tinder of the Old Gentleman’s
conservatisms leaping and flaming.

This was a curious tenacity to Henry. It bothered him to see the Old
Gentleman darken and redden in apoplectic fashion. Sometimes it even
terrified him. But for the life of him, he could not remain silent and
let one after another of his father’s reactionisms die into the quiet
of the evening meals.

“Well, sir, something, ought to be done about this here Red
situation. The Boston police-strike, the steelworkers’ strike, the
soft-coal miners’ strike and now this here railway-strike in England
starting up. Race-riots out in Chicago. Bomb-plot trying to smash
up Attorney-General Palmer’s home. Only way for a self-respecting
government to handle anarchy is call out the troops. Shoot ’em down.
That’s the way to cure these scalawag anarchists. Cowards at heart!”

“Father, every manifestation of social discontent is not necessarily a
form of anarchy.”

“Like to know what else you call a lot of lazy fellows up-and-revolting
against the finest government in the world.”

“Revolt is the soul of progress.”

“By Gad, not to my way of thinking. If you think a lot of lazy louts of
fellows that think they can milk a living out of the Government instead
of working for it are the soul of progress, then, by Gad, progress
has got a rotten soul that I wouldn’t lift a little finger to help
save. You and this here Emma Goldman they’re giving a free boat-ride
to are the kind they drive out of this country and keep out! I.W.W.
crowd—I-won’t-work-ers!”

“Father!”

“Puppa!”

“Well! I won’t have no anarchy talked in my house, where there’s a boy
growing up to listen to it.”

“If it weren’t for that youngster, Father, and my desire for him to
learn to look temperately at both sides of this troubled old world, I
wouldn’t even argue the matter with a biased person like you.”

“I’ve worked hard all my life, earned an honest living, and I never had
time to sit and criticize the government that——”

“Oh, Father, Father—won’t you try to think with your brain instead of
with your prejudice? I hold no brief for anarchy, any more than you do.
I’m merely trying to differentiate between——”

“You hold brief for shenanigans of I.W.W. fellows, who don’t mean no
good by the country.”

“Don’t shout, Father!”

“Puppa!”

“I will shout! Anarchists! Anarchists—that’s what they are—by Gad, if I
thought a son of mine was one, I—I——”

“I quit, Father! If you think I’m going to try and argue capital and
labor with a man who sees red the moment a more equable living-scheme
for humanity is broached, you’re mistaken. You see, Dave, what I was
trying to say to your father is not that this strike or that riot is
right or wrong. The point, David, I’m trying to make to your father is
that without revolt against oppression, ignorance and illiteracy, there
can be no human emancipation. Submission, throughout the history of the
world, has begotten autocracy.”

“And what have such lazy-lout strikes begotten? I.W.W. anarchists.
Anarchy——”

“You win, Father. I quit! God only knows how anyone can be so
hidebound.”

“Hennery!”

“Excuse me, Mother.”

“You should have quit long ago, son. You know how excitable your Puppa
is.”

“I know what Henry means. If the rich ones wasn’t so rich, and the poor
ones wasn’t so poor, then there wouldn’t be so much to fight about,
would there?”

“Exactly, Dave. But you can’t make your father be——”

“Can’t make—can’t make—I’ll break every bone in——”

“Puppa—Hennery—please.”

Turbulent evenings. Supper-table disharmonies that were to set into
motion atoms in the boy’s brain that might never have stirred otherwise.

Off Henry’s sardonic lips were to glitter phrases of curious and
significant prophecy. As if against the retina of his lusterless eye
was imprinted the ultimate significance of empire toward which all
these catastrophic events were scurrying a bewildered world.

World-unification. Annihilation of distance. Propinquity of races.
Tolerance. Fraternity. Lonely phrases in a land that presently was to
pursue its policies outside the League of Nations.

Presently, these phrases, dinned by Henry, came to be the only reality
of war left against Dave’s brain.

The boys were home and settled now.

Even Pete’s mask was no longer terrible.

Here was Stevey as if he had never marched away to the rolling of
drums, living in a semi-attached two-family house out on Tallahassee
Street, within walking distance of the Giles Tool Works, where he had a
desk job in the shipping department.

Something in the nature of one of those freak tornadoes that can seem
to appear in a crazy spiral of fury out of the blue had happened to
Steve. The craving for drink had been literally shot from him.

In all the hubbub of the prohibition which a returning army found
awaiting it and with the nation lying prone upon its stomach and
kicking its heels and squalling over a right that had been wrested
from it, the mere sight of a bottle of Scotch on a shelf was enough to
stiffen Steve, taut and squeamish with revulsion.

A kind of cure not without its rare precedent in medical annals.

The smell, or for that matter even the sight of spirituous liquor in
any form, was to bring back to Steve the odor and smear of a human
face in the act of becoming pulp.

One night, crouched down under a hill of wet mud, and guzzling from a
flask with two companions in the trench, he had seen the face of his
“buddy” literally torn off by shrapnel as he tilted the bottle Stevey
had just handed him, to his lips.

The mess and the splatter were to remain irretrievably mixed in Steve’s
mind with the taste of alcohol, the mere sight of it to recall the
terrible sight of a friend’s face in the act of being blown to pulp.

Here was Steve, almost through no volition of his own, swept into the
scheme of the little two-family house on Tallahassee Street, Claire,
plumpish by now, awaiting him evenings, a normal youngster at her
skirts, in a doorway that had his monogram embroidered in its lace
curtain.

The Steve Schuylers at Number 1569½ Tallahassee Street, rent-payers,
water-tax payers, seat- and presently pew-holders, had fallen into
place. The Schuyler escutcheon had remained unviolated; and the Old
Gentleman, as time went on, came more and more to cast prideful eye
upon his first great-grandchild, Pauline, as she toddled out to meet
him on his less and less frequent visits into Centralia.[39]

Another Schuyler rivet had tightened the impeccable family-machine.
Respectability. Conservatism. Republicanism (consistently up to
this time!). Law-abiders. Voters. God-fearers. Rotarians. Masons.
Policy-holders.

Two years after his return from the World War, Stevey was carrying
fifteen-hundred-dollars life-insurance, depositing one dime a day in
a toy bank toward his daughter’s Vassar College education, lunching
once a week at a Blue Plate Booster’s Club in the Renchler Block,
voting the straight Republican ticket for Harding, and spending his
Sunday mornings flat on his back under the Ford five-seater in the
corrugated portable garage which he shared with the second tenant of
the two-family dwelling.

In the shy coming-together of Stevey and Claire after the convulsion
of their flying-apart, the bone, true to physiology, seemed to have
cemented more firmly than before the break.

Years after, when the name of a Schuyler was up before the state for
the highest honor bestowable upon one of its citizens, someone in
opposing political ranks did attempt the moss-grown device of trying
to probe out an irregularity in the social history of David Schuyler’s
nephew Stephen. A far-fetched gesture at best, and one, even had it
been successful, that was almost sure to have proved futile.

But to try to penetrate the Schuyler armor of social integrity was like
trying to wound the flank of the Himalayas with a bow and arrow.

It was the year that Stevey, with what he considered the hindrance,
rather than the advantage of an uncle the governor of his state, and a
mother the first woman alderman of the town of Centralia, was elected
second vice-president and treasurer of the Giles Tool Works.

Someone’s faint scent of something hurried connected with the marriage
was too faint for even the political vandals to fasten upon. To be
sure, Steve Schuyler and his wife were first-cousins. Scarcely a fact
to unmake governors.

When Bek Schuyler heard of the feeble intrigue, she smiled. A skeleton,
and not much of a one at that, and whose bones by now were soft with
decay, could scarcely be expected to rattle for the political gentlemen.

       *       *       *       *       *

So far as Dave was concerned, Claire’s little house on Tallahassee
Street was to become the center around which an assorted set of his
adolescent emotions were to dash themselves.

When Dora Tarkington was sixteen, and wore her curls in two round, flat
mats against her ears, she attended what was then known as the South
Tallahassee High School.

It was after a sharp attack of influenza, during one of the frequent
epidemics that swept the country those first years after the War, that
an arrangement was made for Dora to have her lunches hot at the Steve
Schuylers’, instead of the cold snack she was obliged to carry with her
the two miles from home.

Nowadays, when Steve returned from the Works for his midday meal, there
was Dora, whom they had known since she could toddle, to swell the
little family circle that drew up to table.

It pleased Claire to have special little daintinesses in her honor; and
since Len Tarkington had bartered in vain for some kind of a financial
arrangement to cover these lunches—Stevey withdrawing offended from the
argument—every day Dora, who was incomparable at handiwork, arrived
with some bit of surprise. A woolen chicken for Claire’s eldest little
girl. A sheer pink underthing for Claire herself, or a plover-egg with
a hand-painted face for the small boy who could crawl, and a tiny
crocheted cap for the baby.[40]

Claire’s little house in Tallahassee Street had to it the agreeable
untidiness of high, unevenly-drawn window-shades that admitted sunlight
in glaring streams across the rooms, youngsters crawling through them
and littering the floors with toys, building-blocks and noise-devices.

She was perpetual motion at stooping, snatching, admonishing, warning,
a wisp of her pretty, taffy hair constantly blown across her flustered
face; and in just such proportion as her activities seemed to increase,
her pretty kind of plumpness crept up on her.

Sweet Claire. She had feathered her nest. At noon and at evening, Steve
turned to it eagerly. Sometimes, at the corner, he consciously slowed
his step, to seem, from some perversity in him that gave him periods of
self-detestation, to enter the home she had made for him, a little less
enthusiastically.

Like her mother’s before her, Claire’s ineffable sweetness was like a
drug. It swam into the senses. It was into Stevey’s senses long before
he knew it. It had him quelled, caught, stabilized. It made a Rotarian
out of the rebel in him. It was sweet to submit to the little tropic
he had married himself into. The tropic of warm, sun-drenched, or
lamplight-drenched home, griddle-cake breakfasts, with the aroma of
little-pig sausages; the cleanest, deepest of beds; the warm, sweet
body of the woman who bore him warm, sweet children. Her intellectual
languor was part of her sweetness, just as it was part of her danger.
Along with the sweetness of those first years, there was just a little
terror of them. Submission. Old rebellions dying. Cravings—old inchoate
beauties—finally, just the sweetness.

The lace curtains in the front parlor of the house on Tallahassee
Street came to have for Steve the living, breathing quality of Claire
herself. She was so warmly behind them, at his coming. At his going.
They stirred faintly of her breath. They were a badge of her.

Sometimes Claire, who was even then locally and affectionately known
as a congenital match-maker, used to stand behind these lace curtains,
tiptoe, to watch for the noonday approach of Dora, usually in the
company of Kenneth Chipman, who was junior partner in his father’s
law-office, just across the street from Tallahassee High.

Kenneth was a campus-looking young fellow, with the first thatch of
patent-leather hair that had reached Centralia, and one of those
figures shaped like the map of South America. Heavy, flaring shoulders,
tapering off into slim, flat hips. He was a graduate of the State
University, a winner of a state oratorical contest; pounded a wicked
ukulele and already, his second year out of college, had his name
on the ground-glass door of the offices of Chipman and Lare, Patent
Attorneys.

His brother Lynn, killed at Amiens, had been the white hope of the
two white-haired senior members of that office. After his death, the
legend grew rapidly that Lynn had been the most brilliant young legal
mind to ever take up practice in Centralia. Nevertheless, even with
the precedent of this older brother, a capable enough young fellow,
whom time and a warrior’s death were to canonize into genius, Kenneth,
ukulele-pest that he could be of an evening, was regarded as one of the
up-and-coming younger men of the town.

The third time Claire stood behind her lace curtains and beheld Kenneth
raise his straw cady and walk briskly down the street with many a
backward glance at Dora as she danced upstairs, and another lift of
hat, and another, Claire remarked to her husband that night, as she was
rubbing tonic into his hair before they retired:

“You know, Stevey, looks to me as if young Chipman is smitten on Dora.”

“Rub a little toward the center, dear. Getting right thin, there.”

“Today’s the third time he’s walked from Tallahassee High with her,
noontime.”

“The way to massage the scalp, dear, is with a circular motion of the
fingers. Don’t shove.”

“Henry says he’s a chip off the old block, and already handling some of
his father’s cases, single-handed. Dora’s one darling girl.”

“’Fraid that’ll put Davey’s nose out of joint,” said Steve, hitching
his collar open.

“What do you mean, Davey?”

“Well, haven’t they been smitten with each other ever since they were
crawling?”

“Why, Stevey Renchler, what ever put that idea into your head? Those
two children! I was saying to Aunt Bek the other day, bright as Davey
is in some ways—you know sometimes—I—you know, Stevey, sometimes
I—think, in other ways, Dave’s not so bright.”

“It’s his manner, Claire. He’s either the smartest or the dumbest kid
on earth. Hanged if I can make out which.”

“The way he lies out there, day after day, herding his little old
handful of sheep, stretched by the hour on the flat of his tummy,
reading or mooning—I guess that’s what some folks call bright. He _is_
smart, of course, in a school way. Henriette says he’s ’way ahead of
any boy his age that’s had schooling regular and all—but in general—for
Davey’s age—oh, I don’t know—just kinda funny, loony-looking sort of
kid to me. Him and Dora! Why, poor Davey, I’ll bet he hasn’t more than
laid eyes on her since the family moved from the House on Sycamore
Street.”

“Why, you know better than that, Claire. The days when—when we—how
often did we use to see Dave and Dora playing around south of the
Igrotte house together. Kids, of course, but that’s all I’m saying.
He’s been sweet on her since he could toddle——”

“I wonder,” said Claire, and sat down thoughtfully, in the middle of
the act of unfastening the tiny pearl buttons of her pretty little
home-made house-dress. “Davey _is_ more her type—I guess.”

“The kid puzzles me,” said Steve and yanked hard at the rear button of
his collar. “Can’t make up my mind about him.”

“Oh, I don’t mean I really think he’s queer, Steve. I didn’t mean that.
It’s all of you nagging him, I think, that confuses him, as much as
anything. After all, he’s only seventeen. Dave happened to come along
in bad times. He’s never had the chance of mixing and schooling the
rest of you had. First came the family-crash and then the War and all.
After all, he’s only a youngster.”

“Old enough by now to know his own mind, you’d think.”

“Not a mind like Davey’s.”

“If you aren’t the greatest girl! Here you’ve been wondering why Dave
didn’t get a move on and take a real job, and the minute I agree——”

“But I mean, Stevey, lots of times a boy growing up—alone-like in a
big family—nobody much to talk to except Henry, who’s a pretty queer
darling duck too—a boy like that gets to feeling around with his mind
in every direction, and for all we know—some day—he may come out all
right.”

“Something in that. Shame he’s had the least schooling of us all. In
his way, Davey’s bright enough. Dave’s deep.”

“Maybe. Only it’s my observation that still water doesn’t necessarily
run deep. Maybe it doesn’t run at all.”

“Things just didn’t break right for him, or for the family, about the
time he came along.”

“’Course, he’s had Henry.”

“That’s something.”

“Something! Henry’s not appreciated in this town. A fellow like Henry
can have a far finer influence over a fellow than all the schools put
together. Look how thick they are. Always puttering together over books
and ant-hills and maps. Let me tell you, Henry’s a liberal education in
himself.”

“Yes, if he doesn’t go putting crazy ideas in the youngster’s head. You
see how far his brains have gotten Henry, don’t you? Look at what his
ideas on war got for him.”

“But there’s just one beauty about Dave. You can’t topple over that
youngster. He’s that square on his feet.”

“That’s true enough. Remember that time, over at Bek’s, Henry was
lecturing on the wrongness of making war possible, and up piped that
youngster from a corner where he’d been lying on his stomach with his
chin propped up in his palms, and says: ‘But, Henry, you can’t end war
by not fighting in it when the war comes. It’s folks you’ve got to
change beforehand, so there won’t be any war.’ Jove, I thought that
about said it in a nutshell. That kid’s got the kind of mind believes
in preventive medicines, so the world doesn’t get the measles. Not what
to do about it when the measles have come.”

“That’s too deep for me.”

“Other evening, when I went out to the Igrotte house to help
Grandfather and Dave lay those shingles, I was looking around for the
kid, and finally I find him lying barefoot, in his overalls, up against
a hay-rick, star-gazing. ‘Say, you’re getting pretty well along for
this barefoot-boy-and-cheeks-of-tan stuff,’ I said to him, ‘How do you
get that way?’ And what do you think he answered?”

“What?”

“‘You know, that fellow Malthus,’ he says. ‘Who?’ I asked. ‘Malthus.’
I thought at first he said Methuselah. Malthus, it seems, was a
fellow who worked out that the population of the world doubles every
twenty-five years!”

“My!”

“Well, Davey must have been lying there thinking about it.”

“Henry’s doings.”

“Because he said to me—‘Just suppose for argument, Malthus was
over-stating, and the population only doubles every fifty or a hundred
years. Where are we going to get food after a while? Eats and stuff.
Where are we going to have room enough to grow enough grain and graze
enough cattle, if the population crowds up the earth like that?’”

“Why, Stevey—working his brain on such stuff when we’ve plenty of
pasture-land around here can be rented for a song. Of all things....”

“That’s the whole point, Claire. There’s a kid with a long head on him.
That youngster, lying there, had thought out something for the future,
where most of us only have the brains to see what’s right under our
noses, and then only maybe.”

“You mean, Henry’s like that, and he’s making Dave like that?”

“No, sir. Henry had been reading to him about Malthus, all right, but
darned if the youngster hadn’t worked the rest out for himself.”

“Well, he’s either right smart or right dumb.”

“A dummy doesn’t work things out for himself. He got me thinking, too.
Just as the youngster said, if we can harness the air and electricity
and water and sun to work for us, why can’t we get busy on the
waste places of the world and make them produce for us. Hundreds of
thousands of miles of desert and prairie and sand are waiting for man’s
ingenuity to reclaim them—darn shame, Dave has seen leaner days than
any of the rest of us. I think it’s put age on the Old Gentleman and
Grandmother—just worrying about it.”[41]

“Well, you know the saying, Steve, you can’t keep a good man down,”
said Claire, with her mother’s rather dreadful amiability, and mouthing
her decrepit observation in the key of having discovered a truth.

“Well, I hope to heaven ‘good’ is the word. Certainly does seem a
fellow his age ought to have a preference for something by now. I
offered six months ago to chip in to pay the wage of a hired-man for
the Old Gentleman, in case Dave might be wanting to scratch around for
a job in town. The Old Gentleman himself keeps trying to oust him out
of the nest.”

“You know, I think Isaiah Clark would be willing to give Dave a job
in his Seed and Feed Store, seeing how Dave’s so interested in making
things grow.”

“Oh, Lord, honey, you see the point about as readily as Grandfather’s
old blind mare sees oats. Besides, Isaiah hasn’t had a boy in there
since Joe Mintz was killed in the War. I’m not in strong at the shops
enough to be asking any favors, but it looks to me as if I ought to be
able to get Davey in at the Works. There’s a future there for a boy
who’s willing to work up from the foundry. Look at Sime Giles!”

“So you think,” said Claire, still sitting in the huddle of
her half-open dress, her pretty pink mouth a little open,
“so—you—think—Davey’s sweet on Dora!”

“I don’t think!” said Steve, and went shushing off to the bathroom, in
bed-slippers hand-scalloped by Claire, “I _know_!”


FOOTNOTES:

[39] ... that was the winter Stevey’s eldest child Pauline accompanied
her father and me to Washington, and the young Marquis de Fressac fell
so immediately in love with her. From the very first, her interest in
politics was to run neck and neck with the social lures her beauty
and personality created about her. It was characteristic of Pauline
that she should choose both. Considering the part she played during
her senatorship, and the influence she exerted both in France and in
America as a social force, it is difficult to estimate in which field
my granddaughter is succeeding most brilliantly. As my son-in-law de
Fressac puts it in his delightfully French manner, “Eet ees een both.”

[40] ... growing up, as she did, in a generation of girls to whom
handiwork was practically an obsolete art, loving gayety, filled
with a social instinct and with a brilliant gift for popularity,
Dora, in a curious way, was not quite of her time. She rode horseback
and crocheted all the edgings for her underwear. She won the local
golf-championship the year her piccalilli took first prize at the State
Fair. Never in his married life did Dave wear a shirt or a tie that was
not personally selected by her.

[41] ... looking back, I can see now, how early this idea was boring
itself into Davey’s brain. In her monograph about him, the late Eda
Eberhardt, Centralia’s librarian, relates how she was obliged to
deprive him of reading-room privileges one week because of his habit
of poring over maps and pencil-marking the deserts, mountains, and
prairies.

He once related to me, word for word, the doctrine of Malthusianism,
as it had been passed on to him by Henry, drawing his own critical
deductions, and evidently thinking about the relativity of population
and land.

He could never bear to see idle land. Even the stony little nooks and
corners surrounding the Igrotte house gave up odds and ends of the most
heterogeneous yield. Mushrooms under the back porch. A potato-patch
he had somehow scratched into being, on a rocky little ledge of land
behind the barns. Even out of the powdery, dry front yard he had eked
beets and carrots.

Much of my own later success with crop-rotation I owe to his helpful
co-operation in those days when his significant back-to-the-farm
policies must just have been taking shape in his mind.




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Twenty-five_


The following afternoon, at the Igrotte house, where Claire had enticed
an inert Stevey for a five-mile walk through the somnolence of a
Sunday, Claire remarked to Dave, who came up on the back porch looking
sweaty from having rubbed down a mare:

“Did you know Dora Tarkington has her lunches at our house now, Dave?
She’s in her second year at Tallahassee High.”

“No,” said David, breathing very softly as if by that device he could
restrain the fact that, at Claire’s remark, every pore in his body
seemed to leap to attention.

“Yes. Ought to see her. Right young-ladyfied. Gets herself escorted to
the very door by Kenneth Chipman, if you please, and is going to take
the kindergarten course when she finishes Tallahassee.”

“Yeh,” said Davey. He was sitting on the railing of the back porch,
Claire on the topmost step, hulling a pan of peas for Mathilda. They
made little tin-dripping sounds, as they clattered from under her
fingers. To Davey, sitting there, swinging one bare foot, and trying to
watch them casually, his eyes felt as if they were smeared across his
face.

Claire felt rather than saw them, and with the blurting lack of tact,
worthy of sweet Emma’s sweet daughter, shot out an eager, friendly arm.

“You’re twice the fellow Kenneth is, Davey, if you pull yourself
together and get yourself started.”

“Aw!”

“Dora’s smitten with Kenneth because he’s sort of what you would call
an up-and-comer. Naturally, he’s so much older than you, but she’d
throw him over like that, for you, if you’d give her half a chance,
Dave, by sort of striking out and making your start in life.”

A rush of words, of remonstrances, of shame, clogged into Davey’s
throat, so that he turned toward her a flaming face, which finally
decided to save itself from tears by a flare of anger.

“What’s Dora Tarkington and Kenneth Chipman got to do with me?” he shot
out. “I’d like to know that! I would! What’s anything about—anything
got to do with me. Pumph! as if I care!”

“Oh, then, Dave, you do!”

“Pumph!” When David was just turned fifteen, his face was still almost
the child’s face of square, unset-looking contour, and bangs that he
was just beginning to train backward, but which still persisted in
drooping square-cut over his brow. A lean, childish-looking face, with
eyes that seemed all out of proportion, because the cheeks needed
filling in. Straight, friendly, brown eyes, level as Bek’s, and square
white teeth against tan. It was a young face, even for the lean,
gangling, childish body. A body of the most astonishing sinuosity.
Tough as fibre.[42]

At seventeen, his arms, knobby at the wrists, seemed endless, and his
legs, knobby at the ankles, seemed longer than they were to appear in
his full maturity.

The farm had put its print on David. Drawn him out long and lean and
brown, so that store-clothes struck him mid-arm-and-leg. Even overalls
hit him too high at the waist, and petered out considerably above his
ankles.

Straddling the porch-rail, swinging bare heels into the side of the
house, there was something wounded and cloudy about him and something
of absurd adolescence.

“Pumph! Good gosh! Dora and Kenneth. ’Sthat to me! Good gosh, can’t a
girl and a fellow walk from Tallahassee High to lunch? Good gosh! Good
gosh!”

Poor Claire, on the thought that she was about as subtle as spinach,
Steve could sometimes kiss the lobe of her ear, a little ashamed that
it endeared her. So now:

“I just thought, Davey,” she said to the ring of the quick peas dancing
down into the pan,—“I just kinda thought—you and Dora—growing up
together—maybe you—maybe she—it’s nice to see girls and boys that grow
up together sort of go on together—that is, if—of course, only, that
is, only if——”

“Well, ’tain’t,” said Dave, and jumped down off the frail rail,
and walked with a casual whistling toward the barn, and crawled as
high into the hayloft as he could, burrowing in and in and in, like
something wounded that wanted to lie hurt and alone.


FOOTNOTES:

[42] I cannot recall my brother ever having a sick-abed day, with
the exception, of course, of the nervous headaches to which he was
devastatingly subject, but which did not develop until along about his
sixteenth or seventeenth year. He was extremely sensitive upon what he
considered this physical shortcoming, and would endure somehow through
a day of the most appalling duress and responsibility, with only the
tight-drawn muscles around his mouth to indicate to those of us who
knew him best, that one of the raging headaches was upon him.




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Twenty-six_


More and more frequently, now that Dave was seventeen, usually at
supper-time in the small kitchen that Mathilda kept spotlessly clean
and decorated in shelf paper of a scallop-design that she snipped out
herself, the Old Gentleman came out flat-footed at him.

It held the little group of four around the table tense from the start
of the meal. Mathilda, who kept breaking in with her futilities of
pass-this-and-pass-that. Henry, whose gaunt, lantern face would darken
and scowl, and Dave, whose toes would wind themselves around the rung
of his chair.

In summer, the dusk crowded into the small stifling kitchen like a
merciless hot smoke, and a clematis vine leaned in at the window and
withered on its indoor side. In winter, the range was full of the small
roar of flames chewing coal, but there was usually hoar-frost on the
leaky windows.

Dave’s place at table faced the window. When the Old Gentleman began
a fusillade, his tormented gaze would dig into the clematis vine or
follow the wild and beautiful outlines of the frozen panes. The Old
Gentleman, without any realization of it, could be relentless in his
taunt. Could poke fun with a pitchfork.

“Well Mother, what do you think I heard over at Seven Mile, where
I drove two heifers this afternoon? There’s a greater scarcity of
farm-help today than there was during the war. Can’t get the men to
stick to the land.”

“It’s a fact,” said Henry, obtuse for the moment. “Labor’s restive.
Flattered by the attention it received during the war it is now
watching the proletarian success in Russia. The Adamson Act fixed the
basic eight-hour day, but failed to keep pace with the rising prices.
Trouble with the back-to-the-land propaganda is this——”

“Well, as I told them over at Seven Mile today, I’ve got one hand on
_my_ place don’t have to be coaxed back to the land, because he’s never
left it. Can’t seem any way to get him to leave it.”

“Puppa—some hominy,” fluttered Mathilda to the Old Gentleman, who was
quivering with silent laughter.

That was the signal for Dave, who was about to quiz Henry about the
Adamson Law, to wind agonized toes around the rung of his chair. It was
the signal too, for Henry’s face to darken at his own gullibility and
for him to rise to Dave’s defense.

“Say, Father, that’s pretty raw.”

“Pretty raw? Well, facts are stubborn things, as stubborn as some
growing and grown boys that won’t get a move on for not knowing what
they want.”

“Davey, little more sorghum on your hominy?”

“I’ll take my chance, Father, on the mind that decides slowly, over
and above the one that is quick and ready on the impulse to which it
doesn’t stick.”

“Quick and ready? It’s the second summer now, Taggart made promise to
me he’d take him on at the bank. Sawdust-sprinkling has made many a
road to the cashier’s cage for the honest, industrious boy. I’d like a
Schuyler in a bank.”

“I don’t like banking, Father. In a cage—all day—thataway.”

“You worry about keeping spittoons clean first, young man.”

“Puppa!”

“By golly, what _do_ you like? I am waiting to hear what you do like
besides doing around here, on the place, chores that you could help me
to hire a boy for, on wages you could make in a man-size job.”

“Puppa!”

“Now, Father, look here, be fair. It is true Dave’s old enough now to
——”

“I don’t need you, Henry, to dictate to me to be fair. I don’t see that
you know how to be fair with yourself, much less instruct me how to be
fair with my youngest. How fair have you been to yourself!”

“Puppa!”

“Hiding yourself under every bushel-basket you could find. Refusing
honor after honor, like that fellow Cincinnati was named after. Only
that fellow finally left his plow. I don’t want another Cincinnati
fellow in the family.”

Anathema to the Old Gentleman were Henry’s shoulders heaving in the
silent kind of laughter that he expressed in every fashion except the
vocal. Red dyed his face. His body quivered. Up under the eaves of his
brow, his eyes watered and drew themselves up tightly, like bird-claws,
and tears oozed at the corners.

“I wish it could seem so funny to me!”

“I’m sorry, Father.”

“Henry, don’t aggravate your father.”

“He don’t aggravate me any more, Mother. That’s all past. I’ve long ago
reconciled myself to the disappointment of seeing the son that could
bring big honor, satisfied with being a country lawyer. It’s bitter to
have to see it, but, by golly, I don’t sit back and see it happen over
again! Dave, content to be just a hand on a one-horse farm!”

The bare toes clamped to the rung again. The Old Gentleman was right.
Of course. A fellow didn’t stick around a farm no bigger than the
Igrotte place, if he was worth his hire at doing anything better. The
Old Gentleman was right. But the torturous indecisions! The torturous,
torturous indecisions....

“You see, Father, a fellow like me in a bank-job—wouldn’t—make a go of
it.”

“What about that job with Seth Pritchy on his dairy farm?”

“But, Father, the trouble with that....”

“The trouble with that,” suddenly shouted the old man, his irascibility
rising and spluttering, “is _you_!”....

“I know, Father, but I don’t want——”

“Then what in Heaven’s name do you want? All right, Pritchy’s out. The
bank’s out. Clerking’s out. Dairying’s out. Farming’s out. Now, young
man, you tell me, by Gad, what you’ve got on your mind. That’s what
I’ve got a right to know. Moon-herding at seventeen. Belly-reading.
Star-gazing. Well—now what?”

“Father—when you yell that way—fellow gets confused.”

“Fellow gets confused,” mimicked the Old Gentleman. “Fellow gets
confused. By golly, what do you think your old Pap is getting,
sitting by and having to see a young fellow stagnate for want of the
gumption to know what it is in life he’s cut out for. Day-dreaming.
Night-gazing. Star-hunting. And the world going marching on! Fellow
gets confused.... Like to know what you think I get!”

“Yes, Father, you get the boy confused, and you get me confused too.
Pretty darned confused. The wonder to me is that the whole Schuyler
outfit isn’t down in medical annals as Exhibit A of nervous dyspeptics,
from a lifetime of meals eaten to your howling temperament.”

“Puppa—you haven’t touched your dish of rice. Pass your father the
cinnamon, Davey.”

“I’m only asking him to tell me what he’s got on his mind that is
better than anything we have to offer him! A father is entitled to that
right. A bright boy, his age, can’t turn down everything that will help
to get him off a shanty-farm without having something better on his
mind than he lets on. What have you and him been cooking up together
all these years, if it don’t give him enough gumption to come in out of
the rain?”

“Give the boy time, Father, to find himself.”

“To find himself, Puppa. Henry, you sprinkle a bit of cinnamon on your
father’s rice for him. He just won’t eat his rice plain. Puppa is the
greatest one not to eat his rice plain.”

“To find himself! By his age, you were already in your second year
law-school.”

“Yes, Father, but I had advantages that—we haven’t been quite able to
give Dave.”

On that, it was as if you had jabbed a pin into the balloon of the Old
Gentleman’s rambunctiousness. He lopped over along his spine. His chin
fell to his chest, his hands sought the table-edge, and the red ran
from his face, leaving it the blanched smoothness of an almond.

“Don’t hold it against me that he was born into the years of my
reverses.”

“Puppa....”

“Nonsense, Father, you know precisely what I mean.”

“I know what I mean. He hasn’t even had a grammar-school education. A
man like me, who has wanted for every one of his children what he could
never have for himself, and who has been able to give it to every one
except his last ——”

“If there is anything to be said on that subject, Father, I’m the one
it might be said to. Not you. I’ve had out a lawyer’s shingle ever
since Davey was born. I’ve been the one who should have managed to make
his education and his advantages possible. You’ve the right to expect
that from us—but, somehow, the blamed war—the general slump—the sum
total of war, even for those who fatten off it, is loss. You lose if
you win.”

“Henry’s been a good education to Davey,” quavered Mathilda. “All
education don’t lie in the schoolhouse, Puppa.”

“If only you wouldn’t keep picking on me, Father,” piped up David. “I’m
earning my keep, thisaway. I’m helping you, and I’ll help you more.”

“Earning your keep!” shouted the Old Gentleman again. “Earning your
keep! Is that all you’re fit for? Like any hobo-hand who rides in on a
box-car.”

“Dave’s of a peculiar and cautious temperament, Father. I’ve noticed
that about him. Slow to act, but decisive, once his mind is made up.
Give him time.”

“Time! Time! Time for what, that’s all I want to know. I’ve got a right
to know. A man like me who banks on his children down to the last of
them, making them citizens a community can be proud of! What’s in the
back of this young one’s head? My other boys got out. Got themselves
started—what’s in the back of this one’s head?”

“For Lord’s sake, Father, quit ragging the boy!”

“Don’t keep asking me that, Father!” cried Dave, goaded until he sprang
to his feet with his face so drawn that before he even opened his mouth
his mother was crying for him. “Don’t keep asking me that. Nothing’s in
the back of my head. Nothing except—everything. I guess I’m not cut out
for much, but if you’ll let me alone—if you’ll only let me alone. _You
let me alone_,” shouted Dave suddenly, in the same key of his father’s
raucousness, and then by an effort that pulled his mouth all out of
shape and made his mother sob more with hurting for him, got his voice
back again into a curious, hard level that slid up at the end into a
ridiculous change-of-voice squeak. “Don’t hound me, Father! A fellow
needs time....”

“He does that, Puppa. Davey was never a quick child. He’s not so strong
as he looks, Puppa. He’s not looked so well lately.”

“Oh, Mother, for goodness’ sakes, Mother. I’m well.”

“A boy that’s too proud to wear his asafœtida-bag—can catch sickness.”

“Don’t hound him, Father,” said Henry, his brow heavy with scowl.

“Don’t, Father!” cried Dave, and, leaping up, suddenly ran toward the
doorway, as if evading the pursuit of more words. “Don’t hound me.
You see, with a fellow like me—with a fellow like me,” he kept saying
through the tight dam of his tonsils, “I’ve just got to have time
to—to—I’ve just got to have time. Don’t I, Henry? Don’t I, Hen-ry?” And
then, to his unspeakable agony, began to cry. In sniffles. And wipe at
his face with the grimy back of a hand.

There was something particularly feeble about the Old Gentleman, as he
shuffled in the quick contrition that was sure to follow one of his
outbursts, over toward his son, the pyrotechnics of his emotions dying
down into broken and pitiable utterances.

“I’m a bad father, Dave. I can’t do anything for my children, and then
I turn around and blame them.”

“Cripes,” said David, “what’s all the row about? I got to go for those
two heifers.”

“Mind you close that south gate,” shouted the Old Gentleman after him.
“Don’t you leave that south gate open, this time of night, again, or by
golly, I’ll——”

“Puppa!” quavered Mathilda, standing in the open window with a stack of
dishes in her hand. “Look! Isn’t that a rainbow out over Middleton way?”

It was. Three-quarters of an arch that stopped suddenly in the middle
of the pasture, as if broken off.

“By Jove, it is, Mother!”

The delicate thing hung with the curve of a descending skyrocket over
the evening countryside, sun-pierced rain-clouds breaking into great
chunks and sending down spokes of light.

Into the light-sprayed arch ran the loping figure of Dave, headed for
pasture.

“By golly,” said the Old Gentleman, blowing at his pipe and rousing the
old, cold smell, “that’s fine! What’s it a sign of, Mother?”

“Run under a rainbow that comes up over your left shoulder, and you’ll
get a pot of gold at its far end and never suffer a bunion all your
days.”

“There goes Davey through! No bunions for him!”

“I’m glad. Bunions is mighty painful things,” said Mathilda, and limped
on her own over to deposit dishes in the sink.[43]


FOOTNOTES:

[43] Time and time again, I’ve heard my Mother tell the story of
Davey running through the rainbow, that prophetic evening that Father
took the boy to task for his habit of the slow decision. A trait
that ultimately was to become his surest asset, this ability of his
to think slowly and surely toward a conclusion, and then act with
leaping swiftness. I have it from my brother first-hand that although
he signed the Air Lane bill, then known as Schuyler’s Cyclone Act, at
the conclusion of his last term in Congress, actually he had given the
matter six years of detailed premeditation.




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Twenty-seven_


All that evening, long after the heifers were in, and the last bolt
drawn, and Mathilda’s last cup washed, and the dishpan set gleaming
against the drain-board, Henry sat in his room, as if waiting. The
sound of his parents moving about their adjoining room at the business
of going to bed, died down, and then the drone of their fitful remarks
to each other, falling light as rain upon the silence, before they
dropped off to sleep.

Every so often, Henry’s pipe, on its way to his mouth, paused, as if to
listen. Or suddenly, he slid forward on the old leather Morris chair
to cock an ear. The student-lamp had a slow hiss to it that no amount
of puttering with the wick would correct. To listen for a creak on the
stairway, you had to strain a bit through that soft commotion.

After a while Henry fitted back his copy of _The Martyrdom of Man_ into
its familiar place on his bookshelf, lowered the wick until its flame
slipped into its slot, and then dragged his heavy Morris chair over
toward the open window.

An April night, with the cool, filtered taste to it of spring water,
lay over the moonless scene. A dark night, but not black enough to
erase silhouettes. A soft, lovely, motionless night, dotted with
myriads of small stars, and through it, like an arpeggio scale, the
minute, silver, hurrying sounds of a runnel of spring water animated by
recent rains.

After a while, the sole light on the landscape, one that burned in the
remote window of a shanty-dweller named Joe Batch, passed out into
the darkness, and then Henry did what, for him, was an unprecedented
thing.[44]

He tiptoed out into the hall, and with his slippers hanging off at the
heels, wound up the ladder that led up into Dave’s room.

The candle in that attic of slants and shadows was guttering low in its
green bottle; and, fully dressed on his pallet, with his cheek down
against the page of an open volume of _Henry Esmond_, and his eyes wide
awake but staring off, lay David.

He sprang up at the appearance of his brother’s head above the ladder,
shamefaced for no reason he could have formulated. Teddy leaped, too,
from his doze, bellying across the floor in a recognizing frenzy of
wagging tail.

“It’s hot up here,” said Henry. “Whew!” and walked over to the
undersized window and threw up the sash. The gust of it blew out the
candle into a darkness for which they both seemed grateful.

“I guess I’d ’a’ been coming down to you soon, Henry,” said the boy and
moved along, so that they both might sit on the side of the cot.

It was only the second or third time Henry had ever been in that room.
They sat silently, Henry stooping away from the rough boards of the
slant ceiling.

“Down, Teddy!”

“What’s what, Dave?” said Henry, and caught up one knee between his
hands and began to rock.

“Why—that’s just what I dunno,” said Dave, and gulped so, that in the
smooth, dark silence, it was almost a click.

“Feeling well?”

“Sure.”

“Any more those headaches?”

“Just kinda. Some days.”

“Often?”

“N-no.”

“Bad?”

“N-no.”

“Today?”

“Nope.”

“Eye-doctor.”

“Aw!”

“What Father meant this evening, Dave, only he’s got a rotten way of
saying it, is——”

“I know.”

“I figure, Dave, that in your case, you’re just a little slow off the
trigger. Am I right?”

“You see, Henry—I can’t say it to Father—but what’s the use a fellow
choosing something to do, just because he’s got to be doing something?”

“Something in that.”

“Now, you just take the way the bees work it out in that book you gave
me about them by that French fellow.”

“Maeterlinck.”

“And the ants in that other fellow’s book.”

“Wheeler.”

“You don’t catch one single one of those chaps down in the bee-world
and the ant-world doing something just to be doing. No, sir. You don’t
catch a worker in bee-town putting his bee-shoulder to the wheel,
unless he knows that wheel’s going to turn something. A fellow’s got to
have his eye on building up something—even if it’s only a honeycomb.
Say, Henry, you know what? This month’s _Farm Journal’s_ got a story
in about bee-raising—maybe if I was to try my hand at that——”

“Yesterday, it was ovibos-raising, wasn’t it?”

“Yeh! That fellow Stefansson you gave me to read. _Northward Course of
Empire._ That’s what I mean, Henry! Just the name of that book says
what I mean. What’s the use sitting in a cage in somebody’s bank, or
keeping count of somebody’s Holsteins, or raising a little old patch of
alfalfa, when there—when there’s whole empires lying about us, waiting
for men; and new worlds that the airship is going to link onto us, so
that the North Pole isn’t even North any more. You know what, Henry?
That land up there isn’t dead. Hundreds and thousands of miles of it.
Fellows have lived off that land up there for years, without having any
provisions with them. That means there’s whole new worlds lying around
us. Don’t it? Funny everybody don’t get excited about it——”

“Well?”

“Well—well—like it says in one of the biologies, man’s pro-duc-tiv-ity
of the soil has got to keep pace with his fertility of the soil. See?
Know what I mean? I’ve worked it out. It’s thisaway.”

“This way.”

“Thisaway.”

“This way.”

“This way. Well, take when a country like ours gets too many people
in it—well, the northward course of empire means that country up
there can be used for growing more meat and more wheat to feed the
over-population—see what I mean?—what’s the use fiddling around in a
clerk’s cage, when—when there’s empires lying around asleep and waiting
to be worked up.”

“Well? Go on.”

“There’s nowhere to go, Henry. That’s the trouble. A fellow just
thinks and thinks, and then—he’s so busy thinking where to begin—he
don’t begin—at all.”

“Doesn’t——”

“Doesn’t.”

“Henry, why did you give me that book called Spencer’s _First
Principles_?”

“To make you think.”

“Do you believe in God?”

“Not as he exists in Testaments.”

“As he exists in these here _First Principles_?”

“Does he exist there?”

“Sure he does. Who made the First Principles?”

“I like your looking at it like that.”

“Was Ingersoll a great preacher?”

“A great orator.”

“Who was a great preacher?”

“Demosthenes.”

“But he couldn’t preach. He had to have a stone in his mouth.”

“His wisdom percolated through the stone, and even the stone heads of
his public.”

“You know what? A good way to make people listen to what you’ve got to
say to them, is to be a preacher.”

“Aha! _Now_ it’s the Church! This is the era of the decline of the
Church and the rise of the State. Don’t climb a sinking ship.”

“You can’t ever sink God.”

“Wait and see what happens when human beings attain the perfect mind.”

“Then they’ll be God themselves.”

“Exactly.”

“I believe in God, Henry.”

“Of course you do. Even when you jump the track, your trolley stays on.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Up there, in the gloom of the room that came down on both sides like
a book closing, they sat side by side on the edge of the cot, Henry
hugging his knee and rocking, Teddy stretched flat on the strip of
matting beneath the window, and the cool, washed night-air coming in
boldly.

It was a habit of these two to sit in silence, out into which their
thoughts could creep, timidly at first, then boldly, like mice at night.

“What’s the matter, boy?”

“Huh? Why?”

“You’re sighing like an exhausted pipe.”

“Roll over, Teddy. It’s him, snoring.”

“Oh!”

“Henry?”

“Yes?”

“Were you ever—kinda licked?”

“I’ve been licked from the start, I guess, Dave. In a way you’ll
probably never know anything about.”

“Shelley, the poet, died young. Did you know that? In a boat. Bay of
Naples. Sad—and grand—thataway.”

“That way. M-m-m. Not my style. The advantages of dying in bed can’t be
overestimated.”

“Have you ever thought, Henry—is life worth living?”

“Depends a good deal, I guess, upon the—liver.”

“Y’know, if it wasn’t for Mother and Father, and you and Bek, of
course, ’n’ all—it would be sad for them. Gee! But I don’t know as I’m
so crazy about living. I could snuff out just like that!”

“Well, taking it all in all, guess there’s pretty much to be said on
both sides.”

“You’re laughing.”

“Forsooth, no!”

“Well, I don’t expect anybody to understand——”

“Who is she?”

“How did you know?”

“I’m like that, sometimes. Intuitive.”

“Has anybody——”

“Nobody.”

“Has Claire?”

“I tell you, nobody.”

“Then how——”

“Oh, after a fellow has lived as long as I have, he comes to know a few
things for himself.”

“You see, Henry, I wouldn’t mind it so terribly—yes, maybe I would, but
maybe I wouldn’t, if it wasn’t one of those patent-leather lizards like
him. That’s what’s eating me. His walking down Tallahassee Street with
her every day.”

“Patent-leather lizard like whom?”

“Don’t you know?”

“How the dickens should I——”

“Kenneth Chipman.”

“What’s the matter with Kenneth? Nice enough fellow s’far as I know.
Son of as nice a fellow and as good a lawyer as this county boasts.”

“He’s a lizard. Tea-hound. Sits in the St. Charles Hotel any Saturday
afternoon around four, and drinks it with girls, with his little finger
sticking out off the cup.”

“What in Heaven’s name——”

“I don’t care what he is, so long as he doesn’t hook his arm into hers
walking along Tallahassee. Guess I’m what you call a single-track
fellow, Henry. Can’t think of anything else but—but his walking down
Tallahassee thataway—what’s the use of anything—with his walking down
Tallahassee thataway.”

“Sounds like an acute case of the girl. Who is she?”

“You—don’t—know——”

“Half-dozen nice kind of girls hereabouts that you might get smitten
with.”

“You—mean—you don’t know—everything?”

“Of course not, except a curl on a neck or a pair of blue eyes could be
responsible for er—a—well, for your acute—er—a....”

“You’re laughing at me!”

“No, no, David!”

“You are! I can feel you—shake!”

“Well, if I am, the joke’s on me.”

“What joke?”

“Life.”

“It’s not like I was a moonstruck fellow, with eyes for every girl.
She’s not like other girls.”

“I’m sure of that.”

“I—I’m not like other fellows.”

“I’m sure—of that——”

“You _are_ laughing.”

“Don’t be an idiot.”

“With me, Henry—oh, I know how fellows get moonstruck. Fellow can’t
help hearing. The boys. The way, they talk—around the barns. Girls.
Fellows and girls. I’m not thataway. I hate that—talk. Ugh! There’s
only one girl I could ever want to—to—to—touch, Henry. I—oughtn’t say
it, I guess—but—I do want to touch her beautifulness, Henry. To be the
first—the only—is that rotten?”

“It’s the soundest thing in life.”

“Gosh—I—just do! Other fellows get moonstruck. I’m not like them. With
me, it’s just Dora. Always!”

“Ah, Dora, old Tark’s daughter! That does complicate things. Our Old
Gentleman and he have about as much use for each other as two cocks in
a pit.”

“That’s nothing to Dora and me. Nothing’s nothing.”

“I see,” said Henry gravely, fumbling to relight his pipe, the match,
in that fitful second, revealing the face of young David smeared with
strain and pallor.

“She’s kinda outgrown me now, Hen. That’s the trouble. I don’t belong
to the Centralia crowd that she’s gone to school with—and then that
dancing-school business. We changed schools and Sunday-schools so
long ago. She’s the prettiest little thing. If Kenneth gets Dora,
he—I—dunno. I just dunno——”

For an overwhelmingly difficult moment, Dave’s tussle was chiefly with
his Adam’s-apple, the puffing of Henry’s pipe helping to make the noise
of the gulping seem less colossal.

“A first love-affair, Dave, is like the measles. A good thing to have
and have over.”

“That’s what you say. You’re—old. But I know me, all right. She’s—why,
she—she’s——”

It was intolerable that a jaw that was about to prick into its first
beard should tremble!

“Where does Dora stand on all this, Dave?”

“She—where would she stand? Where could I—come in with her. Beautiful
her. With her High School and dancing crowd and patent-leather-hair
lizards crawling all around her. Where do I come in? Me? Huh, I don’t
come in at all! Why—I haven’t even seen her, face to face, since—since
one morning in her barn—I—where do I come in? Not at all.”

“Why?”

“Why do you keep asking me _why_? She don’t know I’m on earth—any more.”

“Ever asked her?”

“Don’t ask a girl that.”

“Why?”

“If you don’t quit asking me ‘why’——”

“Blamed little fool, why don’t you go get your dander up with her,
instead of me?”

“If you—if you don’t quit shaking—if you don’t quit shaking—you’re
laughing—” screamed Dave, suddenly in a low, tight kind of agony, and
hurling himself against the bulk of his brother, landed sobbing there.
Tears that laid him low on the rack of humiliation. Deep, wrenching
sobs that he flung himself down into the mattress to muffle, and then,
because they shamed him intolerably began to beat and try to tussle
with his brother.

“You—what do you know about—about—caring——”

“You’re right, Dave,” said Henry. “I don’t seem to know how to
care—enough. That way. That’s what I meant by being licked. If
I—somehow—cared—more I wouldn’t be missing everything. Quit pounding me
boy!”

“I tell you I can’t live in a world where somebody—else—has her. I
can’t think of anything else. No wonder Father says I’m no good. I want
to do pretty nearly everything there is to be done, and nothing’s worth
doing because—I’m like a fellow that’s bleeding to death, Hen. All the
life’s running out of me—and I don’t care who knows it!”

“Have you talked to Dora?”

“Talked to Dora? What’ll I do? Go to her and say ‘Looka here, you’re
going with a patent-leather lizard if you ask me, but just the same, a
fellow that’s up-and-doing, owns his own flivver and can take care of
you and get you somewhere?’”

“Got to admit that about Ken.”

“Well, I’ll say to her, you drop him for me. I’m a farm-boy on my
father’s place out on Pessimines Lane. Everything that I want to do,
or be, is locked up in my head and can’t get out. But you go and throw
over Kenneth and get yourself engaged to me. That will unlock me and
I’ll start out to be something. That would make a hit with a girl like
Dora, in that gay town-set she’s in, wouldn’t it? A girl that goes to
Saturday-afternoon teas at the St. Charles, and holds out her little
finger from her teacup, I’d make a hit going to her with these calluses
on my hands, and forty cents in my pocket, and saying, ‘Dora, I’m the
fellow.’”

“That’s about the only way you’ll ever be the fellow.”

“What do you mean?”

“Go find out. Maybe you are the fellow. If you aren’t, take your
licking and shut up about it.”

The first light trembled over them, as they sat in the long
after-silence of that. Henry, with his thin legs crossed, sitting on
the edge of the cot and sucking at his cold pipe. Dave on his stomach,
with his feet against the warm fur of Teddy and his eyes on the glimmer
of dawn.


FOOTNOTES:

[44] It was characteristic of Dave, that on his world-tour he should
find time to personally see to it that Denny Batch, the son of an old
squatter out home, should be included in the secret-service corps of
that memorable trip.




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Twenty-eight_


On a hot September day of apricot haze; crush of family-sedans along
High Street, and a white-clad woman’s figure in the show-window of
the Five and Ten shooting hot scones from a patent machine into the
acquisitive hands of a sidewalk-jam; a gangling boy’s figure in long
trousers that stopped as if affronted above the knobs of his ankles,
and a short, black coat that hiked, strode along through the thick
human treacle and turned down into Second Street toward the Blue Bird
Restaurant.

He had just been fitted in the spectacles that are by now indissolubly
associated with the square pallor of face, the wide, clear, slightly
beetling brow, and the strong, high-bridged nose; a nose difficult to
span with good fit of eye-glass frame.

That was the difficulty this Saturday. There was an inflamed ridge
across the top of Dave’s nose, and the spectacles themselves were
newly wound with cotton to relieve pressure against the abrasion. It
kept him blinking his eyes and shrugging his nose. Every so often, he
stopped before the mirror of a chewing-gum machine to his reflection in
plate-glass, to ride them up and down into place.

The Old Gentleman’s youngest was not so well known on the streets of
Centralia as the older children had been back in the days when the
family lived in Sycamore Street.

The Centralia scene had changed since then. High Street had been
widened, and there were double car tracks now, and hourly omnibuses
started their cruise from Court House Square along a route that
included Adalia, College Corner, Seven Mile and Middleton. The
five-story Equity Building had replaced the old red brick Renchler
Block; and the new St. Charles Hotel, with a florist-shop,
haberdashery, and Western Union office flush with the sidewalk,
occupied the old site of Wabischer’s saloon, that had been burned to
the ground a few years after Dave was born.

Rows of parked cars stood in a long line down the center of High. A
white-granite soldiers’ monument, twice as tall as a man, and with a
pair of fern-fronds crossed on its inscribed bosom, stemmed the tide
for a brief détour around it, as traffic flowed over the viaduct toward
Middleton.

Spratt’s Dental College now stood on the saloon-corner where the
Old Gentleman, in pre-Volstead days, had leaned many a clay-crusted
convivial boot and swabbed down bock-beer, cramming his pockets with
pretzels and Saratoga chips for young pilferers.

But the Old Gentleman’s phaeton and mare had long since ceased to sway
their daily way down High Street, and Bek’s heroic figure seldom strode
there now except on shopping-expeditions, when she carried two large
oilcloth bags that she fed straight from the counters without benefit
of wrappings. Henry still occupied his office up over Schlemmer’s
hardware-store, but his deacon-like figure hurried along close to
walls these days, and then mostly between the office and the Court
House, with its sooty bunting-draped bust of George Washington over the
imitation Greek-proscenium entrance.

So “the Old Gentleman’s youngest,” except to a few of a generation
that still lingered in front of banks, feed-stores, and the sole
livery-stable that survived, was scarcely a known figure.

Just another gawk of a farm-boy, attracted by the Strand Movie
Theater, Clabby’s Billiard Parlors, half a dozen drug-store hang-outs,
and Linden Amusement Park, which, in summer, plastered an artificial
lake with swan-boats for hire.

High Street, of a Saturday, was pandemonium. Children with flat, eager
tongues for the sticky pleasures of the lollipop. Window-shopping
women, spry with the sense of surcease from the rigors of dishpan and
diapering. Rattle of tin flivvers, mud to the hub. A graphophone in
front of Smilley’s music-store braying to the din. The bright clutter
of sunshine. The Tallahassee baseball-team doing a lockstep out to
Linden Park. The occasional horse-drawn farm-wagon, with chairs in
back to accommodate the family. The Chamber of Commerce windows on
the second floor of the Equity Building, wide open, and filled with
the click of typewriters. Women with net marketing-bags, crammed
with spinach, and sprays of dill, pearl-fleshed spring onions, and
an occasional live wretch of a chicken. Constantly recurring flashes
of young girls, with long, revealing, flesh-colored legs, and bold
lips, frankly penciled into orange and magenta bow-knots. Centralia’s
telephone-directory list out in good store-suits, and the first of the
new season’s straw cadies on their heads, and the fleshiness of canned
foods, canned ideas, canned ideals, and canned music, in spangles of
light sweat across pinkish faces.

A corn-fed-looking populace, which this boy, ambling slowly through
that hottish Saturday, was one day to help swerve from the dangerous
complacency of ultimate defeat.

Long before he was consciously aware of it, the quick antennæ of those
perceptions which were to win him the ultimate sobriquet, “Leader of
Leaders,” were at work.[45]

Every manifestation of crowds such as this “home-brew humanity,”
milling, toiling, playing, was to sow seed in a clump of his fertile
brain.

But on this particular Saturday, the crowds jostling him were just so
much superfluous universe spinning around his egocentric figure.

At the Blue Bird Restaurant, the erstwhile brown little waitress, gray
now, drew out his chair and handed him a stained menu, flicking it
first with the napkin she wore at her belt. Here was a young man, now!

The strong light of the furiously sunny day, streaming in through
the plate-glass front of the Blue Bird, showing up mercilessly the
cotton palms, the cigar-counter with the waving blob of flame on the
cigar-cutter and lighter, the oblongs of fly-paper sucking their toll
into glue, the square white tables, with their slightly used cloths and
geometry of silverware, made his eyes, still smarting of belladonna,
blink even more, and burn.

The Rotary Club now held its weekly luncheons in an upstairs
dining-room of the Blue Bird. Business-men, larger retail merchants,
petty wholesalers, men whose names were written along High Street’s
signs and show-windows, officials from the foundries, a banker, a
merchant, a lawyer, a chief, began to drift in, practically every one
of them wiping at an inside hat-band as he entered.

Five or six of the main dining-room tables were already occupied by
single figures, most of them with the _Saturday Evening Post_ or the
_Centralia Gazette_ propped up against the sugar-bowl. Even though they
were unknown to Dave, and he attracted not their slightest attention,
these sparsely scattered figures set him writhing. It was difficult, if
you had previously been in a public restaurant only one or two times at
best, to sit alone at a table under which legs felt too long to fit.
The spectacles bit down into the inflamed place on the bridge of his
nose, making it feel heavy and round as a potato. His collar twitched,
and his eyes; and sidelong glances into a panel-mirror suddenly
revealed the long, lean rods of his bare wrists.

It was not easy waiting alone in a public place, particularly since his
legs would not seem to fit under. They had fitted under, the last time!
Finally he did cram them in, but the edge of the table bit into him;
and, when he moved, the table tilted.

Henrietta came first. The years had been at her in what seemed a rather
subtle process of dehydration. She had dried, the skin powdery, a
little tougher, a little tanner. Succulence all gone, but a brittle,
bony, brightened look to her of nervous vitality. Rotarians, whom as
boys Henriette had taught the rudiments of long division, passed on
their way to lunch, some of them pausing for a good-day with an air of
self-conscious juvenility that was never to wear off where “teacher”
was concerned.

Even the brown foulard, with the gold bird-claw pinned onto the
écru-lace yoke, had but slightly changed in cut. There had never been a
time when to Dave, Henriette had not been precisely the cut-and-dried
and kind Miss Simpson of that Saturday. A narrow, high-shouldered
little person, indissolubly associated in his mind with the odor of
arithmetic and the light powdering of chalk-dust across her flesh.

If her heart misgave her for a moment at sight of Dave there at the
table, to break in upon the sanctity of her lunch-hour with Henry, she
covered it immediately with the same small, kind smile that had coaxed
hundreds of the youth of Centralia along the rocky road of the three
R’s.

“Well, David, isn’t this a surprise?”

“Henry said I was to come here for lunch, from the oculist’s.”

“Spectacles? Let me see. Turn further. Astigmatic?”

“Guess they look kinda funny? Huh?”

“Not at all. Sensible!”

“Not—not so good-looking, though, I guess. Huh?”

“Anything that denotes common sense is good-looking.”

“I mean—you see, I just wanted eye-glasses. Not these old
spectacle-things around the ears.”

“The foolish kind that wobble and inflame the eyes and fall and break
at every provocation. Ah me, ‘Vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas,’ or
is it ‘vanitates?’”

“Do they look all right?”

“Sensible.”

“I don’t have to wear them for reading. I’m near-sighted, you see.
Guess this cotton wound around looks kinda snide, don’t it?”

“Most of my boys have that trouble the first few weeks.”

“Would you mind looking,” said David, uncircling the frames from
his ears with a writhing difficulty, and his face emerging with the
peculiar swollen look of the suddenly-unspectacled, “which way does it
look best? With them or without them? Huh? With or without?”

Henry entered then, dabbing at his derby hat-band, and paring off the
edge of a group of Rotarians.

“Hope you don’t mind the boy, Henriette. He’s been to the oculist, and
I thought he’d want a bite of lunch afterward. How’s the eyes, boy?”

“How do I look, Henry? He said the frameless ones would only cost——”

“Nonsense. These are adequate and sensible. Feel all right?”

“Yes, but you see, Hen, he had some frameless ones there that looked
great on me, only you said I couldn’t——”

“What’ll you have, boy? Quick!” said Henry, and regarded the speckled
menu with gusto. His family was fond of saying that a prodigal host
was lost to the world when Henry fell short of becoming a rich man.
Himself a sparse eater, he loved the largesse of hospitality. Mathilda
always maintained that his eyes were larger than his stomach. He loved
to bestow. He was reckless and overabundant. If he stopped at the
meat-market, at his mother’s bidding, to send home a leg-of-lamb, all
her admonitions to the contrary notwithstanding, he was bound to select
a far too expensive and extensive whole side of lamb.

Of late years, these commissions had been rigorously denied Henry.

“What’ll you have, boy? Quick!”

“I’d like some of that chile-con-carne and some of that cherry pie à la
mode.”

“Not so good, I should say, for a boy with one fair-sized pimple and a
couple of incipient ones.”

At that, David hauled back from the table, crimson.

“Don’t want anything,” he said and gulped.

“I’m sorry, Dave. Raw as the dickens of me. Here, Katy, chile-con-carne
and cherry pie à la mode for the boy, and make it a double portion of
ice-cream and a portion of that strawberry short-cake thrown in if
his capacity is sufficiently elastic. Couldn’t tempt you to a bit
of that short-cake, Henriette? Come, we’ll all three have strawberry
short-cake.”

“Your rash, Henry!” said Henrietta gravely.

“We can afford to be rash for once, Henriette. We don’t have the young
bloods of the town in on this party every Saturday.”

“You, strawberry-rash was what I had reference to.”

“Yes, I suppose that sort of rash is more my speed.”

It was exciting lunching with Henry and Henriette. The clatter of
dishes rose with the noonday din. Sounds of applause clattered down
from the Rotarian dining-room.

Lonnie Haskel, Middleton’s foremost lawyer, paused to consult with
Henry for a few moments on a point of tariff-law in relation to a
long-drawn case of his involving the Giles Tool Works and a firm in
Sheffield, England, and then moved along.

“What’s tariff, Henry? I know what ad valorem is. Ad valorem is——”

“Tariff is the barbed-wire fence between nations, that keeps man’s
activities nationalized. If you’re really interested, we’ll talk it out
Sunday. The first four hundred and twenty-seven principles of tariff
are the hardest.”

“Henry, I think it’s right remarkable, Dave’s interest in a subject
like tariff. I find my boys just don’t seem right bright on the
subject.”

“Dave’s got a good, healthy intellectual curiosity, and a good long
head on him, when he chooses to use it.”

“Aw. My head—my head’s no longer ’n yours.”

“Your brother was speaking figuratively, Dave.”

“Yes’m.”

“Which reminds me, Henry, I very much want your advice. At the
Saturday Morning Study Hour Club today, I was elected a member of the
debating-team of the Political Science Section. At the October meeting
our subject is to be, Resolved: That Prohibition is the greatest good
for the greatest number. Of course, I shall choose the negative side.
Yes?”

“Not ‘of course,’ Henriette. I’m afraid you are by way of becoming a
disciple of my wild, strawberry-rash radicalism.”

“Nonsense, Henry! You have never won me over to a point of view with
any coercion except the coercion of logic.”

“Good! Resolved then, that prohibition is the greatest poppycock for
the greatest poppycocks.”

“Be serious, Henry! It’s for the October open meeting, and it’s our
most important event. I hope you’ll come.”

“I may be serious at it, Henriette, but I could not possibly be serious
about it.”

“Now, you’ve said yourself, Henry Schuyler, time and time again,
that however vacuous and pretentious and presumptuous the American
club-woman may be, at least she’s the bearer of a culture-banner that,
except for her, would molder under moth-balls in the cupboard, along
with the tired business-man’s Knights of Columbus uniform and Masonic
apron.”

“Oh, there’s something to be said for the uniting of fair hands across
the tea, hot-biscuit, and chicken-salad tables of the country, in the
name of learning the difference between Owen and George Meredith.”

“I notice that two of your own sisters are active and helpful members
of the very Saturday Morning Club in question.”

“Now, Henriette, the hatpin-jab is a method not worthy of you.”

“Well, then, Henry, do stop your fooling.”

“Give ’em light wine and beer, Miss Simpson. The greatest good to the
greatest number.”

“Good for you, Dave. That’s precisely what I intend to do. Don’t you
think so, Henry? Davey’s just said it right. You know, Henry, much as
I’ve always regretted never having had Dave as one of my boys, I don’t
know but what he could pass his High exams. I’d have to work with him
on his mathematics, he’s never seemed right strong to me on square
root, but——”

“You see, it’s thisaway. It is just as well to take everything away
from them in the beginning. Then, when you give half of it back, like
light wines and beer, they’ll be so glad to get it, they’ll forget the
other half that’s been taken away.”

“Excellent points to make in my paper, but, Davey Schuyler, you’re
reciting something you’ve heard!”

“I’m not. Henry, didn’t I work it out for you that night you said
the Volstead Act was—was—aw, I don’t remember how you said it, but I
remember what it meant and that’s what I said back.”

“I said, that if you judge a civilization by its laws, the Volstead
Act will send us down to posterity as a nation of galley slaves,
delinquents, and nincompoops.”

“Well, and I said that the Volstead Act wasn’t as dumb as it looked,
because if you give ’em back the light wines and beer after you’ve
taken everything away from——”

“No, he’s not reciting, Henriette. Leave it to him to reach just
that safe-and-sane, greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number kind of
conclusion. The boy is uncanny in his ability to jump to the one
safe-and-sane spot on the trestle, if he hears a train coming.”

“If I was running this country,” began Dave, digging his eye-glasses
out of the trench across the bridge of his nose, “I——”

“Think you’d better not tackle that second piece of strawberry
short-cake after all, Dave. It looks right vicious after the cherry pie
and ice-cream. Well, folks what say to the baseball-game?”

“Splendid, Henry! Tom Connors, one of my boys takes his place on the
bench as substitute pitcher this afternoon. You know Jim Connors’ boy,
Henry, from Third District?”

“Good! Come along, Dave! We’ll have to miss the last inning as it is,
if we’re to catch the milk-truck home.”

A kind of purplish red, like the fruit-juice that dyed his short,
square teeth, swept David’s face, giving his belladonna-enlarged eyes
the look of being slowly choked out of his head.

“The sun on the bleachers—and all—these spectacles kinda—glare——”

“Nonsense! We’ve a lady along. We’re going grand stand.”

“My eyes—I—I—better not——”

“Look here, when you refuse a baseball-game, there’s something wrong!
Aren’t you feeling tip-top?”

“Sure I am!”

“Well, then, if you don’t want to come along, why not come out and say
so?”

“Just thought I’d loaf around town as long as I’m here——”

“Leave the boy be, Henry. He’s worked out his own way to spend his
holiday.”

“Just thought—Saturday—loaf around—specs feel kinda new—squint—thought
I’d just——”

“Sure,” said Henry, suddenly diving into his pocket for a coin purse
and opening it by its little metal catch, “I understand. Saturday
afternoon. Just loaf around. I see.”

There was something about Henry when he said, “I see,” through lips
that clicked almost like the little coin purse, that sent the red in
David’s face racing deeper and deeper.

“Just kinda thought——”

“Certainly!”

“Thanks, Henry, for the fifty cents. Just kinda thought—loaf around.
These here specs. Give a look, will you, Henry? Now I’ve got them on.
Now I’ve got them off. Quick! Which way looks best? Off or on?”

“Don’t know as one way doesn’t look just about as—er—a—well as another.
I—er—mean—strikes me since you’ve got to wear them, strikes me they
look more comfortable on.”

“But for this afternoon. If you were me—on or off, Henry? Look again.
Now look. On. Off. That there cotton wound along the nose-piece. Gosh,
that’s a fright, isn’t it?”

“What say you, Henriette? If you ask me, I’ll say he looks pretty
intellectual.”

“Sensible. Sensible, I’d say.”

“You don’t think, Henry—just for this afternoon—look better without
’em? Guess that there red ditch across my nose shows up pretty strong
without them. Huh? Yes? Look, when I turn thisaway.”

“I think the specs win, don’t you, Henriette?” said Henry with
unwavering gravity, and covering her shoulders with the string of fur
tippet.

“Sensible, I’d say.”

“Well, then, folks—so long. Guess I’ll er—stroll around town for a bit.
I’ll catch the milk-truck out too, Hen. Or walk. ’By, Miss Simpson!
S’long, Hen! Guess er—I’ll just stroll along—and all.”

With a gravity that continued to maintain itself until he was out of
sight and hearing, they watched him, long, lean, and gangling, slip
into the tide of High Street.


FOOTNOTES:

[45] “Leader of Leaders” clung to my brother from the occasion of his
single-handed crashing through the Reedy Filibuster, which threatened
to destroy the Schuyler Alien Bill.

Personally, I have never felt the phrase a felicitous one. While it
is indubitably true that David from the start was a man to win the
confidence and respect of the mighty minority, as a Man’s man, I know
of no public figure, yes, including Theodore Roosevelt, who inspired a
more deeply-rooted love in the masses than my brother.




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Twenty-nine_


Once off the hard, white-paved clamor of High Street the shady
somnolence of residential Centralia set in.

At the corner of Sycamore Street, on the steps of the square white
mausoleum of a “gift library,” a band of Boy Scouts was assembling for
a hike. David knew some of them, slightly. His eyes flashed away from
them in embarrassment. With a sense of ostracism. They were, for the
most part, the boys with whom he would have grown up, had the family
continued to live in the House on Sycamore Street. He was as conscious
of them as they were unconscious of him.

Clabby’s confectionery-wagon was at the curb of the old Whittier-Neal
mansion delivering a quart of peach-and-pistachio ice-cream for Mrs.
Whittier-Neal’s bridge-party.

Donald Neal was one of the fellows who took girls to five-o’clock
Saturday-afternoon tea at the St. Charles.

Donald had taken Dora on two occasions. David knew.

That made the Neal house seem part of the sense of ostracism. Four
girls, all with intertwined arms, and in the bright sweater-coats and
small knitted caps of the fashion, formed a solid phalanx down the
shady street. The center one was Odette Juss, the eldest daughter of
Max Juss, who boarded at Emma’s.

They were coming. They were coming toward him. With a mounting agony,
David watched them approach, his tongue doubling in his mouth, and his
hand clenched for the doff. Some fellows could do that naturally. Doff
a hat. With Dave, it was like doffing his heart. Some fellows had a
way about them in matters like that![46]

At the very moment of his elaborate détour to let them pass, Odette,
who was sixteen, let out a spurt of a giggly into which the other four
exploded through tightly-pursed lips.

It was horrible. It was so undeniably combustive, the outburst of
restraint. They had burst out laughing. They were laughing at him. His
glasses must be awry. They _were_ awry. He could see a wisp of that
horrible winding of cotton, as he gazed down the bridge of his nose.

Horrible! Horrible!

The impulse to turn around and look after them swept; overwhelmed him.
Perhaps they were not laughing at him. At the craning backward of his
neck, there were the four girls craning too! And then came another
outburst of laughter that splattered the silence, like buckshot.

It was too horrible. A hot wave of nausea swept him. To have looked
back! To have been the butt of their gibes! What was it? Why should the
girls splatter into laughter at sight of him? The shortness of coat!
Well, what of it? A new one would have had to come from Henry, in whose
pockets the clink of the coins was so pitifully light. What else could
it be? The yawn of the pair of Henry’s gray-cotton socks between his
trousers and heavy-looking shoes? Wrists? There _was_ something not
quite right about them. They seemed suddenly like great, misplaced
ankles, dangling.

Why had they laughed? These girls, who were only slightly younger than
Dora. Dora, toward whom he was now directing faltering steps. Cold
sweat sprang out through the fever of his body. The dry-rusk sensation
of mouth screwed tighter still. It was the most devastating thing that
could have happened, knocking his painfully mustered self-confidence
out from under him like a pole from a tent.

Why had they laughed? Odette Juss was a shy girl, who stuttered
painfully, as he remembered seeing her about his sister’s
boarding-house. What was there in him to arouse this bold mob-hilarity?
There had been moments, too, at lunch, when it seemed to him that the
dry lips of Miss Simpson had been compressed against laughter. The same
quality of suppressed merriment that had burst involuntarily from the
lips of these girls.

Was it the spectacles? In the shadow of the Neal garage, he removed
them, examining the frames, and feeling at the inflamed rut across his
nose. The street swayed a little, and his belladonnaed eyes were quick
to tear. Hooking them back on felt steadying and cool.

Why had they laughed?

What if Dora should laugh! Henry should have warned him if he looked
ridiculous. Yet the spectacles hid the ridge. Better the spectacles
than the inflamed rut across the bridge of his nose, especially now
that it had cracked open. It was the cotton must have created the
outburst. Spectacles might even seem interesting without the blamed
cotton. The oculist had warned him, though, that the frame against
the open sore might infect. And yet, to be made ridiculous by cotton!
Standing there in the shade of the Neal garage, he unwound it and
fitted the bare frame back across his nose. The metal bit in with a
sting. It was a counteracting pain for which he was almost grateful.
It made the ordeal ahead, that of calling on Dora, secondary for the
moment. Tears of irritation blistered his eyes and kept him popping at
them up under the spectacles.

What if Dora should still laugh. She was so pretty. The sides of her
nose, rosy little flanges, had a way of quivering slightly before
she laughed, like a small white rabbit’s over a carrot. If Dora were
inclined to laugh, those pink little flanges would become signals. If
Dora should laugh. Lord, don’t let Dora laugh! Amen, Lord, don’t let
her!

The street stretched on to its leafy conclusion. A whirling hose spun
fragrance from the clematis vines that clambered over the side of the
Neal garage.

Down at the very end of Sycamore Street, the old Schuyler homestead,
with a painter’s scaffolding swung across its face, suggested the
one-time short cut to the Tarkingtons’, through South Meadow.

But all that was changed now. The present owners had sold off South
Meadow in parcels of building-lots. Rows of bright, peach-colored
semi-bungalows, with blue trim and false shutters, lined the new,
treeless streets with the blurring rapidity of a deck of cards zipped
through the fingers. They made you blink. The sameness. The hotness.
The umbrella-shaped clothes-line racks in each back yard. Bright
corrugated-tin garage, after bright corrugated-tin garage. Miles of
granitoid gutters. Blue front doors. Even geometry of criss-cross
streets, the new gravel uncrunched. Made streets intervened now,
between the old Schuyler place and the Tarkingtons’. And of all things,
a square, new cereal-factory, set in a swirl of railroad-tracks,
annihilated completely the site of the precious old spring-house and
hoarding-place of books.

There were blocks of hard, white, treeless asphalt now; and the creek
where it used to flow dark and rich and plum-color, was under the
streets now, filled in.

This district, just inside the city limits, was gravely known as Venice.

The encroachment of this “development” of the prosperous factory- and
foundry-workers of the peach-colored semi-bungalows, one-Ford-car
garages, and umbrella-shaped clothes-driers, up to the very edge of the
still-bucolic Tarkington place, was another source of Len Tarkington’s
resentment toward the Old Gentleman.

Fully acquainted as he was with the details of the enforced evacuation
of the House on Sycamore Street,[47] there none the less smoldered
within Len, each time a new smokestack splintered the serenity of
Tarkington skyscape, or a row of workingmen’s paradises went up along
the slick asphalt strips of ready-made street, the feeling that except
for the Old Gentleman’s weakness of the flesh, the Tarkington Place
would still be flanked by the beautiful serenity of South Meadow.

The farm itself, however, did succeed in keeping out a sense of
invasion. The same rich undulation of hedge that had once divided it
from South Meadow, now protected it by a full two feet of additional
height from the geometric outlay of Venice.

Approaching it from down the long length of a mercilessly bright and
surveyed street named Mark Place, it almost seemed to David that the
old aperture through which he and Dora had bellied many an entrance and
an exit, was still there. But actually the little body-worn tunnel,
dear, warm, funny little tunnel, was filled in now by tight growth.
That small, gone paradise of yesterdays.

It was a good three-quarters of a mile down to where the double rows of
elms formed entrance and shrouded the old house in an enormous kind of
shade that made it possible for Mammy, turned eighty by now, to still
keep her newly-churned butter cool in a crock under grape leaves on a
back porch.

Tarkington loved this old place with one of his only two fierce
passions. The other was his daughter.

His acres flowed redundantly, because even with the indolence with
which the Old Gentleman never failed to indict him, they reflected a
certain absorption, on the part of their owner, in the grandeur of
soil. The rotation of his crops was a rotation that implied thought.
Trees on the Tarkington place were carefully forested, and their wounds
filled in with cement. The sole bookshelf Len’s bedroom boasted was
crowded with weather-colored volumes on the habits, the chemistry, the
workability of the local soils that flowed in his state. In one corner
of the dining-room, a fine old ceiling-high wardrobe was stacked with
farm journals that no amount of house-cleaning seemed able to reduce in
number.

They were good acres. The taste of them was to be part of the
warm-pollen sweetishness that was to lie on David’s tongue throughout
the crowded years.

At the foot of the road of elms, Nemo was screwing weeds out of the
path. For five years, come rain, come shine, come winter, come spring,
these two, Nemo and Dave, had curried, churned, calcimined, lugged,
plowed, milked, through the dawns.[48]

There was a curious taciturn friendship between the old white-kinked
black, and the boy, but at the sight of Nemo now, out in the light
of a broad, soft day that made him seem unaccustomed, it was as if
something inner, like David’s tonsils or his heart, had plunged
suddenly down into hollow legs. The body seemed only a shell to contain
breathlessness. Here was old Nemo, who had been in the actual, the
corporeal presence of Dora that very day! Doubtless that very hour. It
gave Nemo a luminosity that hovered over his kinks.

Well, here he was at the Tarkingtons’! By opening his stiff lips and
emitting three words, he could find out from Nemo if Dora were home. As
if, with his expert knowledge of her habits, he did not already know.
On Saturdays, except for the occasion of a matinee or the once-a-month
dancing-tea at the St. Charles, she did not go to town at all. The
Opera House was dark that week. It was not dancing-tea Saturday.

What if—if Kenneth Chipman were to be there, with his long legs,
in white flannel, drooping over the edge of the porch-hammock. On
Saturdays, David’s furtive aching observation had taught him, Kenneth
pretty regularly remained in the office, while his father, under
peremptory doctor’s orders, went to the Middleton Country Club for
golf. Except two or three times, along toward mid-afternoon, Kenneth
had closed office and sped in his roadster out to Dora. Dave knew that!
With his strained, sick heart Dave knew pretty nearly every external
there was to know about these two.

Yet all odds considered, Dora was terrifyingly certain to be at home.
And alone. Abysmal emptiness continued to clutch at him and cause the
day to sway.

“What you doin’ roun’ this time o’ day, boy?” asked Nemo, scarcely
glancing up from his weeding.

“Nothin’ much,” said David, breaking into a run and afraid to ask the
question that might, by its reply, dash the fervent prayer within him
that Dora be not home.

That was absurd, and once out of sight of the old black huddle of Nemo,
he stepped off the cinder path, behind the hole of an elm, and shook
himself. Shook himself literally and with a characteristic clamping of
his square teeth. Struck an attitude. A sort of declamatory attitude,
with his right arm plunging, as if he were striking down something.[49]

He was. The rising sense of his nervous frenzy. That rusk of a
tongue cleaving so to the roof of his mouth. The body a vacuum for
breathlessness. He was striking down, all right. Terror! After all,
through every hour of the last twelve, the procedure had been so
intimately, so privately, so fervently rehearsed. Nothing for a fellow
to feel skittish about.

All there was to it. Calling on a girl. Look here, Dora! Look
here, Dora! Gee! All there was to it. All you had to do—why—easy’s
anything——Look here, Dora! Looka here—Dora——

Goose-fleshing ecstasy, that would send the old eyelids behind their
new glass fronts batting. Heart banging out against torso. All there
was to it. Looka here, Dora! You know! I know! All is not gold that
glutters! Glutters! That would be a fine thing if his tongue slipped up
on him like that! All is not gold that—all is not gold that _glitters_.

Then the figure, standing dallying behind the elm tree and mysteriously
plunging out every so often with his right arm, jerked himself together
and in a dash was up the cinder-road to where the swell of millwork
and wooden rococo verandah came into view. And there, blotting out the
horizon, blotting out the universe, on the patch of front lawn before
the house, was Dora, crouched on her knees beside the open hydrant, an
iron arrangement about two feet high, with a tin drinking-cup dangling
from a chain, and engaged in the precarious business of holding a
fox-terrier under the faucet with one hand and lathering him with a
highly evasive cake of soap with the other.

How beautiful she was as she crashed upon his vision. The sun was all
caught in her hair, and stood off in a little halo, like a soft-pencil
mark when you smudge it with your finger. To David, swallowing his
heart, there was something shameful and furtive, standing there with
his eyes positively seared to the back of her neck. Her curls, with
the single skewer of hairpins through them, were on top of her head,
obviously impaled there with one soapy hand, when they interfered with
the business of lathering her dog.

Her neck was like a beautiful river full of sinuosities. River full of
sinuosities. Not bad. Or had it swung itself into his memory from a
line on a page in Henry’s _Oxford Book of Verse_? Her neck—her neck was
like the glide of one of those snakes, in his zoölogy, (the _Pythono
morpha_, found in Europe, North America and South America), with the
lovely power to move forward in paddling grace.

Her neck—her neck was like a shower of star-shaped clematis that
covered the verandah.

Her neck was like—was like one of the unused white-silk handkerchiefs
in Henry’s drawer, that were not borrowable.

There was something shameful, standing there appraising that
loveliness of neck, and yet it was like—what new and as yet
unplumbed beautifulness _was_ it like? There were, of course, other
beautifulnesses that clutched you by the throat like this. That time
Stevey had swung past with his company. Lying on your back, in the
sheep-pasture, watching Capella tremble in the heavens. Something about
his mother’s face, when he opened his eyes suddenly and caught her
regarding him above his bed. Yet not one of them brought quite this
identical hotness into his throat and across his eyes.

Was it shameful to stand there tingling with this beautifulness of Dora
as she soaped her dog? The sickening talk of farm-boys, which clung to
his ear-drums now and then, made gazing upon the beauty of Dora seem
something of desecration. The furtive snickerings of hired-hands,
seated with their backs against the barn and nibbling at blades of
grass and spitting tobacco in long streaks. It made of Dora something
to enshrine for his own private, sacred adoration. Even the thought
of Kenneth, to whom the sickening talk of farm-boys would have been
equally obnoxious, gazing upon the beauty of that pale curve of neck,
smote him like a blow, and choked an exclamation from him.

Simultaneously, Dora and her dog became aware of David. With a leap
that sent him slick and quick as a watermelon-seed from Dora’s soaped
and sopping clutch, “Prince Charley,” crony of Dave’s through many a
star-specked dawn, met him with such a leap and a bound, that before he
could dart back, the side of his face, from contact, was lathered with
a burning brand of much-advertised flea-soap.

“Prince Charley!” screeched Dora, and darted after him with a great
flapping old towel, as stunned David stood under the bombardment of
suds exploding along his face. “Hold him, Dave! He’ll get himself all
muddy if you let go. Hold him, Dave! For goodness’ sakes, Dave, if you
love me, don’t let go! Prince Charley!”

Slippery, oozy holy-terror! Four soapy paws frantic for clutch.
Licking. Leaping. Yelping. Splattering. His eye-glasses became flecked.
And his mouth painted with suds, in a mustache that tasted and stung. A
great slab of lather began to sing somewhere under his collar, so that
his chin sank into soft, popping ooze.

It was horrible, and it was glorious. “Davey, if you love me, don’t let
go!” Spat-splutter-plop. Davey, if you love me.

Spat-splutter-plop.

She had handed him the key of the world, and his eyes were full
of soap. If only the blamed little old pup—weren’t so blamed old
slippery——Down, you! Splup—Splu—p-p-p-p-.

The stinging taste of the soap. The splutterings of sud-flecked lips.
Horrible!

“I’m so sorry, Dave! Just hold him—plee-ze Davey, while I lasso him
with the towel. E—e-e-e. Don’t let go! Prince—Cha-a-arley.”

It was no use! The squirting, slipping ooze! Time and time again,
clawing, grasping, snatching fingers all but released their hold upon
pawing gyrations. Blinded now by the shower of lather up against his
eye-glasses, lye-bitten, lye-blinded, and smeared even to a great erect
peak of suds on top of his head, he held on bravely, to the screeching
tune of “Davey-if-you-love-me!”

“Davey, if you love me!” Wilderness of snapping towel, spats of wet paw
against eye-glasses, more taste of lye and ooze of more wet fur.

“Davey, if you love me, don’t let go, Dave. I’ve nearly got him. Bad
ittsie Dora’s baby! Bad! Bad! Bad! Mama spank! Bad naughty baby darlin’
doggie!”

Spat! Yap! Guzzle! Ugh!

“Don’t let go!”

Spat! Yap! Guzzle! Ugh! Snork-k—and somewhere in the distance, the
purr of an engine, the grinding of brakes, or was it only through the
blindness, the roar of encounter.

“Prince Charley! Bad! Stop it! Mama spank! Um-m-m-m great big
automobile wun over Prince Charley. That’s a good boy! That’s muvver’s
good Charley Prince.”

Climbing out of the darkness, rubbing his spectacles clear of blur,
digging suds from his bitten eyes, fumbling for a handkerchief that
would not materialize, feeling out toward the direction of the
confusion of laughter, of voices, of yapping, and the sound of the
water still running from the open spigot, was a performance that took
exactly one lifetime to accomplish.

There was Dora, with just enough of a smudge of suds across her curls
to make her adorable, triumphant now, with Prince Charley captured and
wrapped in the towel under her arm, and standing beside her, convulsed
in the kind of laughter that gave them red, boiled faces from trying to
restrain it, Kenneth Chipman and a newcomer to town whom Davey faintly
knew by the name of Florine Kent.

They had arrived in Kenneth’s roadster, which stood by, chugging.

One glance through his lye-bitten, belladonna-tortured eyes, and Dave
knew. They had arrived in the “hub” and the “bub” of the scramble. In
time. In time for the ignominy of his encounter through the suds. In
time!

And there was Dora, with her free arm helping him to fumble for his
wretched handkerchief, that would not seem to be anywhere, and trying,
through the boiled look of her own face, not to give in to that impulse
to laugh. That look in her eyes! The same look of Miss Simpson when
she bit her lips. Of five intertwined girls, down Sycamore Street, and
Odette who had seemed suddenly, to explode of repressed hilarity.

Laughing world. There, Dora had exploded, too!

“Here,” said Kenneth, with what evenness of voice he could muster,
“take mine, old man!” and tossed him a gray-silk handkerchief with
a wide border of purple pin-stripes. He was in white trousers. The
universe became a pair of white trousers. Silk handkerchief! Meany
Henry, who owned six non-borrowable silk handkerchiefs.

“Thanks!” sputtered David, and tossed back Kenneth’s handkerchief,
and with his hand still fumbling for his own torturously evasive one,
bolted down the path.

“David!” cried Dora, and darted after. “You mustn’t go! We’re going to
have lemonade and cake on the porch, as soon as I change into something
dry. Please, Dave, don’t go!”

“Come on back, Dave!”

“Davey Schuyler, if you go, I’ll never speak to you again! We’re going
to have lemon——”

“Mush go——”

“All right for you, Davey! If that’s the way you’re going to act, just
because——”

“Mush go!” coughed David blindly. Blackly. Bleakly. “Mush!” And rushed
off down the cinder walk, the one desire in his head for the relief
of aloneness. A quick aloneness, into which he could crawl. For
eternity.[50]


FOOTNOTES:

[46] I can recall little in Dave’s boyhood that pointed to what was
later to become his capacity for public life. On the contrary, he was a
peculiarly diffident lad, never thrusting himself to the fore, unless
impelled to do so by the violence of the urge of an idea.

He was stiff, even gawkish with girls. His encounter with Kenneth
Chipman, Dora Tarkington, and the dog, told elsewhere in this
willy-nilly journal of mine, gives some idea of his adolescent aplomb
where the fair sex was concerned.

In a lifetime that was to be crowded with public addresses of the most
portentous kind, he has repeatedly told of himself, in the privacy
of a family-dinner, and to our reminiscent merriment, that he never
approached any rostrum with drier throat or stiffer tongue than he
experienced on a certain Saturday afternoon, when he directed his
footsteps toward the Tarkington place for his first formal visit to
Dora.

[47] AUTHOR’S NOTE.—The House on Sycamore Street has since been taken
over by the state, and is open to the public three days a week.

[48] ... when Dora’s Nemo died, the Tarkingtons held funeral for him in
their own parlor. David, who was then “spittoon and sawdust boy” for a
wholesale-grocery firm in Springfield, sent six carnations.

[49] So far as any of us seem to remember, David as a child did not
display propensity for public speaking. I do recall time and time again
seeing him, under strain or nervousness, use his famous arm-plunging
gesture. I particularly recall once, his running to me, over a really
terrible incident that had to do with his dog Teddy and my son. His
dramatic pantomime, as he tried to tell me that story, matches up with
some of his subsequent performances from the platform. But as a growing
boy, it is fair to say that my brother gave no prophecy whatsoever of
the oratorical force which was to penetrate his country to the core.

It was with an amazement that bordered upon actual incredulity, that
Phil and I sat in the little spectators’ gallery, the first year of his
election to state senate and heard him deliver a ringing and inspired
plea for a lowly sewerage-bill, that somehow, by his presentation, he
made magnificent in its scope.

[50] ... at a dinner given at the State Mansion in honor of a legation
about to depart for Russia on a tour of observation, Dora, telling
this story to a group of old Middleton and Centralia friends, stopped
short in the middle of it, heavy tears over her eyes, and regarded my
brother, the then Governor, quite helplessly, unable to proceed.

With his usual alertness to emergency, and his unfailing understanding
of her, he picked up the story where she had left off, concluding it in
a gale of merriment shared by the entire company.

Later, Dora confided to me that suddenly, the pathos of the memory of
that boy back there, battling for her so absurdly and so valiantly
through soapsuds, simply rose and choked her, making it impossible for
her to conclude an anecdote to which the Governor always listened with
the relish of hearing it for the first time.

It is characteristic of him that he never again asked her to tell the
story, or repeated it in her presence.




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Thirty_


There followed days and weeks, and then months, when the fervor for
his father’s patch of farm became an obsession. The security of long
days, sunk up to the aching arm-sockets in chores that had to do with a
clogged water-pipe, milking at dawn, currying for Nemo, sheep-driving
by starlight, manure that steamed as he pitched it, pip among the
wyandottes, new tin rain-gutters along the house, corn-shucking,
sheep-dipping, hay-pitching, well-digging, sheep-herding.

Then long, secure evenings of further escape from the reality of
humiliation. Flat on his stomach, his aching feet bare, his candle
burning softly through hours of boring concentration on the book in
hand.

During that winter, aided by Henry’s shelves, the Centralia Public
Library, the motley universes of land and sea and firmament jammed up
that little slapsided room under the eaves. Prehistoric monsters out
of Java larger than the Igrotte house itself, performed the miracle
of squatting within its walls. China seas swung within that room,
firmaments wide as Galileo’s, winds spiced in sandalwood.

Pages. Pages. Pages. _Wealth of Nations._ Spencer’s _First Principles_.
_Les Miserables._ _History of the Aztecs._ _Karl Marx._ Sinclair’s
_The Jungle_. _Uncle Tom’s Cabin._ _Famous Speeches of Famous Men._
The “All-Boy” series. _Romance of Pocahontas._ _King Arthur’s Round
Table._ _Tales from Shakespeare._ _History of Colorado._ _Ivanhoe._
_Conquest of Peru._ _Tariff and Its Ramifications._ _Governors of
Utah._ _The Growth of Illinois Transportation._ _Industrial Development
of the Middle West._ _Territorial Period._ _Life of Anthony Wayne._
_Hiawatha._ _Vision of Sir Launfal._ _Sea Reptiles and Mammals of
South America._ _Life of Cecil Rhodes._ Peary’s _The North Pole_.
_How to Build Your Own Hydroplane._ _Gem Collection of After-Dinner
Stories._ _The Five Years Antedating the Russian Revolution._ _Compleat
Angler._ _Vanishing Rights of the State._ _Raffles._ _Shandy._
_Japanese-American Relations._ _Two Boys and a Raft._ _Adonais._
_Cellini’s Autobiography._ _War and Peace._

He was sealed up that winter, all right. Silently. Something fierce
about his kind of silence.

Henry, who sometimes sat abstractedly in his office or room thinking
about it, said nothing.

Mathilda went up to him sometimes, as he sat at table finishing his
meal, as if she would place a hand on his shoulder and get said the
question that seemed perpetually hovering along her lips. Or often, as
he was climbing into his reefer for his dash out into the sleet-bitten
days of that long, cold winter, she would kiss him timidly on the
forehead and bleat of castor-oil.

Strangely, the Old Gentleman, not given to reticence, and communicative
enough, dear knows, on any number of controversial subjects those long
evenings indoors, lapsed into a silence not only toward, but concerning
his youngest. Not an ill-natured silence. Except suddenly the subject
seemed to have lost the power either to interest or irritate him.
Strange wisdoms sometimes were his.

There was about the box-shaped little house during this winter
that lashed it constantly with high winds and blew the dry snow in
tall, uneven drifts about it, a curious kind of abeyance. As if, by
unspoken assent, the moments, as they passed, must be sufficient unto
themselves.

Sometimes, usually with a book open to a chapter that had stumped him,
David crept down to Henry’s room, invariably sure to find him awake and
reading; his feet wrapped in an old gray blanket against the creeping
cold of the house, and his body hunched low in the chair beside his
reading-lamp. Then, for more hours with David huddled alongside of
Henry on the arm of the Morris chair, they pored, and sometimes read
aloud, alternately.

Long, rich, slow evenings, without once a reference to anything except
that which pertained to the world of ideas and homely chores into which
David was so obviously and hermetically sealing himself.

If the family discussed among themselves this prolonged, this
somewhat startling state of hiatus in the case of Davey, it was among
themselves, and then usually not in the presence of Henry.

One day, Bek, striding into the Igrotte house in one of Winslow’s
ulsters, collar turned up and her skirts tucked down into her knee-high
boots, inquired from her mother David’s whereabouts, and then strode
off into the barn where her young brother was fitting an improvised
rope halter across the horns of a young steer.

“Where are you going, Dave?”

“Down to Herkhimer’s with this here steer. Father’s traded him in for
two red sows.”

“Good! I’ll hike along. Old Herk’s got some money coming to him for
putting those Howey red terriers to stud last spring. I’ve got two
pretty sick ewes and a ram over at the farm, Dave. Mind coming back the
long way and stopping to take a look at them? You’ve luck with them.”

“Sure, I’ll come.”

They started off through an afternoon the color of wet slate. Banks
of low snow-clouds, full-looking as udders, blew along. Gusts of damp
air, like wet cloths, flapped against the face. A chilled gray waste of
an afternoon, farmhouses, that could gleam in sun, absolutely shrunk
and huddled-looking, and the back road writhing along in two frozen
wheel-ruts.

Suddenly Bek stopped, and with a lack of diplomacy that characterized
her, tilted back David’s face with her large, mittened hand.

“What’s the matter, Dave? Bilious or in love?”

He jerked away sore and hurt.

“Quit!”

“I’d much rather it was your liver than your heart, Dave.”

“Fine way to talk.”

“Why?”

“There’s some things just aren’t talked about.”

“What? Livers?”

“No.”

“Hearts?”

“For goodness’ sake, Bek—honest—such talk makes me sick.”

“But, at least, if it’s the liver, you can talk about it in terms as
definite as calomel. Is it, Dave?”

“Honestly, Bek, if that’s what you’ve come along for ...”

“I’m a great believer in preventive medicine. But if it’s heart,
there’s not much to do about it but let it run its course, and kill or
cure. My own experience, and my children’s, have taught me that.”

“Well, then—well, then—it’s a good thing to profit by experience.”

She touched his cheek lightly with her mittened hand. Poor old Dave!

The rushing sensation was immediately behind his tonsils again, and
the appalling fear that, behind his high-power glasses, tears would
spurt; and, that these might not, he broke into a laugh. A laugh
that cut against the grain, because it was so absurd and young and
pain-addled. It moved his sister to want to put out her hand and tuck
him somewhere close inside Winslow’s ulster. But she did nothing of the
sort. Instead, she swung a little ahead, level almost with the steer’s
lightly roped horns, looking quite away from him across the stubble of
corn-fields that were stiff with old runts, and rattled.

“Life isn’t so black as it can sometimes seem at seventeen, Dave. As a
matter of fact, fellows like your brother Henry and Phil were pretty
confirmed misanthropes before they were twenty. Are you at that stage
Dave?”

“You’re always tabulating people, Bek. A fellow can’t pass an ordinary
remark without you trying to fit him into one of your pigeonholes of
life.”

“Adolescence pigeonholes rather easily, Davey.”

“I’m not talking about adolescence, I’m talking about life.”

“It’s adolescence makes you talk that way about life.”

“Well, any blamed fool can sing a song of sixpence about it. What’s it
to sing about, anyways? The poets are your truly sensitive spirits.
‘Things are not what they seem, life is but an empty dream.’ Know that
one? It’s by——”

“And you’re the boy who used to talk to me about the men who fly and
the men who explore and the men who rule and the men who do! Why, you
used to act as if everything mattered to you so terribly, that you
couldn’t make up your mind which mattered most.”

“Then and—and now are two different matters.”

“How different?”

He turned on her a pair of scarred-looking boyish eyes that scowled and
blinked behind their glasses.

“Don’t!” he said.

“Don’t what?”

“Quiz—please——”

They marched through the soupy gray in silence, except for the clopping
hoofs of the steer and the low moan of wind rattling the corn-runts.

At the Herkhimer farm, a mean one, of squat building and outhouses,
Gramaw Herkhimer, a furiously old walnut of a woman, in a perpetual
gray head-shawl against neuralgia, came limping around to the barn at
sight of Bek; and nothing short of coffee in her small and spotless
kitchen, and chunks of corn-bread, just from the hot stove-top, would
do. Dave, and one of the Herkhimer boys, a great loutish fellow of
twenty, of the group who told sickening stories about country-bumpkin
girls, must come in too, and take their coffee out of great, ironstone,
thick-lipped cups, into which the corn-bread “dunked” deliciously.

A coal-range of magnificent draught roared in one corner, and a huge
pan of Gramaw Herkhimer’s dough, rising to the yeast, overflowed its
sides like a fat pig. A warm, sour-smelling little old kitchen, which
Bek seemed to cram to the raftered ceiling with her enormous presence.

Her incredible capacity for detail with these people! No subject
too small to snag her interest. Gramaw Herkhimer’s tatting. Old man
Herkhimer’s chilblain. Chest-protectors for Herkhimer babies. There
were three of them lying asleep alongside her ailing daughter in
another room. Woolen wristlets. Geranium-cuttings. Drunken son-in-law.
First-communion veil for little Maggie Herkhimer. Bacon-cracklings.
Then nothing would do but a jar of apple-butter to be wrapped and sent
home to Winslow. Back in the old days, High Ridge Farm had practically
fed the Herkhimers. Maggie Herkhimer, gaunt and pale, and interminably
tall in a mother-hubbard that hit her above breast, elbows, and ankles,
came in, all rumpled from napping, to thank Bek for the loan of a
small crutch for her second boy, who had broken a leg, in almost the
identical position Stew had at that same age. They had gone to school
together, Maggie Herkhimer and Bek. They both looked their age. The one
rather magnificently. Maggie, as if the years had hamstrung her.

It was a warming, heartening, little interval. It made the walk back to
Bek’s farm silent, this time, because facing the wind, it caught at the
breath and shortened it, seem not so penetratingly damp and cold.

The two ewes and the ram, sunk in clean straw, went in the smaller
of the two splendidly-equipped barns. Their nozzles came up softly;
and just as Dave was putting aside the medicine-dropper, after having
ministered to the shivering creatures with a curiously adhesive touch
of hand that was never to desert him, this overwhelming thing happened:

Bek, who had gone directly up to the house, came into the barn,
Winslow’s reefer removed now, and a white sweater hanging across her
shoulders.

“Dave, I wish you would wait a minute.”

“Mother needs wood——”

“——and walk Dora Tarkington home as you go back. She’s spent the day
here, helping Winslow paper the dining-room in that pretty grass-cloth
they’re using now. Paula sent it. I wouldn’t let him touch the Howe
walls, so between the two of them, they’ve made a set of panels that
fit on. They say at school, Dora’s that tasty she ought to take up
interior decoration. It’s long walk, and those snow-clouds make it
seem dusk so early. Here she comes now, Davey. Walk her home.”

The figure of Dora, in a woolly white sweater and woolly white cap, and
her short, pleated skirts flying, came down the walk.

“Why!” she said, and stopped short, the light popping out in her eyes
and her cheeks, “I didn’t know—Dave was here.”

“Didn’t you?” said Bek drily. “Well, he is,” and walked off toward the
house, and slam, bang, into it.[51]


FOOTNOTES:

[51] My brother and Dora have often accused me of conspiring to bring
about a certain encounter which took place between them at the farm one
blustery November afternoon, and out of which meeting one of the first
really formative events of my brother’s life was to take shape.

Be that as it may, the simple facts stand duly authentic. Paula, home
for her father’s birthday, happened to remark upon Dora’s reputation at
Tallahassee High for taste and skill at decoration. Winslow jumped at
my suggestion that we ask her over to spend a day and help us stencil
the grass-cloth panels for the dining-room. Certainly anyone with a
pair of eyes in his head could judge for himself that David was looking
peaked, of a complaint easily diagnosed. That same day, calling over at
Mother’s, I did, it is true, ask him to walk back home with me to tend
some ailing stock. Also, the evidence is that there were two sick ewes
and a ram at the farm that day, and Dave’s skill with them was common
knowledge. Further than that, as they say in legal phraseology, I do
not feel called upon to elucidate.




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Thirty-one_


Even at this stage Dave was a good two inches taller than Henry. It
smote him, as he stood there, facing Dora, in an old office-coat of
Henry’s, and trousers covered with the shine of long contact with
Henry’s swivel chair, that he had never in his life worn a suit
designed for his figure. That was why, in those rare moments when he
had occasion to think about his appearance at all, he felt precisely as
if he were dangling by the middle of the back of his coat from a nail.
Short sleeves. Short trousers. Protruding knobs of ankles and wrists.

He confessed to Dora, countless of the reminiscent times in which they
loved later to indulge, that it seemed to him for long moments after
the loud crack of Bek closing the house-door, as if he had hung there
in the clean, sweet-smelling barn, dangling from the middle of the back
of his coat, like a cat when you hold it by the scruff of the neck.

“I’ll race you,” cried Dora suddenly, and on a flash of her unfailing
ability to rise to the exigencies of the moment, sped, a flicker of
white sweater and cap, down the path toward the open road.[52]

That dash along down the road released him, as it were, from that
moment of hanging impaled in her presence. They caught up a quarter
of a mile down, in flurry of quickened heartbeat, and impulsively she
hooked her arm into his, without preliminaries.

“Davey,” she said, “why have you been so mean to me?” And, incredibly,
there were bright and beautiful tears against her eyes, that dried even
as he gazed, giving him a feeling of mirage. “You’re a meany, you are,
David!” she said and a red pompon, on its string, dangled from her
white and woolly cap.

The ground thus immediately cut from under his feet, down he went into
the abyss she had opened for him.

“Gee, Dora,” he said, almost borrowing her tone, “I won’t be—mean—any
more!” And then, overwhelmed by the realization of what her winding
voice had done to him, stopped suddenly and burst out, red and redder
of face, “You mean you’re the mean one!”

“Why, Davey Schuyler, I never was!”

“Weren’t, weren’t you?”

“You know I—weren’t.”

“Oh, all right. Won’t argue—with a lady.”

“Wouldn’t start something I couldn’t finish.”

“Start something I can’t finish! Honest, I don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, if—if a girl was as meany as you say I’m meany—funny you
couldn’t tell her—how meany.”

“How meany? Huh, as if you didn’t know. Huh!”

(How beautiful she was, and he had just said “huh” to her.)

“Huh!” he said again.

“Well, if I felt that way about a girl, I wouldn’t walk home with
her,” she said, and flopped like an adorable beautiful little minnow.
A minnow on the end of some bait too delectable to even conjure. Bait
would have to be ambrosia for Dora’s lips to nibble. Only one didn’t
nibble ambrosia. The Greeks musta drunk it——

“Well, if I felt that way about a girl——”

“Oh, Dora,” he said, and reached out a long gawk of bare-wristed hand,
“I—I guess I feel every way about you, I guess.”

“Well then—well then—well then, why the dickens don’t you say some of
the good ways,” she cried, and stamped her foot, and let the clear
bright tears pop out in her eyes again, and shook her head, and gritted
her small white teeth.

“I never thought you’d listen, Dora. Honest!”

“Oh, you know well enough I’d listen, all right. You’ve always just
kind of tried to make me feel little. I—I should worry!”

“Little?”

“Yes, little! My parties and all—your never coming and you in our
barn every morning—you never looking anywheres near the house where
I might be. That day—that day—soap—Kenneth—the way you walked off on
me—something I couldn’t help. How do you think I felt that day—walking
off on me—thataway——”

“Why—how do you think I felt?”

“As if I didn’t know, Davey,” she said and turned her eyes full upon
him, as they stood face to face in the rutted road, a hard, windy,
slate-colored twilight blustering about them. “I’ve cried and cried.”

“You’ve cried, Dora?”

“You know I have,” she said, and stamped her foot again, the bright,
angry tears drying as soon as they formed. “You hate me—that’s what I
believe.”

Hate Dora! Why, just as likely that he hate moon. Hate stars. Hate
firmament encrusted in eternity. Hate Dora—why—why——. Where were
his words, to tell her? And so there he stood helpless before her
indictment. And yet again, strangely, so strangely, there was something
sweet about the indictment. There was something about hating—that was
fiercely akin to loving.

“I’ve always tried,” she said—“I’ve always tried——tried——”

“Tried what?”

The quivering would not let her get it said; and while he stood flaming
with the same sense of exhilaration over her fumbling that the word
“hate” had fired in him, he wanted to lie flat on his back before her,
that she might walk over him with flaming heels. The trembling of her
lips was cruelly pleasant to him, and yet he wanted to fling himself
before her, because those lovely, trembling, pink ledges were trembling
of his doings. Here was a hurt bird needing him. Here was a ewe with
soft, sick eyes. Here were all the things in one that were tender and
wounded.

“Well, well, tried what?”

“To—to—let you know I—how to let you know I—I wanted you not to—to hate
me.”

He could have bitten and ground the next words back against his tongue
when they came. But there they were, said!

“Kenneth Chipman!” he barked.

“Silly! You silly! You silly of sillies!” (How lovely she was, as she
grew pinker and her teeth whiter.) “You silly!”

Silly—silly—silly—why, there was even the same ecstasy in being that.
To her.

“Haven’t you eyes? Couldn’t you see?”

“See what? See what?”

“That was part of the trying. Everything was. I—don’t care now. I might
as well tell. An idiot might as well tell on herself.”

(Idiot! Idiot! Blessed be idiots!)

“Why do you think I took all my lunches at Stevey’s and Claire’s? Huh?
Huh? Huh?”

“Huh?”

“Didn’t I have my own cousins, Essie and Tad, going home to their house
every day right out of my same class and my aunt feeling offended, and
all, because I went to Claire’s and Stevey’s?”

Gump! Gump! He hadn’t thought of that.

“Don’t just stare. Say something. Didn’t I? Didn’t I? And why? Why?”

“Why?”

“Because I thought sometimes you might be around all your relations.
Then Kenneth—I—I—let Kenneth walk with me noontimes—thinking—oh,
I’m not ashamed now—now that I wouldn’t be friends with you for
anything. Just not for anything. I let Kenneth walk with me noontimes,
thinking—maybe you’d be there and see. Meany, Meany, you!” she cried,
as the tears jetted and careened down to her lips. Then she broke
from him and ran, down the rutted road, turning her ankle, lunging,
and giving him run until he hurled himself around in front of the
Tarkingtons’, and blocked her.

“Quit now, stopping me. Papa gets worried if I’m out after six.”

“Want to tell you something.”

“No!”

“Dora!”

“No!”

“Dora! I like you! Terrible!”

“Well then—why’ncha say so?”

“You—you got so big, Dora. You got so big and so—so pretty. Us having
to move away. You got so pretty on me, Dora; and I stayed—just me.
Not even a look-in at High School—me—didn’t dare. I wouldn’t any more
dared come near you. I thought, you see—slick-looking college-fellow
like—like Kenneth. Patent-leather-haired. Dora—I like you so. I just
can’t seem to get my mind on anything. That’s my trouble, Dora. Liking
you. I’m full of always wanting to do a million big things that will
make you look at me; and then, for thinking about you, Dora, I can’t
do a one of them. Crazy-like. Around in a circle. That’s what’s the
trouble with me, Dora. I can’t seem to think my way out of anything for
seeing you. Just can’t care about wanting anything unless it’s got you
in. Dora!”

They kissed timidly, lightly, there in the dusk. Wonder was out over
them. “If only I’da known all along.”

“If only I’da.”

“You’re so smart, Dave, and I’m just like everybody else.”

“Smart, nothing! I haven’t even finished County Grade.”

“Alma Dreyfous’s father says he walked a little way alongside of
you on the road one morning, and you talked about airships and—and
whatchamacallit—tariff, or whatever it is, and Woodrow Wilson, and
where Ohio gets her water power from, like a Philadelphia lawyer; and
Miss Weil, over at Tallahassee, told her class that the smartest boy in
this county was a boy who’d never even finished county school, but put
every single moment to cramming new ideas into his head.”

“That wasn’t me.”

“Was so, because Efram Juss asked right out if it was, and she said
yes.”

“Shucks!”

“I like your being smart, Dave. So much smarter than me.”

“Dora—if you like me—any way—at all—that’s all I need.”

“I do, Dave—only—You won’t be mad?”

“No.”

“Sure? Davey—that _isn’t_ all you need. Papa thinks it’s awful,
Davey—that—that you—You won’t get mad, if I say it?”

“No.”

“——thinks it’s awful that you’re only a——”

“Only a——?”

“You won’t get mad, Davey?”

“Only a farm-hand, is that it?”

“Yes.”

“Huh, don’t I know that? Sure. He’s right, all right. Only I’m not
going to be a farm-hand any more. Now. Fellow’s got a reason to make
something out of himself—all a fellow’s got to do now is make sure of
what he wants to be, and then—be it!”

“Davey, what do you want to be?”

“You know what, Dora? Know what I think I’d like to be?”

“What, Davey?”

“First of all, before we talk, we’re engaged, aren’t we?”

She turned him the fresh flower of her face.

“Yes, David!”

“Well then, Dora, how’d you like me to be something big for you?”

“I would!”

“I was thinking last night, as I was driving along a flock of
black-face sheep from the Howey stock—funny thing about that
species—they’re hornless, yet they belong to the hollow-horn family.”

“But, Davey——”

“The interesting part is that you can’t—exactly place where this
species passes over into the goat family——”

“But, Davey—that’s all right—about—about goats. But what about us?”

“That’s just it, Dora. How’d you like for me to be a big-gun in the
study of sheep-culture?”

“Pouf!” she said, and made a pink trumpet of her mouth. “Sheep! You’re
too smart for that!”

“Too smart! Huh! If I was smart enough to know everything there is to
know about a great industry like wool—know what I’d be?”

“Wool. Woolen underwear. Sure enough. I never thought of that. I was
just thinking of sheep. Only I hate woolen underwear next to my skin——”

“And you know what interests me a lot, too, Dora? I was talking it over
with Henry the other night. Now, you take this here wool-industry, and
then you take this here tariff-situation, and then you——”

“But, Davey—all that far-away, highfalutin’ talk—what’s the use? We’re
engaged. When a fellow’s engaged, he can’t stand around talking about
whole industries. He’s got to talk about a—job.”

“Engaged! Oh, Dora!”

“Papa says the trouble with young people nowadays is that they have to
have so much more to start on than they used to.”

“Of course! A job. I’ll tell you what, Dora, has always interested
me a lot. I read a book on silk the other day. Dora, let me tell you
something about this here little fellow, the silkworm.”

“But, Davey—there you go again. Silkworms aren’t—practical.”

“Oh, I mean a job all right! Now, if I could get a job with some
silk-firm. You see, now that the little old silkworm isn’t the whole
silk-show any more, this here artificial-silk industry is the coming
thing in the whole industry.”

“There you go again. Whole industry.”

“But I’m talking about a job, Dora. If I could get a job, say in
Chicago, with one of the big silk-firms, or in Springfield, where my
brother Phil lives. There’s a future to a job with a big mercantile
house, Dora. Some day—maybe when I’m a big-gun in a silk-firm—I’ll have
to go to China!—you and me—China!”

“Oh, Davey!” she said and screwed her round little nose tighter into a
button, and jammed down her cap more snugly over her eyes. “China! That
would be heaven! Only—that would take so long, Davey—from now.”

“How would Civil Service be, Dora? I could pass Regents’ exams easy as
anything. I like jobs that tie up the Government.”

“Not a postman, Davey. I hate postmen. They’re always being waited for.”

“Naw. Wouldn’t be a postman. Know what, Dora? I’d like to be a consul
some day. That gives a fellow a chance to see the world.”

“A fellow and—and—his wife, Dave. All consuls have wives. Or should
have. Or got to have. Or just have.”

“Wife! Gee, Dora! Wi-fe!”

On the magic of the word, they flashed face to face, their fingers
feeling hungrily through the wool of mittens.

“I’d like that, Davey. You and me. Cleone Beal’s father was consul once
to a place called Uruguay.”

“That’s a republic in South America.”

“They lived in a town called Mon—Mon—something.”

“Montevideo. Oh, Dora, wouldn’t I love to live in Montevideo with you!”

“And me with you, Davey! I’d entertain—them all—at balls in Montevideo.”

“How would you like to go off exploring with me, Dora—and add new
territory to the maps? Ever hear of Seward’s Folly? Well, there’s a
fellow, ’course he didn’t exactly go off and find it, but that fellow
had an idea all right. He went to the Government one day, and said,
‘Looka here, Government, here’s a country called Alaska—that some day
is going to——’”

“Now, Davey—there you go again—some day! What about now, getting a job
right now? Just thisaway—talking and dreaming and if-ing and and-ing,
we’ll never—get anywhere!”

Tears, that he wanted to snatch off with angry, frenzied hands, gleamed
along her cheeks.

“Why—why—Dora—my brother Phil can get me a job in a wholesale grocery
concern in Springfield right away! Twelve dollars a week——”

“Oh, Davey, _now_ you’re talking!”

“You see, if I could send my father six out of that—we’re so poor,
you see, Dora—but even with six left—my brother can’t afford to, but
he’ll board me awfully cheap, anyway. Then, Dora, if I went to evening
law-school—there’s something about law I like—suppose I was to do that?”

“How long?”

“I could do a four-years law-course in two. Nights. What do you bet?
And then—a town like Springfield—Springfield’s a capital. I could
practice law there some day.”

“Some day?”

“Law’s the thing, Dora. Look at a fellow like Kenneth. He could marry
now, and he’s only been practicing a couple of years. I’m as smart as
Kenneth—Dora.”

The answering tug of her arm, closer, tighter, warmer, made his long
legs seem to gallop over the frozen ruts of the road.

“How many years, Davey, before you could be ready?”

“It would have to be four before I could be a practicing lawyer,
earning enough to——”

“Four,” she said, her eyes flattening as if they were contemplating
four eternities.

“Dora—what’s four years, when we’ll have a secret—just ours——”

“It’ll have to be secret, Dave. You see, Papa—he——”

“He thinks I’m a bum.”

“He—he says you’re not a go-getter.”

“I’ll go and get now, Dora.”

“Just as I get you—I begin to lose you.”

“Dora, the quicker I begin, the quicker——”

“I know. The quicker you’ll be ready.”

“Dora—isn’t it worth waiting for? Some day. You and me. A little old
place of our own. One of those semi-bungalows. Springfield! Wholesale
groceries—we could start together sooner—if we could count on getting
our groceries wholesale. Maybe, if I get along in the wholesale
grocery-business, I’ll stay there and get to be a big-gun in the
mercantile world.”

“Oh, Davey—the sooner—the grander!”

The darkness was about them like a beatific cloak, except for two
lights from the Tarkington place, which suddenly gleamed at them from
the end of the elm-walk; and some one was sounding a family-whistle of
three staccatos and a long, which Dora answered in fashion.

“That’s Papa.”

“We’re engaged, Dora.”

“Yes, Davey. Say it again.”

“We’re engaged, Dora.”

Parting, they kissed once more, in the light, startled, pecking away.


FOOTNOTES:

[52] I have never seen the like of Dora for her unfailing tact and
ability to rise, or for that matter fall, to an occasion. Nor wonder
they used to call her Madame Cherchez-la-Femme. Her memory for faces,
for names, for circumstances, was of the most incalculable value
to my brother, who had none of Roosevelt’s genius for that sort of
thing. Time and time again, I have seen her win for herself and my
brother, the deathless loyalty, for instance, of a lumberman from
Nebraska, whom she could recall having met five years previously at
the Sesquicentennial at Philadelphia, or recognize by name, the wife
of someone they had probably shaken hands with from the platform of a
moving train.

I was not present at the famous Franco-American banquet, where she
averted what promised to be a fistic encounter between Ambassador
Toussain and Leopold von Mark, by tilting a dish of raspberry ice into
the lap of her canary-colored velvet gown, just as those two gentlemen
were about to fly at each other’s throats.




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Thirty-two_


Every evening, after supper, Winslow started at carving his
picture-frames out of an excellent grade of soft white pine that, for
fifteen years, Bek had purchased from a lumber-dealer in Middleton. It
was scarcely a purchase, but a trade in the literal sense. A two-gallon
crock of Bek’s piccalilli could keep Winslow supplied in picture-frame
lumber for a year.

There was something grateful about the litter of wood-carving and the
slithering little noise of the sharp knife rushing down into the pine
and the clean, dry smell that rose off.

Over her account-books, at the green-baize desk in the corner of
the dining-room, wanting her farm back, scheming for her farm back,
contriving for her farm back, or poring over farm journals, with that
same eye to winning her farm back, or darning heels of socks and
stockings over the ridge of a great wooden ball, as she dreamed of
winning her farm back, Bek liked the consciousness of Winslow, pipe
drooping low, and absorbed in turning a difficult corner in the wood,
or scooping out an ailanthus leaf.

Leslie liked it, too. He would sit among the litter of the curly white
chips, splashing among them and letting the shavings cling to his
beardless chin.

There was something so dreadful to Bek in this last. Leslie simulating
manhood. She wondered if Winslow ever noticed, and contrived not to let
him.

Sometimes Winslow leaned over to bestow upon Leslie a particularly
handsome shaving. With sufficient of these he could weave a garland for
his mother, which he placed across her brow as she sat at work, giving
her the look of a tipsy Cæsar.

Dozens of Winslow’s water-colors, prettily framed in the carved,
gilded, and sometimes polychromed woods of his handiwork, adorned the
walls of the house; and the attic-studio was hung in three rows of
them, that touched edge on edge.

The copse of willows behind the barn, in every conceivable mood and
perspective and light and shadow. The cow-pond, with Howey Holsteins
standing knee-deep, in study after study of the same quiescence, same
shadows draped painstakingly into their flanks and down into the water
that opened about their knees. The distant rise of the hills that
sloped toward the Igrotte house, with the magenta tinges woven into
the purples, that no one in the family would dare admit never being
able to discern. South Meadow in bright clover. The slant of red roof
to old Jessup’s shanty, showing through the stripes of the plane-tree
boles. Sheep, at evening, meandering homeward, with their heads low.
There was always a human figure injected somewhat timidly into these.
A lanky gawk of a herdsman, with little more than the scissors-like
attitude of the legs to distinguish him from the tree-boles. Indeed,
the casual observer was scarcely able to discern at all this lone foray
of Winslow’s into the realm of human anatomy. To Winslow himself, this
figure was Dave, to the eyelash.

The year that David was born, a water-color of Jessup’s red roof,
seen through the tree-boles, had been sold from the window of Hessy’s
art-store in Middleton, to a Sandusky bride and groom on their
honeymoon. Eleven-seventy-five, framed. Ten per cent commission. On
the strength of it, one or another of Winslow’s had hung in that
window ever since. Every Christmas, Bek sent a two-gallon offering of
apple-butter to the Hessys. And at Thanksgiving, a jar of mincemeat.
But the Sandusky bride and groom remained Winslow’s sole patrons.
Dozens of his efforts adorned walls of Whittier and Wayne Counties.
Birthday, wedding, Christmas, and anniversary gifts from the Winslow
Renchlers. And meanwhile, undaunted in output, Winslow’s power of
production went on. There were rows of his pictures, in framed stacks,
with newspaper in between, on the floor and shelves of practically
every cupboard in the house.

Winslow still painted away the major portion of each day, the same
technique, perspective, foreground, horizon, chiaroscuro, overtones,
scale, proportion, continuing to absorb him for long, squint-eyed
periods over the top of a horizontal pencil.

Paula, who now taught history and first-year botany in Cleveland;
belonged to a little-theater movement, and was secretary and treasurer
of a large teachers’ organization known as The Scribes, once winked
at her mother across the top of a sheep-and-landscape her father was
showing her, upon one of her Easter visits home. Such a scorching flame
of anger and rebuke had leaped into Bek’s face, that Paula’s air of
indulgence toward her father’s work had been promptly nipped in the bud.

For over a period of twenty-two years, Bek had not seen to
the impregnability of Winslow’s art against any possible
family-facetiousness, only to have Paula wink it down.

Even the Old Gentleman, torn between secretly despising the
non-producer and admiring Winslow because he was Bek’s choice,
continued, in the years that one or another of Winslow’s water-colors
had been gathering dust in Hessy’s window, to refer to his “artist”
son-in-law.

Yes, Bek saw to that. Fiercely. Her subtle classification of Winslow
held. Centralia, the family, the county, nailed by Bek’s glittering
eyes, came gradually to take Winslow at her valuation of him. A woman
who marries an artist, she was fond of saying a little proudly, must
learn to cope with nerves and temperament. Once you understand them,
geniuses are the most lovable creatures in the world.

To listen to Bek, Winslow was that. A genius. Too indifferent to the
world to reach out a hand to stay its heedless passing-by. A recluse.
An inspired eccentric. Unappreciated by his contemporaries, but
posterity to be his beneficiary.

Bek aided and abetted this psychology of her own building. Winslow’s
bottle-green velveteen coats, soft collars, and flowing ties were not
his preference. On the contrary, in the beginning he had demurred.

“These long ties are a nuisance, Bek! They flutter and get in a
fellow’s mouth while he’s trying to paint.”

Bek knew better. They were not in the way of the special dispensation
of public opinion that she sought for him, and missed but by an ell.

Even Paula, who belonged to the little-theater group in Cleveland
that produced Synge, and who sent Christmas-gifts of _Jurgen_ to her
friends, returned from those Easter holidays with a couple of her
father’s framed landscapes in the top of her trunk.

One evening, in the large cretonned room in a “private house” that
she shared with another school-teacher, she removed the chafing-dish
from the cretonne-covered top of her trunk, unearthed them, and began
showing them around as some “rather good bits of Dad’s.”

A young secretary of a philanthropic organization and a teacher of
English in a High School regarded them with squints and slants, and
secretly nudged each other.

Paula sensed rather than saw the nudges and with some of her mother’s
stubborn kind of indomitability hung one on each side of her
dressing-table, but with discretion, so that they were out of line of
vision of her roommate, who knew a Monet from a Manet.

Sometimes, covertly watching Winslow over the top of her mending or
reading, a sense of the security into which her vigilance had tucked
him, smote Bek with some of the warm thrill of gratefulness she felt
when regarding Leslie. The sweep of her passion for Winslow had
probably never been more or less than just that. He was someone whom
she had tucked into the cove of her heart, to protect there, justify,
elevate to a plane that however make-believe it might have been, was
not make-believe to Bek.

Then, too, there was the curious compatibility of their opposing
temperaments. His fastidiousness. His recoil from the sweaty chores to
which she bent her wide and willing shoulders. His inability to cope
with the conflicts in which she reveled. His spiritual distaste for
barter, where she moved quick and sure through stockyard, cattle-pen,
and sty, keeping to the shrewd side of the bargain. In Winslow, was
something preciously apart. Hers. To be kept in its cotton wadding; to
be mounted as you mount a jewel against the proper background.

It was the mother twice over, who sat these evenings, wanting back her
farm, while her husband whittled, and Leslie, her perpetual baby-son,
grown now, sat among the shavings, fashioning garlands with which he
fantastically bound all three of their brows.

The lean years of servitude to the Howeys had squared Bek’s face
and grayed her hair. The lean years had scarcely touched those two
there. Thank God! Nor Paula, who had flown the nest wisely and soon.
Nor Steve. Again, thank God! Thank God! Safe in a nest of his own
feathering.

How securely she had kept the world of mean detail from Winslow’s
reckoning. His face, with the soft smile, would have been a jerked
and nervous face had she not kept it tranquil. His long, facile hands
that she loved for recoiling at the chores she could tackle. His soft,
fastidious air of isolation from the barn-and-sty—worlds through which
she sometimes stalked knee-deep.

Bek would no more have permitted Winslow to behold her breaking open
the mouth of a horse in the cattle-marts, or bartering in the clinical
phraseology of the cattle-pen over bull or stallion or sow.

A secret sense of spiritual refinement at being the wife of an artist
had been awake in Bek from the first, when as the smart, eldest
Schuyler girl, she had gone off to Middleton one morning, with
Henriette Simpson for companion and witness, and barn-and-sty worlds
married Winslow Renchler, son of a Presbyterian minister up Ideola
way, who, at twenty-six, had never done anything more than clerk in a
haberdashery by day and dabble away his evenings in a rigged-up studio
over his father’s barn.

There had always been, to Bek, something a little Robert Louis
Stevensonian about Winslow in appearance. The nervous kind of
slenderness. The white, thin-skinned æsthete’s brow. The full, rather
beautiful lips, behind a brown mustache. Winslow had first pointed out
the likeness. After that, she read _Treasure Island_ and hung a print
of Stevenson in the parlor.

There was so much one could do for Winslow.

Now with Paula, it had been so different. If there seemed to be between
Bek and Paula a certain outward incompatibility, it was probably
because of the too perfect similarity of the two. At bottom, there
existed a passionate admiration of each for the other’s power of
dominance. In spite of it, they clashed constantly. Paula made no
evasion of the fact that life in the same house with her mother was
impossible for her. Their wills met and tilted. Since she had been
seventeen, and out of Centralia Normal School, they had lived at
sufficient distance to keep those strong wills in respectful leash in
the comparatively brief periods of Paula’s vacation-visits home.

There was so little one could do for Paula, who was so capable of doing
for herself.

With Steve, it had been different. No one but Bek would ever know how
much there had been to do for him.

For Winslow, sitting there in the lamplight, at his whittling, there
had been so much to do. So much! And for Leslie.

Regarding her twenty-year-old son, with his delicate, listening,
beardless face, and the look he had of knowing minute, woodland things,
there was the old streak of pain across her heart, that could feel
to her exactly as if it were bleeding. And then, combined with it, a
secret sort of exultation that shamed her.

He needed her so.[53] She still undressed him at night, and sat on his
bed-edge to tell him his choice of the legend of the Golden Fleece,
the story of Esau, Peter Pan, and a folderol chant about Chanticleer
which ended in a loud crowing that invariably sent Leslie off into
long and repetitious mimicry. He played a flute, one that Winslow had
improvised for him out of a reed, down where the cattails grew. He came
crying to Bek when it became clogged, even though it was his father who
had fashioned it. He cried to her when it rained, and looked to her to
cause the sun to shine. She did, by a contrivance of electric light
with a reflector behind, which she had rigged up in the attic, against
the curious effect of depression and actually impaired digestion, which
weather had upon him.

There was a tune, a concoction of her own that still sent him off on
his afternoon nap, his hand in hers. She knew his sometimes bafflingly
inarticulate names for favorite trees, and his bird-calls, and could
sit patiently on the outside of the minute woodland life that could
cause him to break into soft and private laughter.

How snug he was in that strange world where the tragedy of her life had
tucked him. Sometimes, when her thighs flamed of fatigue, and the world
of accounts and hoof-and-mouth disease and locust-scourge and drought,
and the constant carping grief for her farm was too much with her,
again and again the consolation of this thought smote and half-shamed
her.

How secure Leslie was in the world back there in the hinterlands of
maturity, in the land of fantasy from where he had never crossed the
frontier into reality.

Leslie, whose eyelids were still hung with the shining scales of
illusion. How safe he was from the realities that could beset and
become grotesque, when she woke at night to find them sitting on her
chest. Realities like her chronic dread of Winslow’s deep-seated lungy
cough. The never quite realizable calamity that the farm was no longer
hers. Her parents scrimping themselves into old age. Paula, whom she
loved, so strangely remote in her associations and preferences. That
blighted potato-crop. Life-insurance policy to be met. (Heaven knew
how.) Phil’s apparent inability to regain his business feet. Strangely
persistent adversity. His first years had shown such business promise.
Rita was looking peaked, too. Was another baby coming? Of course, it
would be fine if the doctors had been wrong—except for the strain—the
financial millstone that seemed around the neck of the family.
Sometimes Clara, off in St. Louis, on the modest certainty of Sam’s
salary, seemed best off of all. But with her children growing up—what
prospects, what future? All the panorama of these realities could seem
so grotesque at night, or rather toward morning, when she awoke, as was
her wont, of a heaviness at her chest. The squatting realities. David,
a curiously thoughtful boy in his slow, observant way. What private
panorama moved behind his square, calm imperturbability of face? If
any? Was the lethargy into which David seemed locked just inertia that
characterized the type of boy slow to get his bearings? Or was he the
kind of boy, almost extinct now, who would stick to the farm? Or was
here another Henry? Dreamer. Yearner. Spectator. Idealist. Genius?
Failure? Or just David. Any boy. Good boy. Slow boy. Thoughtful, deep,
rather intellectual boy.

The peaked expression that for the first time was coming through her
father’s face! That sunken area about the mouth. Almost the way he was
going to look in his coffin. Ugh!

But it was only in that curiously corpselike hour before dawn that such
drearily hopeless thoughts could beset her. Sitting there over her
accounts that evening, Bek was scheming and contriving. And now, after
secret years of the slowly planned project, the sudden return of old
Governor Howey from two years abroad, had ripened the plan into action.

“I’m going to walk over to the Howey farm, Winslow. And see the
Governor,” she said, slapping a last account-book shut and pushing back
from her desk.

“Better let the old man get his travel dust off, hadn’t you?” he
replied, without glancing up from his whittling.

“He’s been home two days. Besides, I need to see him.”

“I suppose he’s holding you to an accounting for your loose
management,” said Winslow with an elaborate gravity.

“Why should he?”

“Oh, I thought he might be inclined to fire you for a more competent
overseer.”

“Stranger things have happened,” she said, getting his point and
smiling back at him.

“Maybe, but not much,” said Winslow, whittling away on a staff of long,
white-pine.

“The Governor has early supper same as always,” said Bek, winding
a knitted scarf over her head. “I’ll get there just about as he’s
finishing. It’s as good a time as any to buttonhole a man you’ve
business with. Thursday’s corned-beef night at the Howeys, and if I
do say it, I’ve never corned finer for them than the piece he’ll be
cutting into this evening.”

It was a good two miles to the Howey place, over country it would never
have occurred to her to fear. Country which she had stalked, after
dark, times too countless to record. And yet she stood waiting, wanting
Winslow to fear for her. Wanting to be worried over. Secretly resenting
not being feared for, and yet everything, in her bearing, forbidding
solicitude.

“Think I’ll need a lantern, Win? Looks like snow.”

“Nonsense! There may be a flurry of sleet, but it won’t amount to much.
There’s a moon due in an hour.”

She walked over and kissed Leslie on his long, palish brow.

“Mother will be back in a little while, Leslie, to put you to bed.”

He held up a half-finished garland to crown her.

“Father says there’s a moon tonight, Leslie. I’ll tell you the
fairies-and-elves story when I come back. Bank up the furnace, Win, but
keep the third flue open. Never mind! I’ll go down and attend to it
myself, on my way out.”

She left them puttering among the shavings and at whittling in the
warmly lit dining-room.

In the basement, the coals made a rumbling noise as she dove in with
her shovel and lugged and relugged more shovels of them to the greedy,
red mouth of the furnace.

“Don’t bank her up too tight, Bek,” called Winslow through the
dining-room register. “Shouldn’t be surprised if, after all, we do have
a flurry of snow.”

“Yes? Then maybe I’d better not—go?”

There was no answer to her pause, because Winslow, who had been at the
window to peer, was out in the pantry pouring himself cider into a
pewter mug.

“Oh, Win——”

“Yes?”

“Think I’d better not venture? Don’t think I’m apt to be caught, do
you?”

“Nonsense, you won’t mind a flurry, even if it comes.”

“No—I won’t mind—but if you’re going to worry about me——”

“Be sure and leave us plenty of heat, Bek.”

“Yes.”

Outside, a half-clear and listening kind of night met her, the same
lowering beauty of snow-cloud edged in sunset that hung over David and
Dora as they dallied together further along the same road. A moon,
about to rise out of the cloud-mass, cast its brilliance ahead in a rim
of silver.

There was a hog, with a rip along its flank from an encounter with a
barbed-wire fence, to be glanced at as she passed down the cinder-path
to the open road; and, for the life of her, Bek could not pass a barn
door without a dragging-back of bolts for a precautionary look-in.

A chorus of whinnies met her, and the lowing sound of bulls. There was
a new mare, with a vicious snapping-habit, standing muzzled in her
stall. She loosened the strap slightly and rubbed a flank or two as she
passed along.

It was full-dark, with the moon slid like a coin into a slot of cloud,
as she fiercely struck her pace out on the road. A swinging pace as
free as a man’s, and with her heart beating high from the excitement of
her purpose, the cold air beat against her face and left it flaming.


FOOTNOTES:

[53] Leslie died yesterday. I suppose we were what you would call
prepared for the end. Winslow closed his eyes. The President of the
United States drew a sheet up over his face. He lies downstairs in a
white coffin. At forty-eight Leslie’s coffin would have to be white.
He never had any age to him. Only youth. I can’t realize that my boy
who remained a child for me is gone. To think I must go on waking up
every day and never again know what it is to be needed by him—my dear
darling——




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Thirty-three_


For thirty years, the Howey family, with a wealth of social and
intermarriage connections that extended beyond the state to the Eastern
seaboard and Europe, had exchanged the niceties of Christmas puddings,
cider and Thanksgiving, walnuts off the Howey trees, and minced meat
out of Mathilda’s larders. And every fall, up to the year of her death,
Kate Howey had sent Mathilda the first cuttings of dill from her
kitchen garden. A custom which Shirley, the eldest Howey girl, Princess
von Windigger now of Vienna, kept alive, along with others of her
mother’s homely habits, cabling instructions to the caretaker of the
old homestead.

Every Christmas, the Governor, who was indebted to Henry on a hundred
counts (not least among them the hushing-up of an ugly land-deal
involving Loring Howey the Governor’s second son) sent him, whether
from Madrid, Washington, Paris, or Buenos Aires, where Loring now had
headquarters, a box of fifty Habana cigars and a gray-silk muffler.

The remaining two Howey boys, Tom and Weston never failed to drop into
the office above the hardware store on their infrequent visits “back
home.”

There existed a rather formal _entente cordiale_ between the home-grown
Schuylers and the globe-trotting Howeys.

A Schuyler was always sure of a gracious reception from a Howey. A
Howey was known to cater to a vote long after the immediate need for it
was past.

This relationship had never been tested beyond this insular one of the
neighborhood. Bek Schuyler and Shirley Howey were within six months
of the same age. But while Shirley had been educated in Switzerland,
Bek had attended Centralia public schools. Henry had attended the
state-endowed university, and Tom Howey, who was also a lawyer, Yale.

The Howeys respected the Schuylers. Although not one of them would
admit it, except perhaps Emma, who was a family-joke on the subject,
and to whom a Howey was a Cabot, every Schuyler secretly nourished a
wistful kind of admiration for the Howeys; an admiration that dated
back somewhere from childhood. The preponderant magnificence of
gubernatorial prestige. The fine old Howey homestead. The debonair
habits of wealth. The comings and the goings of the Howeys in
motor-cars, years before the Ford and the tractor had inundated the
countryside with the fecundity of locusts. Shirley Howey was the first
woman in the county to ride a horse astride. Loring Howey laid out a
nine-hole golf-course along the left flank of his father’s estate,
years before the Whittier Country Club was even dreamed of. The Howeys
dressed for dinner. With the exception of Henry, a Schuyler had never
owned a dress-suit.

A Howey was perennially exciting to a Schuyler, exotic, mysteriously
and a little splendidly, alien.

Claire cut out _Spur_ and _Vanity Fair_ photographs of Shirley von
Windigger, and every other imaginable snapshot of her she could lay
hands on, and tried, with her own pale and fluffy hair, to imitate her
sleek-groomed coiffures, and from one photograph of her, with her two
little girls, charming in their Kate Greenaway dresses, proceeded to
dress her own little girls in like manner.

A Schuyler just naturally revered a Howey.

Another favorite family-joke was to get Phil, who was Loring’s age,
started at defending the rather notoriously black sheep of the Howey
family. They had been boys together during the period of a scrum
baseball-team and swimming-hole days, before Loring was shipped off to
Grout’s Academy in Pennsylvania. Phil could be bitter with loyalty to
Loring.

The Ex-Governor, who at eighty-seven still had the aggressive
bison-like lunge of head that had crashed him through two of the most
tumultuous terms in the history of the state’s legislation, was seated,
the night Bek arrived on her mission, in his small study of red leather
and mahogany, that was dominated by an oil-panel of himself, painted by
Sargent, the year of his election to second term.

It was little more than an anteroom, and smelled of camphor and
slip-covers. Except his bedroom, it was in fact, the only room there
had been time to unwrap for him on the heels of his wire, announcing
his coming.

The old Ex-Governor who had dined alone off a small table drawn up
before the fireplace, greeted her with his inquisitive, appraising
eyes, in a face more shrunken than she recalled it, but their alertness
and their shrewdness undimmed by the years which had got at his body so
and gnarled it.

“By Gad, Bek, you haven’t changed a hair in the last ten years,” he
said, and lied gallantly and with the politician’s reflex for the
diplomatic word at any price.

Bek had gained thirty pounds in that period. And knew it.

“Nor you, Governor,” she lied back. “Where do you get your own special
kind of immunity from the years?”

“Don’t!” he said, with the shadow of almost his only fear flickering
across the uneven surface of his face. “I’m a goner, Bek! Angina
pectoris. Fatal as hell. Two years at the outside will see my finish.”

“Nonsense!”

“How’s your father?”

“Father holds his own, considering.”

“Ever get a penny out of that hound Milliken?”

“He died two years ago, intestate, so far as we were able to find out.”

“And his son?”

“One of the heaviest tax-payers in Toronto.”

“One of the orneriest scoundrels ever came out of his state.”

“They’ve made it hard sledding for us, Governor.”

“Hit the whole gang of you, eh?”

“Yes, we seem to be like that. As my brother Phil puts it, united we
stood and united we fell.”

“Phil’s the third one, isn’t he? How’s he doing?”

“Well, Phil’s the kind of fellow, Governor, good head on him, but
somehow always standing just on the verge of something big that never
quite comes off. As a matter of fact, he hasn’t done much more than
make a living since—since our—crash. But I understand he’s got some
right good prospects now on some sort of an airship deal a group of
Springfield business men are trying to negotiate with the Government.”

“Wish it to him. And Henry? Still trapesing along, wasting himself on
a one-horse town? There’s a fellow could have brought himself and his
state glory, if he’d had guts. I was never so fixed, you know that,
Bek, what with conditions I had to contend with in office, that I
could throw as much in his way as I’d liked to, but he knew, from me
a-telling him, I’d have backed him for anything within reason.”

“Henry Schuyler, Governor, is a big tragedy to everybody in this state
except himself. And, possibly—me. No man is a failure, Governor, if
he has eyes that er—a—as we say it in elocution—see the glory of the
coming of the dawn. Henry wouldn’t turn a hand to earn for himself some
of that glory—but he sees it, all right.”

“Well, all that’s pretty fine for the hymn-books, but where’s it got
him? One-horse lawyer to every two-by-four case in the county. All
right for a man to sponsor the under dog, so long as he doesn’t weaken
his power for helping by remaining one of the under-dogs himself.”

“Lot in what you say, Governor. Here’s Henry, who’s probably handed out
back-stair wisdom in every important case in this state in the last
twenty years, barely eking out a living for himself and for the fund
we somehow manage to keep going among us children for the old folks,
without their knowing just exactly what it is keeps them going.”

“Old Gentleman won’t stand for any out-and-out hell from his children,
eh? I’ll wager that. Great character there. Stuff that the salt and the
magnesia of the earth are made of. Old fellows like him are what the
language manipulators, down Washington, are always referring to as the
bulwarks of society.”

“If ever a man stood for just that, I guess it is Father. Pretty much
of a crude proposition on the outside, but at heart, he’s the most
uncompromising idealist I know. Father’s been a rich man and a poor
man in his day but the one quality in him that hasn’t swerved with his
fortunes is his integrity. He hasn’t got much of any thing to show for
it in a worldly way, but Father’s far from a failure in my eyes. He’s
lived what he believes.”

“Well,” said the Governor, with his eyes suddenly seeming to shrivel
into two scars, “maybe he hasn’t got much of anything to show for the
years, and maybe he has. At least he hasn’t got a brace of sons that
have taken his life’s blood. You don’t need me to tell you Bek, the
pretty penny my two boys have cost me since the day they were born, to
say nothing of—of—keeping one of them out of penitentiary.”

Bek didn’t. Her knowing it so well, and his referring to it at this
time, made what she had come to ask the harder.

“I understand Governor, indeed I do. No, Father’s not had what you’d
call a particularly brilliant brood of us, but—well—our boys have
spared father much of what you’ve been through.”

“Spared. Your father has a fine bunch of men to show. How’s the
after-thought the Old Gentleman sprung on us some years back? That boy
ought to be along in his teens now.”

“Davey’s—let me see—going on eighteen——”

“You don’t tell me! Lord, don’t a fellow ever get old enough to get
over surprise at the way time sneaks up on him. I remember meeting the
Old Gentleman down at the bank, day or two after the boy was born—‘Hi,
Schuyler,’ I said to him, ‘hear you been doin’ some tardy propagatin’
of this here vale of tears. Don’t you know there’s a birth-control
bill up in this state?’ ‘Birth-control,’ barks the Old Gentleman,
‘birth-control poppycock! All that’s the matter with propagation is the
quality. More and better propagation is my slogan.’ There’s a card for
you, if ever there was one. ‘More and better propagation,’ he says to
me. ‘Well, sir, I hope that last kid is more and better propagatin’.’”

“Davey—well, Dave’s a peculiar child, Governor. Coming along as he did,
so long after the rest of us—growing up alone, you might say—Mother,
bless her heart, treating him more like a grandchild than one of her
own, most of his uncles and nieces twice his age, war coming along
right in the middle of his childhood, Father’s reverses, well—somehow,
never has seemed to me Dave’s had a ghost of a chance.”

“You mean he isn’t ...”

“Oh, he’s got the levelest head of any child you ever saw. Good bit of
a dreamer, too. Dave’s the kind of a child you can’t tell much about
while he’s growing up, and, all of a sudden, he turns out to be—a
something or just—just a kind of nothing. Know what I mean Governor?”

“You mean, if he’s a dog, he’s a dog, or if he’s leopard, the spots
haven’t come through yet?”

“Sort of. I just mean Dave’s what you might call still-water in a way,
but I’ve the feeling about him that he not only runs deep, but that he
runs wide. A regular little Mississippi.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Well, I guess you might say, not much of anything That is—I think
what I have just been telling you is why Dave isn’t doing more than
he is in a—a regular sort of way, I mean. Dave’s had no schooling to
speak of but Henry’s influence, I always say, is more than a college
certificate. Dave’s got curiosity, Governor. ‘Intellectual curiosity,’
Henry labels it. Nothing satisfies that boy short of learning
everything there is to know about everything.”

“What did you say he’s doing now?”

“Oh, well—truth of it is—Dave’s just around the farm yet. No job in the
regular sense. The Igrotte place isn’t much more than kitchen garden,
but—well it’s just as I say, Governor, Davey hasn’t had the deal the
rest of us children had. He just growed, like Topsy. Father’s needing
him most of the time for herding and chores. Course he’s had Henry.
Even without what you might call proper schooling, that’s an influence
not one boy in a thousand comes under.”

“Great deal in what you say.”

“Except that Henry’s not what you’d call, in this age we live in,
much of a live-wire. It’s made Davey kinda what you’d call a stagnant
little fellow. Hope to goodness it don’t mean he’s going through life
thataway. It’s the wrong age to be born into, if you’re slow-going.
But unless I miss my bet, Dave’s the kind that spends his time growing
cone-shaped, and then watch your cyclone. Not that I mean—well, I guess
about all I can out-and-out say to your question, Governor, is that, at
present, Dave’s tinkering around the farm.”

“Humph!”

“Just the same, his information for a boy is surprising. He can tell
you the distance of a star or recite the Fourteen Points, or, all of
a sudden, tell you something out of Greek literature. He’s got one of
those curious combinations of conservatism and imagination, if you get
what I mean.”

“Humph! Guess you’re about the pick of the crowd, Bek.”

She sat before him, with the scarf fallen back from her large, capable
face, her hair with the gray in it straggling a little from under the
plait of it on top of her head, and her square hands clamping down
tightly on each knee.

“Coming to that. Fact is, at this moment, I’m the failure of the
family, Governor,” she said, forcing his gaze to meet hers, squarely,
“and you know why.”

“I’ve never talked over our business arrangements with you, Bek,
knowing that’s all fixed between you and my overseer, but you know that
I know, from what he tells me, that you’ve done as well with High Ridge
as anybody could—considering two droughts, hoof-and-mouth disease, and
bad crop-conditions the last five years—all things considered——”

How shrewd he was. As if he had not scanned to the penny the detailed
fidelities of her annual reports. He knew to precisely what extent
the High Ridge was a going-concern, and to what extent its expert
first-hand control had enabled it to yield richly on his investment
Sly old rogue. He knew, and his old eyes slid under her square gaze for
the moment, but she captured them fast again with her own.

“All things considered. You mean High Ridge hasn’t paid?”

“Not exactly that——”

“I can show you, Governor, a five-per-cent yield even on your war
years.”

“Five per cent to a man who makes his money earn almost twice that,
isn’t such a hell of a good investment my dear Bek, if you’ll pardon my
‘hell’.”

“As a matter of fact, Governor, the average of the last four years had
been considerably over that, if you figure——”

“In total, perhaps, but the alfalfa fiasco——”

“You know how I advised against that.”

“Whatever the situation was—and mind you, in any other hands than
yours, there is no doubt but what the case would have been much
worse—the total results from the farm haven’t yet averaged a
particularly good return for my money.”

He lied down her own knowledge of her own figure without as much as the
batting of an old crocodile eyelid, and lying, knew that she knew he
lied.

“You’ve averaged over six per cent on your money,” she repeated,
standing her ground with a cold and even voice.

“Wrong, there. Can show you the figures. What with the cost of upkeep.
Now if we could cut down on the expense of operation——”

So that was what made the old Governor so cagey. Fear that she had come
to demand an increase.

“Governor, you feeling as you do, listen to this. Here’s a proposition.
I’ll buy the place back.”

“Eh?”

“I’ll pay you seven per cent on your money.”

With the lightning perception that his great age had not dimmed, he
saw his trap almost before she had the words out, and with the same
lightning perception, saw its cunning mesh.

What a woman! Damn fine shrewd old girl. Should have been a man. Worth
the whole bunch put together. And as the situation flowed over him, he
began to laugh until his bent old figure rippled along his blue brocade
dressing-gown.

“So! So!”

“With that three-acre triangle just below Algahr’s, and not counting
the artesian well in the drilling, and the two tractors on order, and
the electric milkers, I’ll pay you—forty thousand dollars. Exactly
twenty-five per cent more than the last mortgages I held from you
on practically the same property. The matter of the slightly above
the usual six per cent will be a private matter between you and me.
Six-year term of mortgage, subject to extension for same period.”

“By Gad, I——”

“It’s my land, Governor. That farm’s my child. My very roots are down
in that soil. That’s why, since I’ve lost the land, it has been as if
an arm or a leg of mine were buried somewhere, and keeps hurting even
though it is no longer part of me.”

A curious, half-fanatical flame crept along Bek’s face.

“Sell me back my farm, Governor,” she said, and thrust her burning
countenance closer and closer to his vision. “You’ve so much land. To
you, land is just so much income. So many bushels of wheat. So many
heads of cattle. So many mowing-machines to make it yield. But land, to
me—that land, of that farm, to me—it’s a bosom breathing, Governor!”

“Come, come, now, Bek. Not like you to talk business on a woman-basis.
That’s woman-bosh. If this farm that you know from A to Z is worth that
much to you why isn’t it worth that much to me?”

“I’m glad you asked that Governor, because I can tell you why. It’s
because, with all the conscientiousness in the world, I can’t make
it worth that much to you. Why? Because I’ve lost the creative thing
in me that made me mother to that farm. I’m just its wet-nurse now.
God knows, I’ve given you just about one hundred and one cents on the
dollar, Governor. No glory to me but just on the principle that I’d go
the limit for a child of mine, even though I’d given it out to another
family for adoption. But just the same, Governor, I’ve lost the fire in
me that made me the creator of that farm. I can’t fight for her while
she’s not all mine. It’s not in me. I’m hired. Sell me back my farm,
Governor?”

“You are prepared to buy a forty-thousand-dollar farm?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

She looked at him, aware that her face must be pulled to reveal a
terrible state of eagerness which she did not want revealed to him.

“Right big business, Bek. Forty-thousand-dollar deal! What’s your
proposition?”

“I’ve given it to you.”

“In detail?”

“I’ll pay you out, Governor, barring the first year for
breathing-space, on any—any conditions as to time and amount you
think—fair.”

“How much down?”

She captured his gaze again, squarely to the center of his eyeballs.

“Come now, Governor.”

“Fair question.”

“Nothing—down.”

He drew on a beautifully colored but draughty old meerschaum pipe, with
two ivory antelopes with locked horns on its hump, and laughed softly,
so that the brocade rippled again.

“You’re the best business man in this room, Bek.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised, Governor.”

That tickled him more, so that he laughed out into a high thin, very
old man’s cackle.

“But it takes even a smarter man than you to get curd-and-whey out of
water.”

“You’ve nothing to lose, Governor, by taking a chance on my
legerdemain.”

“Why haven’t I?” he barked.

“Why, if I don’t meet my obligations—the mortgage is in your hands—as
before——”

“So you propose to meet those obligations on a zero foundation?”

“The moment I become even theoretic owner of my farm once more, my
foundation ceases to be zero.”

“How do you mean?”

“I’m a Samson shorn of my locks now, Governor. I’m tied hand and foot.
I’m a hired-hand.”

“Who tied you?”

“You, Governor. Not in so many words; but with somebody else’s
property, one goes safety-first. I’ve had half a dozen schemes in the
last five years I’d have put into practice, if I’d been risking on
my own. On one of my schemes alone, I’d be in a small fortune now.
I’d have gone in for sheep-raising on a new scale hereabouts. I’ve an
experimental-dairy idea that’s been brewing for years. I see money
in alfalfa. Not under the conditions you made me plant three years
ago, but according to my own theories. Remember, I wired you and
you vetoed? I’ve an idea up my sleeve that’ll turn those acres of
corn-fields into quick-turn-over money. Experimental, perhaps, but a
person will experiment with his own, when he won’t take a chance for
another.”

“Something in that.”

“As long as I’m working for you, Governor, I’ll give you the best there
is in me. But the very best isn’t there. I’m a dead thing. My vision
and my imagination and my courage are in my shoes. Sell me back my
land, Governor. Take a sporting-chance on me and I won’t fail you.”

“I won’t live to see whether you do or not,” he said, drily, his eyes
going dull, as if they were mirrors and someone had breathed on them.

“Sell me back my land, Governor. It’s part of my state. It’s part of my
country. It’s part of me.”

“Don’t know but what I will,” drawled the Ex-Governor and sat back
in his leather chair and pulled hard on his pipe with the two ivory
antelopes. “Rotten bad business tactics, but, by Gad—don’t know but
what I will, Bek.”




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Thirty-four_


It was at this precise moment that Dave, after Dora had dashed from him
into the long row of elms, reached the little eminence of land, on his
way home, from where he could see, on one side, the remote, low-lying
roofs of High Ridge, and, on the other, the roof of the Igrotte place.

The moon had come out of its snow-bank, wafer-thin, and throwing a
light the color of steel over the countryside. Fields billowed around
him, as if under his very feet, he could feel the movement of their
flow. Valley whose magnesia of the soil was the soil of his own
make-up. He had that sense of oneness with the ground, as if the roots
of him, like the roots of a tree, flowed down through layers of the
curiously alive earth into sub-strata——

Years of his dreams, dreamed from the flat of his back, had risen off
that soil. Folded close to the deep, the loamy, the fructifying dirt,
what countless times he had dropped his book on its face, to float off
to worlds of pirate and raft, shark and Tartar. North Pole. Airship.
Submarine. Dick Needham. Later, Ivanhoe. de Galis. Tom Brown. Cecil
Rhodes. Galileo. Captain Kidd. Peary. Teddy! Marconi. Orville Wright.
Othello.

Everyone of them had sat on the slope of his hill that slid down on one
side toward Bek’s and on the other side toward the Igrotte house.

Why, buried somewhere on the left slope of hillside was a copy of
Darwin’s _Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication_. He had
played at Captain Kidd burying his treasure on damp spring afternoons.
That was his treasure. For months, it had lain moldering there, waiting
for him to find time to go searching the spot, over which tufts of
grass had grown meanwhile, erasing trace of the ritual.

Dreams had been dreamed here, and now culminating within him, in what
seemed actual spurts of energy, came the first concrete impulse to be
up-and-doing he had ever known.

Here was his soil flowing into a future that seemed suddenly to draw
aside one of its many thicknesses of curtain for him. The future that
was to be flecked with the rise and dip of aeroplanes. The future when
this soil must run fertile and yielding as far as Stefansson had been
able to visualize in the _Northward Course of Empire_. The future that
suddenly was something to arm cap-a-pie for. That he must rush to meet.
The future that suddenly, amidst the vision, the dipping of the planes,
the onward rush of empire, had its nucleus under his feet and stretched
out to new horizons. Suddenly that future became alive. A future of men
whose ideals must rise above the soaring of the planes, or who would be
crashed to earth by them.

A future that was suddenly luminous, because it contained him and Dora
under the rooftree of a semi-detached home of their own making, in a
town called Springfield.

How suddenly and gloriously alive this future, starting under his
feet and radiating outward, chiefly toward Springfield! Clerkship.
Husbandship. Dora!

Something else, too. The something else that was part of that future.
Uncorrelated. The fields all about him were soaked with his dreams;
with his inchoate impulses. To launch new ships. Dreadnoughts, with
nothing to dread, were the only kind of ships that ultimately must
mark man’s ability to rise above his mechanical age.

One thought a great deal about that. Henry said, what good is the
telephone, the telegraph, the aeroplane, the motor-car, if man use
these magnificences of his own inventive brain against himself....

Henry said. Henry said ... Henry said ... somehow swam out of the
vast ether of moving molecules—Henry said! Impulse to warn men lest
the power of brain prove to be a boomerang. Impulse to jerk the world
into compactness by quick navigation of air. To make men less strange
to one another, less afraid of one another, by annihilating distance.
Supremacy of the air must mean just that—not the power of poison-gas.
Henry said——

To tread new altitudes that back, through the ages, only eagles had
dared. To seek new pastures. A world to be tamed by its mechanical
magnificence, not made savage by it. A world to leap to the stars on
the quick mechanical steeds of its achievement, not to hurl bombs from
them—not to rush to intellectual, spiritual, idealistic destruction on
them. Henry said—Henry said——

The impulse to straddle the world as if it were Pegasus gone mad and
check-rein it—Henry’s words—Henry’s words were kindling in one. To
ride toward the stars, instead of into destruction, on a steed with
mechanical entrails and seven-thousand-league hoofs.

And above all, to come back to Dora four years hence, with money in the
pockets of a blue serge suit that was nattier than Kenneth Chipman’s,
and carry her back to a Springfield that had a shingle over his office
door, a client on his books, and a first month’s rent planked down on a
two-family house! Dora!

Against the horizon, from the direction of the Howey place, her
silhouette unmistakable, climbed the figure of his sister Bek, at
enormous stride, even for her. A stride that seemed to spin the road,
a little contemptuously back from under her strong feet. A stride that
somehow, as he stood on his eminence of small hilltop, with a rising
wind flapping his shabby, baggy trousers, filled him with a curious and
comforting sense of inheritance.

Some of that power that made his sister magnificent and his father like
a stanch old phaeton that would carry its burden even when the spring
groaned; that made his brother full of a wisdom that seemed to begin
far behind things and leap so far ahead of them—some of that power must
be his!

There were new ships to launch—somewhere—air ships! Dream-ships come
true. Power!

Why, he had seen his mother, who was full of years and had
fainting-spells, deny her chilblains and walk miles on feet that must
have been fiery and icy furnaces under her. He had seen her, who
sickened at blood finish sticking a knife into a pig, when a farm-hand
cut himself. Even his nephew Stephen, whom he had seen kick in the side
of a dog, had a valor that had pulled him through.

Some of that power, flowing like a mill-stream through his family, must
be in him. Big wheels to turn. Why not? Half of a two-family house in
Springfield—someday—who knows—there was a future to law—corporation
law—if Kenneth Chipman could—well—if Kenneth Chipman could——

His dreams must be struck into life, as one would strike a match into
flame.

As Dora had struck the match of him into flame!




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Thirty-five_


Lopsidedly, the rust-colored, pot-bellied stove in Henry’s office had
whirred through its twenty winters. Second-hand originally, in setting
it up the fourth leg had come off, so that from the beginning, it had
stood propped on two wooden blocks. Its hoarse, hurried whisper was
indissolubly associated with that flimsy-walled room in one of the few
frame buildings that remained on High Street.

It was probably the only coal-stove left in a High Street office. It
had a gaseous, soft-coal breath that hovered over the place even when
August crowded its humidity into the little room. Its soot lay along
the mountain-ridges of the relief-map of North America that occupied
one entire wall, like the grime in the wrinkles of an old gypsy’s face.

There was never a time within Davey’s recollection, when the Socrates
on the bookcase had not grime in the curlicues of his hair or along
the deep sills of his eye-sockets, or when the top of Henry’s yellow
oak table, that served as desk, was not gritty to the touch. Usually
Henry sat in a swivel-chair, with one bony knee crooked against the
table-edge, and foot dangling free of the floor. Except when a client
was present. Then it was his idiosyncrasy to seat the client in the
swivel-chair, where the hard light from the window fell upon his face,
and himself occupy the casual straight chair alongside.

It was a motley, ill-ordered table-top. For as long as Davey could
remember, a horseshoe had dangled from a nail at one end, and to which
nail the countless zigzag rents in Henry’s seersucker coat bore witness.

Briefs piled in stacks had slid down along themselves. A magnificent
plaster-of-Paris Holstein-Friesian bull, of the vintage of a
Nineteen-Hundred-and-One State Fair browsed in the center of a litter
of ink and mucilage pots. Above the table was a flecked picture of
Abraham Lincoln, that had once been given away, on his birthday with
a Sunday edition of the _Kansas City Star_. An excerpt from his
Gettysburg speech was pasted alongside:

  ... that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that
  cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we
  here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that
  this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that
  government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not
  perish from the earth.

It might be said of Henry that he dallied for hours in his swivel to
the rhythm of that segment of the speech. Not consciously. The text
of it was almost part of his very texture. In that speech was Henry
fluttering for flight. In that speech his cry, his plea, his dread,
his hope, his passionate yet passive caring about men and their
emancipations. Tilted in his swivel for hours, he could regard the bit
of print, without actually seeing it, but soaked in its rhythm, which
was the rhythm to which he swung his knee and tilted in his chair and
passed his days. Alone. As much as they would let him be. Flies had
specked it, and a celluloid campaign-button, from the first Howey
campaign of 1896, was dug into one corner.

There were road-maps and wavy stacks of books, half-a-man high,
staggering from the floor above the table-top; an engineer’s map of
the plan of a proposed spur-railroad off the main line from Centralia
to Springfield; a blue-print of a thirty-mile stretch of a new state
highway; a plan of a negro-shanty, where a murder had been committed
in the name of chicken-thievery. A black-and-white print of President
Wilson. Charts for a proposed clearing of a swamp known as Nigger
Hollow. A hand-made map of the States of Ohio and Indiana, with
red-headed pins outlining sources of water-power. A photograph of Phil
Schuyler’s one-time pretentious home in Springfield, with Phil and Rita
and the children seated on the porch rail.

A country-bumpkin of an office. Probably the only one of its kind
left in a small city that now boasted its Chamber of Commerce, two
ten-story, fire-proof skyscrapers, a Federal bank, the largest
tool-works west of Massachusetts, two five-and-ten-cents stores, a
daily Blue Plate Business Men’s lunch served in the Rotarian Rooms,
two radio-shops screaming out onto the sidewalks, omnibus-service to
Seven Mile, Cottage Corner, Tallahassee Dam, and Middleton, and a bill
pending for the inclusion of Seven Mile within the city limits, thereby
adding one-fifth to the population.

And, curiously enough, in that antiquated office over the
hardware-store, from his tilted swivel up there, where for hours on end
he could make chapel of his ten fingers, and gaze with mild, amused,
sardonic eyes upon the flow of High Street, it was Henry Schuyler who
had his long, lean finger in all of these pies of progress.

A finger that never bothered to draw out a plum.

There was something inscrutable in this smile with which Henry
surveyed the scene from his window. The hurrying clang of bright
new street-cars. He had been instrumental in wrenching a franchise
from political interests. The new concrete viaduct jerking Seven
Mile greedily closer to the flank of Centralia. The machinery of
the appropriation for that considerable piece of engineering had
passed through his hands. The World War Soldiers’ Memorial Park that
had threatened to take the form of a block of marble, until he had
intervened. The distant shine of the Tallahassee Aeroplane Field and
hangars, which he had influenced old Hiram Tallahassee to endow in his
will.

The town, bustling, banging, rattling in its small way with the
things that mattered to it. Its increasing and growing canning- and
foundry-industries, attracted by bonuses that Henry helped appropriate;
its modern pressed-brick schoolhouses, with sunlight-factory exteriors
and every modern device for the presentation of not-so-modern
curricula. Its paved highways for easier and swifter mileage, its
cinema-houses for surcease from the too crushing reality of days filled
with the quest for more capital, more speed, more lust for water-power,
horse-power, candle-power, man-power. All this spread itself before the
mild, sad eyes of Henry Schuyler, like a satirical play in which he had
unwittingly collaborated.

“These first twenty-five years of this century are undoubtedly the
greatest in bulk of achievement in the history of the world,” he used
to say. “Of course, it is true that invention makes history. For lack
of a telescope, Aristotle’s astronomy is a tissue of childish romance.
For lack of a microscope, his biology wanders endlessly astray. It
was her low power in industrial and technical achievement that kept
Greece below the general standard set by her unparalleled intellectual
achievement. And yet, here we are in the age that excels along those
lines, skimming under seas and over mountains, and annihilating
distance with the jerking of a lever. What bothers me a little bit,
though, is, whither? Is the aeroplane going to do as much for humanity
as Socrates did, who sat on a coping in his home town most of his life,
and thought out loud to folks who had the time to listen to him? Where
are we rushing? Strikes me we’re all dressed-up and no place to go.”

Henry was not dressed-up. His office was pretty much his coping, in
which he sat, in seersucker, intoning to his world, which he seemed to
regard as infinitely younger than he. Inviting definition from all with
whom he came in contact, but usually ending by giving it himself.[54]

In the swivel, before his brother’s littered table, the light from High
Street hard against his squaring young face, and Henry seated by in
the casual attitude of visitor, David faced his brother, the morning
following his encounter with Dora in the wind-swept twilight. They
might have been father and son, but in the largely impersonal way that
Henry somehow seemed paternal to the world he lived in.

There were small, rigid places at the edges of David’s mouth,
occasioned by a sort of misery at what he was doing. He was asking
of his brother a loan; and knowing, as he did, his financial status,
the moment was pretty obnoxious to him. Furthermore, sitting there
stammering out his request, his eyes fixed unhappily upon a sheet of
paper sprawling on the table before him, suddenly, as he stammered
along, the blur of typewritten letters shaped themselves into words,
and the words into meaning.

It was a letter from a firm of solicitors in Middleton, holding to
account Henry Stephen Schuyler for the sum of four hundred and fifty
dollars, for which he had gone bond for a young farmer named Edwin
Penwhistle, who had defaulted payment by disappearing from the state
two days before said moneys fell due.

It made the hard, jade-white areas along the side of David’s nose
quiver and flatten as he limped along with his recital. The snagged
places on Henry’s shabby seersucker coat too, kept hooking onto his hot
and tortured gaze. Not that under conditions of the most fantastic:
financial well-being could he imagine his brother in an unsnagged
seersucker, but just the same, those little repetitious triangles kept
jerking up his words, making him stammer and stumble, and finally end
up by just sitting in the middle of a sentence and regarding Henry with
stinging, miserable eyes.

“—hate like the dickens ... come to fellow like you for a loan—but it’s
the poor help the poor—money don’t seem to mean much to the poor.”

“Something a little wise in that, boy. The poor remain poor, as a rule,
because they spend easily. They’ve never known the gloating of watching
a bank-account grow.”

“It’s asking a lot, Henry. Two hundred. You see, though, that could
tide me over the winter-tuition. I can’t very well ride Phil, the way
he’s got to hustle to make their ends meet—his kids and all. Looks like
you’re the only one, Henry, a fellow can sort of turn to. You couldn’t
see your way clear, could you, Henry, to let me have that coupla
hundred? If I’m going to do the law nights, I’m already three weeks
late for the beginning of the term.”

“What determined you, boy, so all of a sudden?”

“That’s why I caught the milk-truck in, so we could talk in town.
Private.”

“Quite right. But last time we tried to get anywhere, talking this
matter over, Dave, you were all heated up about the Wheeler book
and had decided to devote your life to zoölogy, and then _Arabia
Deserta_ and Stefansson got you het up about reclaiming the waste
places of the earth, and it looked like engineering or Cecil Rhodes
empire-stuff; then, if I remember rightly, Wilson’s perplexities got
you thinking about international law, and then forestry seemed a good
bet, and then, ’long toward the last, wasn’t it ovibos-breeding,
Antarctic exploration, ornithology, banking, lumber-jacking, astronomy,
shipbuilding?”

“Of course, if you’re going to rub that in....”

“Now, old fellow, don’t go getting sore. I think the idea of taking
that job Phil can swing for you in Springfield with a grocery-firm,
where you can dig into the law nights, is bully.”

“Then why the dickens didencha say so?” said David, his dry lips lifted
back off his dry teeth and his eyes seeming to push up close to the
lenses of his spectacles.

“Well, I just do kinda say it now. It’s a darn good decision. A job by
day, and a law course to keep you out of mischief nights.”

“Law’s something a fellow can fasten his teeth into, Henry.”

“Knowledge of the laws men live under, Dave, even if you never do much
more with it than—well, I guess you’d have to do more with it than I
have, or strike a mark below zero—me being the zero—but what I started
to say, boy, knowledge of the laws men make for themselves to live
under is one way of getting at the knowledge of the kind of fellows
human beings are to have made them just that way.”

“That’s it, Henry. Even if I wasn’t ever to actually go out and
practice law—like you——”

“God forbid!”

“Sometimes, Henry—know what?”

“No, what?”

“Well, just a little turn of the wheel, and, all of a sudden, a
fellow’s got his bearings. Know what I mean?”

“Think I do. All of a sudden, well, just all of a sudden, something hit
you. That about it?”

“Exactly. Nothing so much in a grocery-job, but it’s wholesale, and,
anyways, Father’s always said he didn’t care so much whether he had all
silk purses in the family, just so he didn’t have any sow’s ears.”[55]

“I’d like mighty much to see you surprise the Old Gentleman with a
hundred-per-cent silk purse.”

“He’s a silk purse himself.”

“No, the Old Gentleman is more like the honestest woolen sock in the
world.”

“A sock that Mother knitted.”

Out of their laughter, a shadow fell across Henry’s face, as if a shade
had been lowered.

“Tenacious old folks, ours, Dave. Such old-fashioned and relentless
ideals as toil and integrity and loyalty are pretty much out-of-date.
Father yells and hollers about it all, but he’s the tree and root and
the sap of the soil all right. It’s fine to be an acorn off that kind
of oak. That’s what you are at your age, Dave. An acorn crammed with
future.”

“Remember what you said to me once, Henry, when you were reading
Aristotle to me? Inventions make history, but is history worth the
making? That wasn’t nice, Henry.”

“Of course it wasn’t, and of course history’s worth the making. The
hominy must have been scorched that morning for breakfast. What I
probably meant was something like—well, to make history really worth
the making, the age of invention should have preceded the age of
thought.”

“That’s what I say, Hen. What could those Greek fellows be expected to
know about some of the most ordinary facts of the world they lived
in, when they had no way of getting around it? No wonder old Aristotle
was way off on his astronomy. Didn’t even have a pocket telescope like
mine. Know what, Henry?”

“No, what?”

“Well, sir—looka this country. If Greece could do what she did without
inventions, what do you think we ought to be able to do, having them?
Looka the aeroplane. Didn’t we invent it? A pair of fellows right here
in the Middle West? And here’s France and all those countries getting
more use out of it than we are. What’s distance or cold or heat to us,
or any of the things that have kept other nations down? Yes, siree,
if I was practicing law in a live town like Springfield, living say
in a little attached house with a front yard to squirt evenings with
the garden hose, and plenty of time to think things out—oh, say—oh,
say—well—just ’oh, say,’ is all I got to say.”

“Yeh!” said Henry, fumbling among the litter of his table and
reaching across the body of the boy toward the far end. “Hand me that
check-book, Dave——”

It was a scrubby affair through which Henry’s wetted forefinger rustled.

“How’s a hundred and forty-three dollars and fifty-six cents on
account, boy?” he said, after some figuring on a margin, “That’s
fifty-six dollars and forty-four cents shy of the two hundred, but——”

“You mean, Henry—that’s all you’ve got?”

“I mean nothing of the sort. There’s always more coming in somehow.
Fellow up here in Tole County blew in last week and paid me
seventy-five dollars for a fee he’s owed me nine years back——”

“But——”

“Take it or leave it,” said his brother, scrawling on the check and
jerking it testily out of the book.

There was always in Henry’s manner toward his money-affairs, and in his
response to any and everybody’s inroads upon the notorious generosity,
a manner apt to be embarrassing to even the most hardened collector off
his bounty.

He treated money with the tip of a somewhat contemptuous finger.[56]

The canny, the meretricious, the sycophants, and the needy, who at one
time or another passed in almost constant stream about that white-pine
table, sensed it even when Henry himself was most unconscious of the
trait.

His scorn for money. It made even the hardened recipient of his
largesse shrink a little as he left his presence. It made Dave, to whom
money had suddenly and for the first time loomed with importance, feel
sticky-fingered at the savage generosity which made his brother, as if
angrily forestalling more ado, thrust the check into his hand.

“Henry, you’re just about the best friend a fellow ever had.”

“I’m just about the best boob a fellow ever had. Keep me in front
of you, boy, for your ‘Don’t’ slogan. Look at me, and pretty nearly
everything you see me doing, don’t do. And above all, don’t laugh at
the age you live in. Laugh with it. That’s not my idea so much as the
laughing philosopher’s, Democritus. Whatever you do, don’t, like gloomy
Heraclitus, shed tears about it. Shed your illusions if you must, and
then fight like hell to recapture them in terms of reality. Don’t keep
your tongue in your cheek. Just poke it in occasionally. The pupils of
Socrates, you remember, were divided into cynics and Cyrenaics. Don’t
let the stale apathy of cynicism get you, ever. It takes a clever man
to turn cynic, and a wise man to be clever enough not to.”

“Is that one of those eppy-grams, Henry?”

“No, only a rather dull truth. A wise man lets his mind ferment,
Dave, but never turn to vinegar. You’ve got a level head on your
shoulders. Keep it there. Don’t let it get caught in the rut between
your shoulders. The sixth human sense, Dave, is a sense of humor. Care
passionately about everything, Dave, using your sixth sense all the
while, and see to it that almost everything is worth caring about. Then
curb your passions.”

“I can care all right, Henry—_now_!”

“Don’t march ahead of the band-wagon. They’ll stone you, boy, if you
do. Ride with it, but keep your eyes ahead. If you see Light, guide
them toward it, only in the name of Heaven, don’t let them know they
are not seeing it for themselves.”

“You know what you should have been, Henry?”

“Yes, I know what I should have been, Dave. I’m one of those fellows
who, by making a few wise cracks to the not-so-wise, gets the
reputation of still water running deep. As a matter of fact, still
water doesn’t run at all. Yes, know what I should have been? I should
have been Diogenes with a radium-lantern. I should have been Socrates
with the wing of an aeroplane for his coping. I should have been that
fellow Teufelsdröck. Who was Teufelsdröck? Quick!”

“Oh, I know! He’s the old chap in _Sartor Resartus_ who——”

“Good! Well, I should have been him, spending my days in the tower of
a two-hundred-and-ninety-eight-story Woolworth skyscraper, playing
marbles with the stars. Or maybe, by Jove, I should have been a
third-rate country-lawyer trying to sprinkle salt on the tail of the
comet I inhabit, and preaching to a small brother, to be able when he
reaches my age, to sum up his life in terms of ‘I am,’ instead of like
me, ‘I might have been.’”

“Well, allrighty, you mighta been—allrighty—you mighta been——”

“I mighta been, allrighty——” said Henry, looking out upon the tide of
High Street, his eyes seeming suddenly to be the wise, tired, prophetic
eyes of what he “mighta been.”

       *       *       *       *       *

There entered, unannounced, as everyone entered that office
unannounced, the hurried, perspiring figure of Steve Renchler. In
spite of the fact that he had come in out of the thin-aired bluster of
November, there were moist little places out under his eyes and along
his upper lip; and although he wore a sweater-waistcoat (a handsome
slip-over, of a variety which Claire could knit so skillfully that a
Springfield department-store purchased her output), his coat was jerked
back, and his derby hat was along the back of his head, pushed there by
a mopping handkerchief.

There was little resemblance left to the dark, tortured boy and
dreamer. It was a fed face. The face of a man of strong, healthy
appetites, and strong, healthy gratifications. If the mere smell of
alcohol could turn Steve pale and gone-at-the-knees, the delights of
the table had done their measure, and apparently were not without
compensations. Steve’s clothing bore the horizontal creases of a man
whose legs bend heavily. There were dimples out along the backs of
his hands, set in little cushions of fat. The tailor, in taking his
measurements, had to throw the tape-line around his waist.

Right in the town of Centralia, hundreds of replicas of
this derby-hatted Steve were meeting their life-insurance
endowment-policies, being fairly true to their wives, reading their
_Saturday Evening Posts_, _Literary Digests_ and comic-supplements,
mowing their front lawns, paying their installments on loud-speakers,
eating their Blue Plate luncheons, dodging jury-service, reconciling
themselves to bob-haired wives, driving their family sedans, having
their children’s tonsils out, purchasing Frigidaire ice-boxes in
fourteen monthly payments, attending the cinema-houses, tuning-in
before turning-in, struggling to relieve financial strain, staving
off blood-pressure, subscribing to fifty bricks, at a dollar a brick,
in the new municipal hospital, scheming to turn in this year’s
four-cylinder model for next year’s six, dreaming of college education
for the children, struggling for Country Club membership, “now that the
children are growing up,” hoping for that raise, dreaming of the trip
to the Canadian Rockies, spoiling their children, hating, indulging,
loving, or spoiling their wives, achieving nervous indigestion, joining
the boosters’ club, stifling another old dream, climbing after new
dreams, voting the full Republican ticket, flying an “excuse my dust”
pennant from off the old sedan, teaching son to salute the flag,
doctoring income-tax.

The stamp of his times was on Steve. His was the rather flabby
figure of a man with a body still fairly adapted to the lugging of
water and the killing of game but who finds himself instead, turning
spigots, and picking up the telephone-receiver when he would eat red
meat. He read two newspapers a day. A local morning-sheet controlled
by Republican interests and a Chicago day-old pink evening-sheet
controlled by capital and designed to meet the mammalian needs of who
runs as he reads the-syndicated-universities of Frank Crane and Parkes
Cadman, Eddie Guest, Beatrice Fairfax, Bud Fisher, Glenn Frank, comic
strip, and baseball brevities, and such of the financial, industrial,
governmental, international, and political fluctuations as were deemed
digestible for a barley-watered public. The newspapers were as doped
for public consumption as many of the foodstuffs and drink-substitutes
that found their way down the naïve palate of Centralia. A press
that was free to mix, dilute, pervert truth to meet the demand of
politics and policies, hurled its vitiated and vitrioled facts in
twirled newspapers against the front doors of Centralia as the carrier
passed down the streets in a two-wheeled cart, from which he was crack
sure-shot.

Steve read his morning-paper propped up against the sugar-bowl as he
dipped up his nationalized cereal, and then left it at home for Claire,
who read the death, marriage, advice to-the-lovelorn, and Lost and
Found Departments.

Claire, however, also read Mencken and Sherwood Anderson and Cabell
at her Saturday Morning Literary Club, considered them terribly
interesting, and “Mencken a scream. I just love his way of writing. He
sees right through everybody—and don’t hesitate to say so.”

There was an uncut volume of _Prejudices, First Series_ on the
center table of Steve’s reception-hall, and an unthumbed edition
of _Winesburg, Ohio_, inscribed “To Claire Schuyler in recognition
of her loyal presidency of the Saturday Morningers,” and in a neat
row, between bronze-elephant book-ends, such miscellany as Burns’s
_Collected Poems_, _The Winning of Barbara Worth_, _Girl of the
Limberlost_, _Ingersoll’s Collected Sermons_, _Stella Dallas_, _Guide
to Bridge Whist_, _Motion Picture Classic_, _Watch Your Calories_,
_Adult Book of Knowledge_, _Child’s History of England_, Kathleen
Norris’s _Mother_, Ben King’s _Verse_, _A Thought a Day_, Owen
Meredith, _Ethan Frome_, Papini’s _Life of Christ_, _Innocents Abroad_,
_The Iron Woman_, _Garden of Allah_, _Mary Page_, by Leroy Scott, _One
Hundred Famous Quotations_, and _Friendship and Flower Book_.

When Stevey waited for his barber or dentist, or took a train to
Springfield, the _Literary Digest_ served him one news-concoction after
another, as quickly as an Automat....

News-reels flashed to him, from his favorite motion-picture theater,
such items of the day as were considered good for his American
well-being. Such as the Soviet scenes that could instruct him
only in the dangerous and unsuccessful aspects of the gigantic
world-experiment. Political slogans put forth by this and that
“interest.” Propaganda. Publicity. Advertising.

If the thousands of half-doped Steves abroad over the land ever paused
to think about Russia at all, it was in terms that had been doled out
to them in careful rations from a careful Press, of a terror-ridden
country lying prostrate under the savage and kicking heel of crazed and
delirious labor.

At the same time, the headline-story of some creedist in Vermont
being thrown into jail for protesting against jury duty, scarcely
indented itself with any of its monstrous and satiric import into the
anesthetized brains of the Steves.

Birth-control, book-censorship, Eugene Debs in jail, Tea Pot Dome
scandal, lynchings, child-labor, Lawrenceville Kansas, or any of the
acid awarenesses of things current that had cut the lines of pain and
cynicism around Henry’s mouth, flashed across the less-sensitized,
half-doped Steveys who mutely accepting their God, their food, their
censored motion-pictures, books, and politics in the tabloid form
rationed out to them in the interests of the greatest good for the
greatest number, were mute indeed.

The Steveys were the doers, not the thinkers. They bought their
tinned propaganda, theirs not to reason why. They read the Tea Pot
Dome scandal as news, and not an outrageous infringement upon their
own rights. They let their propaganda-logged eyes skim Eugene Debs
headlines, and said “Serves him right.” “Tarring and feathering is too
good for those anarchist fellows.”

They squealed a little when the shoe pinched their own particular foot,
or when a case of local or municipal graft touched their particular
pocket-nerves. But otherwise, except for nervous indigestion, the
infernal high cost of living, the appalling and expensive precocity
of children, the wife’s mounting demands of budget, the daily grind
of office and high blood-pressure and self-playing piano, the bad
street-car service and the unendurable tax-burden, the growing
difficulties of labor-unrest, the high cost of production and college
education, of butter and life insurance, coal, children’s shoes, tires,
tonsil operations and dining-room rugs, life was a charivari, merry
enough in its way, of radios, electric signs, aeroplane-races, baseball
series, Armistice Days, lodge meetings, and making ends meet.

Steve Renchler had been caught up by the rhythm of the machine.
He ate his morning cereal and slightly-watered milk with the
newspaper-spokesman of that machine propped up against the sugar-bowl,
and suffered no more than the normal indigestion due to overeating.
Cereal and watered milk, news that the Ku Klux had tarred and feathered
a negro, a college professor dismissed for free speech, Mexican
unrest, Rockefeller’s dime-gesture, private ownership of railroads,
were as normal to the digestion of the Steveys as seal meat and frozen
fish to an Eskimo.

The stomach and the brain can be trained to overcome any initial
aversions to certain foods and learn to assimilate them.

Steve had assimilated. At thirty, he had practically passed the danger
of thinking, hurting, or rebelling against any social, aesthetic or
spiritual shortcomings of environment, except where personal struggle
for existence, and sweet butter and life insurance, coal, children’s
shoes, tires, and dining-room rugs had kept the mind competitively keen
as a blade. Due to the exigencies of the age in which he lived, the
chief of his sensory organs which he had developed was the eye. The
motion-picture, the rotogravure, the observation-car, the motor-car,
had developed a visual age. Stevey thought mostly with his eyes.

What he beheld first-hand, with the evidence of his own eyes,
stimulated him. The Tallahassee Aeroplane Field and Government
experimental shops, practically adjoined the Tool Works where Steve was
by now department-manager.

In the beginning, it had been necessary to use disciplinary methods
with the foundry employees, and even with the office-workers, to keep
them from flocking to the windows every time a flight or even the most
casual hop-off took place.

The curiously exultant roar of a mounting machine had long since become
a matter of course, scarcely causing the lifting of a head. Except to
Steve. The excitement of that living, throbbing note of release, as
steel and timber took flight, never ceased to thrill him. In spite of
the need to be exemplary to his men, it was practically impossible for
him to remain away from the window when the song of flight began to hum
its way above the din of foundry.

Frequently, instead of lolling his lunch period at home with Claire
and the children, or stretched on the flat of his back beneath
his five-passenger sedan, he spent it among the men on the field.
Government inspectors. Mechanics. Pilots. Once, unbeknown to Claire,
he had made a short flight. He was even versed in the phraseology of
a new, strangely buoyant, etheric world. Air-pockets. High-pressure
areas. Angle-of-drift.

With something of the old inchoate yearnings which had stirred the dark
and nervous boy, this present goose-stepping Stevey, snatched back to
normalcy by what was probably an inherited capacity for it that was
stronger than even his weakness was weak, must have felt something of
those remote old stirrings. But felt them safely.

The air, particularly after his first flight, interested Stevey
principally from the vantage of his two feet on the ground.

Here was a new world of navigation, of commercial possibility that
soared beyond credulity. New undreamed-of lanes of transportation,
unchartered. By Jove, the day those two Ohio fellows flew at Kittyhawk,
had unroofed the world! There were fortunes in those new lanes up there
as yet scarcely trammeled by competition.

Here was a means of communicability as yet unchartered to any
appreciable extent by “interests.”

Steve meant to be a ground-floor man, so to speak, in the new etheric
zones of air commerce.

Men’s creative brains had wrought the miracle of the flying-machine.
The brains of practical men must launch it.

Air commerce. Air franchise.

Steve’s dreams as a family-man began to weave about this idea. His
ambition for position. A large and beautiful home for Claire. Heavy
insurances. A new battleship-gray limousine with balloon tires.
A thousand-dollar radio and loud-speaker. That see-America-first
rail-trip, celebrated in a folder that he and Claire liked to pore
over. Niagara Falls. Yellowstone Park. Seattle. Banff.

Suddenly, to Stevey, who paid forty-two dollars a month house rent;
doctor, music, dancing, school fees for the children, clothing for two
adults and three youngsters; laundry, gas, gasoline, fuel, lodge, fire,
automobile, and life insurance, special tutelage for his child Henry,
who stammered, and miscellany _ad infinitum_, on a salary of forty
dollars a week, had come a chance which brought him pell-mell, and with
a speed that caused the caves of perspiration beneath his eyes, to that
haven of the needy and the desirous, his uncle Henry’s office.

“Uncle Henry, must see you. Right away. Alone. Sorry, Dave—get
out—there’s a good kid. This is the only time I can get away from the
office.”

In a slow-mannered sort of indulgence, Henry regarded his nephew
without uncurling his posture.

“Hold your horses, Steve. Me and Dave are having a talk here that about
amounts to what you fellows would call a ‘conference.’ Everything in
the world excepting time and a bad egg will keep on a day like this.”

“I’ve only about forty minutes, Uncle. I wouldn’t butt in this way, if
it wasn’t important.”

His uncle rose, his great length of body unwinding in slow good-humor.

“Of course, if it’s something special.”

“It is, Uncle. As special as anything that has ever happened to me.”

“I see. Well then, Dave, shall we give way to your nephew a bit? Guess
we’ve about said it all for the present, anyway. We’ll let the universe
rest as is.”

Dave rose and began rolling his cap. A conference was something
inviolate. And here was Stevey crashing selfishly, inconsiderately,
domineeringly, through the very warp and woof of an hour of interview
with his brother, so privately his own.[57]

“Well, one thing,” said Dave defiantly, folding his check and slipping
it into his trousers pocket with the long down-gesture of a man now of
pocket-affairs, “if I’ve got to shove my way in this world, I’m going
to shove it with my head, and not my shoulders.”

Stevey, far too hurried to be amused, cast a perspiring look at the
rangy figure of his young uncle.

“Snap out of it, Dave, and don’t be a fool.”

“Dave’s in nobody’s way. Out with what’s on your mind, Steve.”

Steve slapped down his hat and, straddling a stool, jerked it to him
until he was up face to face with the lean lantern from which Henry’s
eyes looked so humorously.

“I’ve got the chance of a lifetime, Uncle. And I need two hundred
dollars to grab it.”

It was Steve’s pronouncement of himself as a crisp go-getter man of
affairs. Bandier of no words. American business man tactics. Straight
from the shoulder. Right to the point. Efficiency.

It was Dave who half leaped forward, not Henry, who sat with his slow,
contemplative thumb and forefinger, stroking his slow, contemplative
jaw, and his other hand, with pipe that always smelled, held equally
lax, as he tapped it against the table.

“That’s not such a large order, Steve, provided the fellow you’re
striking for the loan has the two hundred.”

“Well, you have it for every Tom, Dick and Harry, Uncle!”

“You may be right, Steve,” drawled Henry, “but fact remains, I haven’t
got it—now.”

“He hasn’t,” yapped Dave. “Henry’s no mint.”

“Keep out of this, Dave! It’s the first time, Uncle, I’ve ever come
to you for the loan of a penny! I’ve worried along on my own pretty
steadily. You’ll have to grant me that. But there’s nobody I can turn
to, between heaven and earth but you now, Henry.”

“That’s what we all say. That’s why he’s the hounded one of the whole
fam——”

“Shut up, Dave. I only need a couple of hundred dollars, Henry. My
whole future depends on those few paltry dollars. If I’m ever going to
be anything more than a two-by-four cog in the wheel of a man-eating
iron-foundry, you’ve got to advance me the few dollars to pull myself
and my wife and kids out of the rut that’ll close us in, sure as
fate, if I wait much longer. I’m borrowed to the hilt, as it is, on
my insurance-policies. My Buick isn’t even paid for. Let me have that
couple of hundred, Uncle. You can. You must. I’ll give you my note on
any terms you say.”

“That’s not fair, Steve. Henry’s not got it.”

“For cripes sake, keep out of this, I say, Dave. It may do you some
good to listen to some of the things I’ve got to say. They may help you
to get a move on.”

“Steve! That’s no way to talk to the boy.”

“Opportunity is knocking at my door, Uncle. Oh, I’m not whining, but
if you stop to look at my life for a minute, it—it hasn’t been all beer
and skittles, Uncle. I—I’ve had a fight every inch of the way through
two or three kinds of hells that—for what I’ve got—out of it——”

“I appreciate that, Steve,” said his uncle.

“You should, Uncle, because—you—helped.”[58]

“I do understand, Steve, more, perhaps, than you realize.”

“Well then, Uncle—you know better than anybody—the everything of what
I’ve been through. I’ve worked my way along pretty steadily these last
years, grant me that.”

“Indeed I do. I’ve man-size respect for the struggle you’ve made and
won, Steve.”

“Well then, prove it. Opportunity bobbed up for me today. Out of a
clear sky. Opportunity’s knocking at my door. For two hundred dollars I
can open it.”

“I tell you he hasn’t got it. Is it always going to be like this for
him? First me. Then you. Tom and Dick and Harry? I’ve just borrowed his
last penny off him. If you don’t believe it—here—looka this check—then
looka his stubs. What are we around him, anyway? A lot of bleeders?
Henry hasn’t got it!”

“Not so fast, Dave.”

“He’s got to have it. It’s my whole life, Henry, getting my hands on
this money today. There’s a half a dozen can grab this chance away from
me if I don’t.”

The narrowed look had come into Henry’s face. A tired look. An old look.

“Mighty ’fraid Dave’s right, Steve. Fact is, I haven’t got it.”

“All you have to do is look at his stubs, Steve! If it was for anything
else except getting me out of the way and started toward something, I
wouldn’t take it, either.”

“Borrow me that money, Henry. For God’s sake, get it for me.”

“Why, boy, I can’t borrow the price of a bus ticket from here to
Middleton. Everybody in this town is onto my way of borrowing from
Peter, so Paul can borrow it off me.”

With a quick fist flashing down over David’s wrists, Steve jerked his
young uncle toward him, so that his spectacles jerked off one ear-lobe
and hung dangling across his face.

“Dave, let me have that money.”

“Steve!”

“He’s only a kid, Uncle. Whatever he’s going to do with it now, he
can do later. I’ll make it up to him. This is my chance, Dave. You’re
eighteen. I’m nearly twice that and where am I? Tied to a snide job in
a snide town. Opportunities like this don’t come twice to a man like me
in a town like this. You see, Dave, I’ve got a family and kids. I’ve
got a mother—your own flesh and blood sister, who deserves, if ever
anybody on God’s earth did, to have me make good. All right, call it
sniveling if you will, but let me have that money, Dave.”

“Steve—shame!”

“Why, Uncle? A man with sense will go any length to throw a sop to
opportunity, if she’s pausing outside his door. I wouldn’t ask Dave if
I wasn’t so sure. It’s a turning-point in my life. It’s now or never.”

“What about Dave’s life, Steve?”

“He’s a kid.”

“Yes, but Dave’s been what you might call grist between the mills of
poverty and war, pretty much since he was born. He came along just in
time for his father’s bad financial times to set in, and then what did
he do but run into a world-war during the years he was growing up.”

“He’s got life before him.”

“That’s where it will remain for him, Steve, unless he begins to
encroach upon it.”

“My life’s as important to me, as yours is to you, Steve.”

“I know that, Dave. But what you’ve got to realize is this. You’re a
bright kid in your way. Maybe a slow way, but you’ve got something
to you that I won’t have, if I live to be a hundred. May not get you
anywhere—much—unless you get a hustle on you. But you’ve the makings,
Dave, of quite an unusual kind of fellow. Don’t know just what
kind—but—but life’s full of opportunities for you. Scientific farming.
Or maybe big business. I’m just a regular, every-day fellow, Dave, with
a nose for the opportunity when it comes along. And I tell you this is
opportunity.”

“Might I ask,” said Henry, tapping his dry teeth with a pencil, and
regarding his nephew with a frown over-hanging his eyes, “the nature of
this er—a—mysterious opportunity?”

“Indeed you may! That’s my best selling-card, the nature of the
project. You’ll be the first to see the thing, Uncle. The idea sells
itself to a fellow with vision....”

“Well?”

“The birth of the air-age is taking place right under our eyes. I want
to capitalize that fact. I want to ride in on it. Me and a fellow at
Tallahassee Field, Eugene Bymore, a crack pilot and a fellow that knows
the air-game, A to Z, can buy up a plane out of that Smoothfield wreck
you read about the other day for a song. This is all inside stuff that
comes to Bymore, who’s the Government aeronautic engineer. Took a fancy
to me. Anxious to meet you, Uncle Hen. Knows about the family and all.
This plane can be bought, Uncle, for the price almost of so much junk.
Nothing much the matter with it that a fellow like Bymore, who knows
the plane through and through, can’t handle in a jiffy. Me and this
fellow—funny, Uncle, the way he took a fancy to me—we’ve got an idea
for starting a parcel-delivery service between here and Chicago. Over
a known lane that Bymore’s flown himself for off and on of two years
in mail-planes. Idea looks so big to me, there’s just no stopping it.
Somebody’s going to hit on it sooner or later, certain as fate, and
it might as well be us. It’s coming, just as sure as there’s express
trains this minute running between here and there. Only, it’s coming in
a bigger fashion than anything we’ve ever dreamt of.”

“You’re right there, boy, but many a good man and good plane have gone
down to prove what you’re saying.”

“The way we’ve worked it out, on the principle of what Bymore calls the
aerodynamic safety in transport-aviation, there’ll be minimum chance of
a good man or a good plane going down.”

“It’s gambling with tomorrow, Steve, but tomorrow’s coming, sure as
hell.”

“I knew you’d be the one to see the can before the can’ts. That’s what
makes you the darnedest fellow, Uncle.”

“You mean, Steve,” said Dave, with his spectacles thrust forward along
his nose, and his head thrust forward on his shoulders, “you mean
you’re starting in the aeroplane-delivery business?”

“Exactly. Parcel-delivery by air, just like the Centralia Parcel
Delivery by wagon. When the Chicago Motor Company needs a bale of
special screw eyes from the Giles Tool Works, double-quick jiffy, we
supply the double-quick jiffy. When Cincinnati needs half a gram of
radium for an emergency operation, and that half a gram happens to be
on a shelf in Chicago at nine A.M., Cincinnati is going to have that
tube beside the operating-table forenoon that same day. Let us deliver
your ivory, apes, and peacocks by air! Express by air and save ten
hours delivery-time between Centralia and Chicago. Nothing in time or
space can stop us, Uncle.”

“It’s big, Steve. By God, nothing should stop you!”

“I won’t stop you,” cried Dave, and slapped down the check on the
table. “Yes, sir. Looka. Looka what the Zeppelins are doing now! Why
couldn’t it be the same from Hamburg to New York and New York to
Bombay? You can have this here check, Steve—reckon that’s all right
with you, Henry?”

“You reckon right, boy, only how are _you_ going to tunnel out, boy?
Dave was going to Springfield, Steve, on that money to commit the
well-known turning-point-of-his-career act.”

“You won’t be sorry, Dave. You and Henry can regard yourselves as
partners in on this enterprise—stock-holders or anything you say——”[59]

“Gee, Stevey, you fellows get the world small enough, and there’s not
going to be any more distance!”

“Righto, Kid! I’ll be in a position to pay you both back, tenfold, some
day—mark my word——”

“Cut out distance—kinda get the whole world to draw up its chairs
in a closer circle and get acquainted, and you cut out a lot of
misunderstanding between fellows and countries, get countries to
feeling friendlier, and——”

“Righto, again, Kid! This here initial money doesn’t mean capital—it
just means if we can get enough fellows interested in the cost of
laying an air-line between——”

“What’s that you were saying Dave—about drawing up chairs closer——”

“What I was trying to say, Henry, was—cut out the strangeness between
men, so’s they understand each other better by sitting in closer, and
there aren’t going to be so many wars, and—and—now my idea is this——”

“Yes, Dave!”

“Say, the kid’s right bright! It’s as Bymore says, Uncle, if we can go
to a bunch of fellows and say, look here, we have the——”

“You were saying, Dave?”

“Nothing, Henry, except——”

“This check means more to me than you’ll ever know, Dave. It’s going to
put a crimp in your plans, but——”

“Crimp, nothing, I’m going anyhow.”[60]


FOOTNOTES:

[54] To the great embarrassment of his elders, David, as a boy, was a
great one to insist upon definition, urging detailed explanation of any
subject which caught his attention. There is little doubt but what my
brother Henry, who had one of the finest capacities for intellectual
curiosity I have ever known, was largely responsible for this trait.
Later, of course, he (David) came to be known as The Inquiring Mr.
Question Mark, and in the memorabilia of the Museum of Baltimore is the
original of the much-reproduced Glake cartoon, which is a most amusing
likeness of my brother, entirely drawn in small question-marks.

It is said of him, and I think rightly, that it was his insistence
upon definition that saved America from being party to the Allied
International Peace fiasco at Moscow.

[55] I shall never forget that rather murky November evening, when
I was out in what I always called Winslow’s garden, wrapping a
hydrangea-bush in straw, when, lo and behold, who should turn the
corner of the porch, but Henry. A most unusual thing for him to show up
at the farm.

“Bek,” he said to me, without an ado or introduction, “Dave’s made up
his mind to go to Springfield and take that job polishing spittoons and
the handles of the big front-door for a wholesale grocery-firm.”

It wasn’t anything to take on over, and yet I can never forget the
curious feeling that shot through me. Like dropping suddenly in one of
those thirty-story elevators I never can get used to.

“What on earth,” I cried, “made him decide that? Couldn’t he do that
good here in Centralia?”

“That’s just the fine part of it, Bek. The kid wants to go to
Springfield because there’s what they call an Extension Law Course he
can attend evenings. Beat that?”

Maybe you could have beaten it, but to Henry and me, standing there
grinning, in the cold, gray twilight, it didn’t seem beatable. It
lifted Dave’s going, for us, out of the dreariness we associated with
his job as grocer’s handy-boy.

“Know what I think, Bek?” Henry went on to me. “He’s sweet on some
girl. Wonder could it still be the Tarkington girl?”

“I wonder,” I said, smiling a smile that, as it stretched across my
face, made me feel as if I looked exactly like an old gray tabby we
had, called Sly.

[56] I have often wondered, in a practical family such as ours, reared
as we were to know the value of a nickel, where my brothers Henry and
Dave inherited their disregard for money. It is probable that each,
in his own way, was responsible for vast fortune after vast fortune
that was to fall into the hands of other men. While it is true that
our family-fortunes were destined to rise on the wings of a winged
invention, not one penny of that fortune was due to the business acumen
of these two men. Where their imagination and vision soared, it took
men like Phil and my Steve to capitalize the ideas from such minds as
Henry’s and Dave’s as they fell to the ground like feathers from an
eagle in flight.

[57] ... speaking of red tape, and his abhorrence of it, long after
his (Dave’s) official position would have given him precedence in any
important man’s anteroom, he never permitted himself to be ushered into
the private office ahead of those waiting their turn. If there was no
appointment, he insisted upon taking his place. I am in possession of
an amusing incident that had to do with this characteristic quality of
his consideration for others.

Once, while he was Police Commissioner of Springfield, and calling on
the then Governor of the State (Canfield), he sat next to a garrulous
old farmer in the anteroom, who, also waiting his turn, struck up a
conversation with my brother. In the course of it, the old fellow, whom
my brother had never seen before, began to describe to him the Police
Commissioner, whom he professed to know intimately.

“Quietest fellow you ever seen. Square Dave, the boys call him. Kinda
solid, square-looking fellow. Says a thing. Does that thing. Biggest
fighter for what he thinks right you ever seen and never lifts his
voice or his hand or his little finger so far’s anybody around him can
see. When them Russians and Pole factory-workers began copying them
Soviets two years ago, I was standing within a stone’s-throw of him.
But believe me, I was behind a pillar. Yes sir, I coulda put out my
hand and touched him. Well sir, I wanna say to you—I wanna say to you
that he stood on the little old balcony outside the Civic Building
window, square, plain-appearing fellow, full-blast where a bullet or
even a fist could have done for him. Did he budge? Not a budge. Some
pretty little lady, his wife, I reckon, poking her head outa the window
in back of his, was shivering all right, but never letting out a cheep.

“‘Attention,’ he snaps out suddenly, when the brick hit his cheek that
smashed his glasses. Not scared-like. ‘Attention—’ he says to the
militia quiet-like, as if he was telling them to drink a cup of tea.
‘It’s between principle and the people now. Principle must save the
people. Jerk them to their senses with three shots, and I’ll hold them
there. Attention—Fire!’ Just like that! And darned if that’s just what
he did do. On three shots, mind you. Three shots, mind you, and them
shots in the air.”

And all through this, my brother, who had never seen the fellow
before, listened gravely to this piecemeal picture of himself, mostly
inaccurate, and evidently garbled from newspaper accounts of the
opening explosion of the bloodless Springfield riots.

[58] I have always had the feeling, although neither my brother
nor Stevey ever referred to it, that Henry had more to do with the
salvation of my boy than any of us were ever to know.

[59] I suppose it may be said that The International Aircraft
Corporation virtually had its birth-pangs in my brother Henry’s office
whither Stevey had hurried that epoch-making day I have just described.
Destined, as it was, not only to affect our family-history, but to
become one of the great factors of its time in world-progress, how
little the three of them, maneuvering among themselves over the raising
of that tiny initial capital, could have foreseen the immensity of
circumstances that were to unfold out of that hour. For years, my son
Steve and Eugene Bymore vigorously contended that Henry and David were
entitled to large parcels of stock in the company, a concession which
both of my brothers consistently refused.

[60] Much has been made of the fact that David earned his first
year’s law-book money in Springfield by operating a sawing-machine
for a lumber company during his noon-hours and Saturday afternoons.
In fact, Elsworth Tappen in his monograph, goes so far as to say that
he earned enough money, what after paying his board, his lodging,
and sending money home, to pay for his law-books and accessories by
sawing wood. One way, I suppose, of interpreting the act of operating a
sawing-machine.

But, in any event, the American public loves to think of David as
literally sawing the wood.




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Thirty-six_


It was toward the evening of this day of cross-currents in the affairs
of Schuylers, that Henry, shaking down his pot-bellied stove, climbing
out of his seersucker into the gray herring-bone one with the shiny
shoulder-blades, and wrapping a gray wool string of a scarf about his
throat against the chill of the long ride home on the dairy-truck, was
interrupted by a final visitor, old Dr. Dan Kiskadden, who brought him
tidings that made the long, tired brackets around Henry’s mouth cut
grimly deeper.

For forty-five years, the Kiskadden brothers, like their father before
them, had practiced medicine in Centralia. Two months before, Eli, the
younger, had fallen over dead while he was writing a prescription for a
patient in the office he shared at one end of the old red-brick double
dwelling which the Eli and Dan families had occupied since the two
brothers had married the two Dinwiddie sisters at a double wedding that
had gone to make Centralia folk-lore.

“Doctor Dan,” as five counties knew him, had a high comb of thin, black
hair, which lay on top of his otherwise bald head in a fat finger-curl.
On his pipe-like legs, that were too slender and short for the paunch
of his torso, he did sort of a running-walk, his neck darting in and
out after the fashion of a rooster pecking gravel. His voice, completed
the analogy. It rose and fell in hollow clucks, with the dartings of
the neck. A squeaky little voice, emanating shrilly from the bantam
little body.

Sometimes Henry and Doctor Dan passed each other as often as three and
four times a day along High or Sycamore Streets, occasionally drifting
to a standstill for an exchange of local gossip that had to do with
business or politics.

The doctor was usually carrying on dietetic experiments with
guinea-pigs and rats in a laboratory he had rigged up, by courtesy of
the school board, in a small room adjoining the zoölogy laboratory of
Tallahassee High School. Sometimes, on Sunday mornings, Henry walked or
got a lift into town, to pore over the doctor’s charts with him in the
deserted, chalk-smelling school-building.

When Henry was seventeen, Doctor Dan had fought through a close case of
double pneumonia with him. A warm, curiously impersonal friendship had
persisted, although it was only the second or third time Doctor Dan had
ever appeared in his office.

In an age of specialization in medicine, there was something as
antiquated about the general practitioner as a horse-car. In the little
cubby-hole behind his office Doctor Dan still pulverized with his own
mortar and pestle, and measured out physic in an ungraduated glass.
Sometimes, for weeks, his prescription-pad lay untouched.

Their experiments in the fields of biometrics and dietetics had from
time to time brought one or the other of the Kiskadden brothers,
usually Eli, before frequent conventions and in important contributions
to scientific journals. An instrument for determining nerve-heat in
connection with caloritropic observation, called the Kiskadden fork, is
in common use.

But in the main, it was the older generation in Centralia still called
in Doctor Dan. The younger sought out more modern outer-office, with
white trained-nurse attendants and card-index systems. Those who could
afford it journeyed as far as Springfield, Chicago or Rochester for
diagnosis.

Doctor Dan still opened his own office door to the ring of a patient.
He neglected to send bills, except occasionally a mussy one made out by
his wife, when the ex-chequer loomed bare. He answered night bells. He
seldom operated for a pain in the side. He had a range of instruments
along the shelves of a glass case, but usually he preferred to probe
about in that sore throat with the handle of an old silver spoon he
kept lying about his desk. As a rule, but not invariably, he washed
his hands, between patients. His little grandson Denny’s kiddie-car
had a habit of cluttering up his office, and it was not unheard of for
Doctor Dan to commit the ethical breach of ministering to a sick dog
or cat. It was town lore that he had once answered a midnight call for
Harriet, Forbes’s three-legged cat, Timp. Doctor Dan kept no card-index
filing-system and he never inquired deeply into a patient’s history.
Usually he knew it beforehand, or did his best to figure it out for
himself.

He, and particularly his late brother, considered the wave of
vegetarianism sweeping the country as pernicious, in its way, as
the immoderate use of red meat. Rigorously ethical in his practice,
he none the less openly advocated birth-control, and was one of the
first physicians in good standing, in his state, to become actively
affiliated with the movement, and still keep that standing.

Every once in a while, he packed his bag and went off to Rochester to
watch the Mayos operate.

He entered Henry’s office with curt preliminaries.

“See you a minute, Henry?”

“Sit down. Glad to see you, Doc.”

“Henriette Simpson came to my office today after school. Have you seen
her since?”

“No.” A kind of pallor flickered along under the leathery toughness of
Henry’s skin. In streaks, as if it could not all get through. “Nothing
wrong, is there, Doc? She was well as usual when I saw her Saturday.”

“Wrong as wrong. Thought I ought to talk to somebody. Not asking too
much, is it, Henry, but I guess you’re about the first in line. Not a
relative to her name, so far as I know.”

“Right.”

“She’s a pretty sick woman.”

“Seemed all right. Don’t remember ever hearing her complain.”

“Astonishing constitution. Nasty cardiac condition there. Chronic
endocarditis. Enormously enlarged heart. Fluoroscope reveals half the
chest-area covered. Valvular leakage. One of those cases where she can
go any minute, or outlive us all. Seen it happen. Look at old lady
Beattie, up Middleton way. They were writing her burial certificate
twenty years ago, and she’s outlived her grandchildren.”

“You—didn’t tell Henriette of this?”

“No.”

“Right. Right.”

“That’s why I’m here. Told her there was nothing much to worry about,
and I’d drop in to look her over again in a day or so. Nothing to worry
about! There’s damn plenty to worry about.”

“What’s to be done?”

“How’s she fixed?”

“She’s still paying off on that little old house over on Ludlow Street
her father left mortgaged to the hilt. It sucks up her salary like
blotting-paper.”

“She’s got to quit teaching. Every inch of strain on that little body
of hers is to the bad. May outlive us all if she’s handled right. What
you say about her affairs don’t gee-up any too good with the situation,
but there it is.”

“I see ...”

“What ever became of that old friend of the family, ’Liza Simpson, used
to live with them so many years?”

“’Liza’s out in Arizona, Doc, taking care of her brother’s children.
Henriette sends what little she can spare, out there.”

“Nice woman, Henriette is,” said Doctor Dan, and sat with his
bandy-legs dangling, and his eyes, from which all fluids seemed long
since to have been drained, as twisted-looking as water being sucked
through a drain-hole.

“Leave it to me, Dr. Dan. I’ll take the matter in hand.”

“Thought you would. You understand the situation. Care, leisure, ease,
and she can live to be a hundred. Maybe. Maybe not. School-teaching’s
out of the question.”

“I’d rather you didn’t tell her anything until after I drop by
there this evening. And when you see her in the morning, just let
her know enough to see to it that she realizes the care she must
take of herself. I’ll find a way to break the news to her about the
teaching part myself. Telling her the truth would about kill her. Most
independent temperament in the world.”

“Sorry, Henry. Know what a friend—of yours, and of your family’s, she’s
been.”

“We’ll take a hand, Doc. Don’t worry.”

“S’long, Henry.”

“S’long, Doc.”




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Thirty-seven_


For five or six years, at intervals that had grown from semi-occasional
to occasional, tiny black flashes of vertigo had been laying hold of
Henriette. The first appreciable instance was once at a blackboard, as
she was diagraming the genealogy of the Tudor family for a class of
twenty-six girls and boys. Just for a moment, like one of her prankish
boys yanking the plait of the little girl ahead of him, something had
yanked one of Henriette’s breaths. It was something at first too quick,
and too slight, to feel quite sure it had happened. For all the world
like the little girl of the yanked braid turning her startled head.

Then it happened once or twice in church, or at Saturday-morning
teachers’ meeting; and one Saturday, while lunching with Henry at the
Blue Bird, she had been obliged to put down her coffee-cup and grip
the table-edge to hold herself steady, smiling all the while, but
unconscious of one word he was saying.

It was disquieting, but scarcely so disquieting as embarrassing. Her
lean, fibrous body had never, in all the years she had inhabited it, so
much as called attention to the frailties of its flesh. It was one of
Henriette’s rare boasts that she had never in all her life spent a day
in bed, or had so much as a headache.

There was something lean and ascetic and brown and tough about
Henriette’s body at forty-nine. The fibrous body of a woman whose flesh
had never dared to shimmer of those ecstasies that lay sleeping beneath
its surface.

And just as there was something shameful to Henriette about the girls
she passed on High Street, most of whom she knew by name and taught in
school, who permitted their dresses to sag off one bare shoulder and
their young breasts to tremble in outline behind their flimsy blouses,
so there was something shameful in these vertiginous signalings of a
body she had so rigorously held in subordination.

The one being for whom desire could awaken in that prim flesh, had by
the very decorum of all his years of friendship with her, held it so
in abeyance, that at forty-nine, the sight of Henriette to herself,
undressed before her mirror, would have been shock and anathema to her.

Nice Henriette. The chilled niceness of a little tomb.

Vertigo and that irrepressible rise of the nap of her flesh that the
sight and too often the mere thought of Henry could inspire, were
equally to be dismissed and despised.

For five years, Henriette, ashamed of the frailty, contemptuous of it,
unwilling to admit that the attacks were anything more than “nerves,”
had fought the panic of these moments of black suffocation and ignored
their recurrences.

Then one evening, seated at her little table in the tiny living-room
of her frame house on Ludlow Street, correcting examination papers on
fractions, proper and improper, she fainted suddenly down into them.

There was no ignoring it this time, because it so happened that when
Henriette sat down to the table and picked up the first sheet of
foolscap, with “Martin Giles, Grade four E, Class B, Arithmetic,”
written across the top in the monotonous, vertical chirography of
stubby fingers, the small, gilt shepherdess-clock on the mantel was
striking seven, in the bleating little fashion it had. When Henriette
struggled back out of the overwhelming kind of tight blackness that had
flowed over and seemed to drown her, the index finger to her right hand
still lay against Martin’s rather dreary conclusion and 3½ x 6¼ = 18½,
and the shepherdess-clock on the mantel was now pointing to twenty-two
minutes to eight.

The next day, after school, she paid her visit to Doctor Dan. The
cruel grilling before the fluoroscope had been a harrowing experience.
The baring of her breasts to the stethoscope. The close, personal
questions that made her lips quiver and recede back against dry teeth,
as she tried to answer them. The proddings and the punchings that only
the enormously impersonal procedure of Doctor Dan, whose eyes were
frighteningly attentive, but whose lips kept smiling, made endurable.

It had been a little awful, too, that moment before he called her back
into his office, after she had climbed back into her waist and hooked
the high-necked dickey close about her throat.

Not exactly awful with fear. Suppose, after all, there should turn out
to be something seriously wrong with her. Well, suppose. Henriette had
her God. A precious Presbyterian one. There were Simpsons, notably
her parents, who had been dear to her, gone on to a peace more vast
than anything finite she could hope to find. There were compensations,
even if Doctor Dan’s closely scrutinizing eyes should make findings.
Most of the time Henriette believed in her soul’s immortality. It
behooved her that this be one of those times. There was something about
the loneliness of stalking back into that office, to hear about the
possible death of a life that had not been lived, that made Henriette
need terribly to believe in her soul’s immortality.

But after all, she had stalked back in, and Doctor Dan had only
tilted in his swivel and made a church of his ten fingers and talked
of run-down condition—too close application—general overhauling—and
here she was at home again in her own chromesque sitting-room that
you entered by two short steps straight from the small bricked yard,
feeling a little sheepish after the frightening kind of aloneness of
that moment of waiting until Doctor Dan called her back into his office
after the examination.

Of course she was run down. Mid-year examinations. One of the most
nervous classes of youngsters she had had in years. Must cut down on
her Saturday Morning Club work. Resign from programme-committee. Dinah,
an old family-washerwoman, might be induced to come in once a week for
the general going-over of the little house. Yes, run-down. Doctor Dan
had been clever. Fortunately, it was Friday. She would sleep an hour
later tomorrow, and possibly pass up the Club, although Miriam Chipman
was to read a paper on Leonardo da Vinci she particularly wanted to
hear. Still, it might be a good idea to lie abed until time to meet
Henry at the Blue Bird.

Part of the appalling sense of loneliness, in that moment before her
re-entry into Doctor Dan’s office, had been so complexly interwoven
with Henry. Thoughts that she beat back from coming to life....

On Monday she was to call back at Doctor Dan’s for drops and further
instructions. Run-down. Nothing much to worry about. But served her
right for her absurd assurance, all these years, that her tough, lean
body somehow had exemption from decay.

Well, anyway, it was sweet and normal and cozy to be back home again
after the peep over the precipice into the abyss of loneliness that had
yawned so suddenly at her feet. It left her a little weak and woefully
in need of a cup of tea, which, somehow, she had not quite the energy
to go into the kitchen and brew for herself.

Instead, Henriette just sat in an unwonted kind of idleness in the
small sitting-room that smelled of dried grasses and chalk-powder,
rocking away in a low chair with sawed-off legs, when, by routine,
she should have been washing and peeling her usual two potatoes and
pounding herself a bit of round-steak to lay in the skillet to fry,
or fluffing up a pair of eggs into omelette. She just sat on, while
the twilight began to pour around her, and the footsteps of Henry, who
semi-occasionally of a Friday, stopped by to exchange a word about
Saturday’s plans, drew up at the door.

It was particularly nice to have him come this evening. It was part of
her grateful return to a world of warm normalcy that was safely remote
from the cold-steel curve of instruments and the odor of iodoform and
frightening kind of loneliness that had so suddenly pervaded her heart.
Yes, it was particularly nice to hurry across to light the gas and draw
the shades and drag the stiff-backed rocker with the cane inset that
Henry always occupied in a sitting-forward attitude, closer to the
table.

The dear delight of living, it flashed over her suddenly, was like a
flame, unbreakable, though it bend and double upon itself.

It was good and warm and all right to be opening the door for Henry.
They were always of few words together. She drew out his rocker and
took a bisque wheelbarrow from the mantel, into which he could rap his
pipe from time to time, and placed it on the table beside him. While he
lit up, she lighted a lamp on a small stand in an opposite end of the
room, that had a white china rose-painted shade, and drew up her own
chair primly opposite him.

“Getting right nippy,” she said, narrowing her shoulders.

“Is it? I’ve been thinking, Henriette,” he said.

She hoped he had not trumped up some afternoon excursion for their
tomorrow. It would be difficult to evade it without telling him of
Doctor Dan’s dictum that she take it easy for the next few days. She
would no more have told Henry of the ripple across the face of the
tranquillity of the routine he had learned to expect from her!

“Here’s an article, Henry, I cut out of _The Nation_. It’s right in
line with some of your ideas about the debt-cancellation. Bankers, it
goes on to say, are beginning to realize the idiocy of the Versailles
programme——”

“Nonsense! Neither Democrats nor Republicans will face the fact yet for
a while that the War was a colossal failure——”

“But this article goes on to say that we are asking a country to
mortgage not only itself but its children for two-thirds of a
century—it’s as if we were pledging all the little unborn babies to
give us their note for a war that took place in this world long before
they had ever arrived in it from the land of the unborn.”

“Well, Mr. Mellon and Mr. Hoover know that, and will doubtless let
their European friends know they know it; but no man out to get his
votes is likely to dare talk such commonsense. But all that’s beside
the point. I—I’ve been thinking, Henriette.”

Oh, dear—there _was_ something he must be wanting to do tomorrow!

“Yes?”

“Henriette, something hit me between the eyes today.”

For the moment, she seemed to take him literally, peering forward
anxiously.

“What?”

“A realization.”

“They do hit one—that way—sometimes,” she said, and, for no reason she
could diagnose, began to tremble.

“Life, Henriette, is passing us by.”

“Why, Henry Schuyler, what _are_ you talking about!”

“It’s been my fault. Twenty years of the rather despicable, detached
inertia of a man who thinks so long before he leaps, that by the time
he’s ready, the opportunity to leap has passed him by, that’s me.
Henriette, I hope the opportunity hasn’t really passed me by.”

“Why, Hen-ry Schuyler, what on earth are you talking about? Why, Henry
Schuyler!”

She had to say something. Anything. Because all of a sudden, around
Henriette’s brain was racing and racing the excitement of her lifetime.

“Let’s catch on to what there’s left of life. You and me, Henriette.”

“Why, Hen-ry—I believe you’re proposing to me.”

“I am.”

She looked at him in a little short-of-breath fashion that was to
become, from then on, a mannerism resulting from her ailment, as it
settled, but which made it appear as if life were suddenly too large
and delicious a gulp for her to swallow down easily.

“I think I’m going to giggle, Henry. It’s funny.”

“Let’s make it funnier, Henriette.”

“I never did!” said Henriette, and sat with her bony hands held up
against her breast, and her mouth slightly open with the thirsty-bird
look.

“You never did what?”

The impulse for hilarity was suddenly like a gale in Henriette. She
began to laugh.[61]

“I like to hear you do that, Henriette.”

“Oh, Henry! It is funny!”

“Let’s make it funnier! Marry me!”

“When?”

“What’s the matter with now? Good a time as any. Let’s walk over and
rout out Ed Sykes for a special license and carry it around to the
parsonage.”

She reached out suddenly and caught him by the arm.

“Henry Schuyler, look at me!”

“Yes?”

“Look me in the eye. Who’ve you seen today? Are you being noble?”

“No more so than usual.”

“Nobody’s been telling you I’m run-down or anything? And need a little
rest?”

“If they had, Henriette, I wouldn’t be proposing anything so arduous as
married life.”

“Sure you haven’t been talking to Doctor Dan——”

“Doctor Who?” he said, with a bland prevarication he was never known to
achieve before or after.

The sweet, eager look flowed back into her face.

“They won’t let me teach—married, Henry.”

“Dumb of them,” he said; “but it suits me exactly. My bank-account for
the moment is the shape of a hen’s egg, but we can indulge in the
amiable hallucination that two can live as cheaply as one.”

“I haven’t a thing to wear.”

“Take my coat, if you think it’s going to be damp talking over to the
Sykeses,” he said, and took his flimsy top-coat off a peg.

Her own was hanging on the same peg beside the door, but she slid into
his.

“Come.”

“Coming.”


FOOTNOTES:

[61] ... I do not pretend to be adept at the psychology of human
beings, but to even the most astute it must have been obvious that
in the sunshine of her happiness with my brother Henriette Simpson’s
personality blossomed out into something almost unrecognizable from
the Henriette we had known before. All her self-assurance, her prim
restraint, her inhibited, timid little ways dissolved. She basked
frankly and even a little lazily in the warmth of her new estate. She
delivered herself up to the luxury of permitting her husband to wait
upon her. She became a purring, pussy sort of little person, glorying
in the relaxation of her happiness.

My daughter Paula always used to say that mirth was born in Henriette
the day of her wedding. For a positive fact, it did seem to all of us
that there rippled through her, dating from that time, a stream of
good-humored and irreverent levity that was to amaze and delight Henry
for the remainder of what was to be their singularly happy and by no
means brief life together.




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Thirty-eight_


And so they were married.[62]


FOOTNOTES:

[62] ... that evening, when I arrived home from having supper with
Steve and Claire, who were both in a great state of excitement over
my son’s impending aeroplane venture which Henry and David had just
made possible, I was met at the door by Winslow with the overwhelming
news that Father had just telephoned out that Henry and Henriette had
been married. And indeed you must add, lived happy ever after. With a
chivalry that almost passeth the telling, and at a time when under the
conditions, it almost amounted to foolhardiness, my brother took over
what had hitherto been the prim little life of Henriette Simpson. While
she was never again to be robust, and all the remainder of her life
was to be subject to fainting-spells, against which my brother was on
constant guard, she was destined to outlive many of those of her own
generation about her.

For four years subsequent to their marriage, they remained in the home
of my parents, the Igrotte place, which has since burned to the ground.

After the death of my parents, my brother and his wife spent the
greater part of each year in Washington, where they had an apartment in
H Street.

It was in this apartment that my sister-in-law Henrietta died of a
singular and distressing accident.

Leaning out of the thirty-ninth-story window of the fine building in
H Street, Level II, one morning, to wave my brother au-revoir, as was
her invariable habit, she turned in the window-frame to look up at him,
as his little two-passenger aeroplane slid from the hangar atop the
building, just as the heavy window-sash gave way and fell across her
chest, killing her instantly.




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Thirty-nine_


Thanksgiving again. A decade and a half since a sheepish-faced Old
Gentleman had faced the bombardment of eyes most immediately concerned
with the impending event of another Schuyler about to be born.

There were Schuylers assembled again about the board of the Old
Gentleman. This time, a far more meager board in the sagging old
house set into a patch of scrubby farm-land that was all shot with
rock-stratifications which every so often came to the surface suddenly
in sparkling little micaceous platforms.

The latter years of her life were to witness a recrudescence of power
in Mathilda that amazed her children and husband even while it dismayed.

She continued to outdo in menial labor any hired-hand that came to
the place. As her face paled and shriveled and certain diabetic
tendencies began to manifest themselves, the iron power of her hands—at
scrub-and-rub over a washtub, at churning, at lugging, at beating rugs,
which she flung single-handed across a sill, at red-washing the brick
walk that led from the kitchen, at calcimining hen-houses, sawing,
smoking hams, salting pork, rendering geese, even to cooking lye in
vats for its use about the barns—seemed to mount with the years, rather
than decline.[63]

It kept her full of miseries that asserted themselves in backaches
and swollen joints and the effects of chilblains which shriveled her
valiant face into knots of pain for winter months on end. But there was
no restraining the stern flagellation of toil that Mathilda had imposed
upon herself, even back in the days when prosperity sat upon her house.
Her hands and face were horny with it. In an age when grandmothers had
silhouettes and stalked on tall heels, Mathilda was as gray as a moth.
A moth with shriveled wings.

Strangely enough, in a way her children hoarded this horny-handed
grayness of hers and the faded little streaks of her hair only barely
covering the scalp, the corded hands and neck, the furiously wrinkled
eyelids, like dried leaves, and the pointed basques she wore all inset
with whalebones.

“Thank goodness, Mother has had the sense to grow old honestly,” was
one of Bek’s frequent explosions. “If Mother looked like some of the
freak old women one sees around, with their puttied-up faces and their
diddering about all over the place with swollen ankles that sag down
over their French heels, well, I—well, I just don’t know _what_ I’d do.”

“Mother’s got too much sense to make a caricature of herself,” was
Phil’s invariable contribution.

“Why, I just wouldn’t feel like I had a mother if I had to fumble
around for an unpainted spot to lay a kiss on, the way the Whittier
girls do their mother,” trebled sweet Emma.

“I wouldn’t change her for fifty thousand of the green coupons it
takes to get a covered vegetable-dish,” was the caliber of the Old
Gentleman’s summing it up. Pleasantries like that hit Mathilda right
across her hungry heart. He could be so outrageously inconsiderate of
her in the trifles. He could have kissed her small, tired feet, out of
reverence for her, and yet the slightest compliment he ever paid her
was a mocking one, in the key of the covered vegetable-dish.

She regarded him unsmilingly most of the time, sitting mute and
unamused at his effulgences.

There was something of a fierce, lean look of hunger in Mathilda’s eyes
when she regarded her husband. She adored him. She wanted his caresses.
Instead, he gave her persiflage, of this variety, and always in the
hearing of others, which cut her even more.

She wanted something else, and the Old Gentleman, who gave so freely,
and who would have cut off his right hand rather than hurt her, went on
hurting her and did not know.

Forty years of being hurt and feeling herself on the rim of the life
of a man by nature more intense, more gregarious, more boisterously
alive than she, had taken any semblance of smile out of Mathilda. She
regarded her husband, her children, her grandchildren, with solemn,
worshiping, terribly concerned eyes. Concern for her husband’s loose,
easy ways with what sparse moneys came his way and which he brought
to her, except when someone intercepted him first, and placed in her
hands like a child. Money she used with frugality and wisdom. Concerns
of this sort kept Mathilda’s face a little stern. Concern for a
grandchild’s first tooth, a daughter-in-law’s watery damson-preserves,
Bek’s astonishing deal with the Governor, the incredible happening of
the bringing-home of Henriette Simpson, a bride.[64]

Except for the eighteen-pound turkey gobbler, a basket of grapefruit
and oranges which Phil and Rita had brought down from Springfield,
Emma’s usual offering of five pounds of hard candies from the St. Louis
Busy Bee, and Claire’s candied apples for the children, every dish of
that Thanksgiving-dinner-to-eighteen, had been personally prepared by
Mathilda.

There were two tables rigged up in the dining-room, another one in the
kitchen, and the sewing-table spread in the hall for Rita’s youngest
two children and Clara’s twelve-year-old, whom she had brought from
St. Louis this time. Even then, neither Bek nor Claire nor Rita nor
Mathilda sat down.

Henriette, with high red spots in her lean cheeks and a blue-checked
apron on over her spotted-silk foulard (net dickey out!), was eager
to join the brigade of the serving women. But the family, all of them
aware of what she was unaware, would have none of it. After all, in a
way, it was her day, only the seventh after her marriage. And Henry,
who was already displaying what were to be, with him, chronic symptoms
of concern at tiring her, forced her down into a chair beside the Old
Gentleman, who took immediately to serving her with enormous helpings
that overwhelmed and indeed defeated the prim appetite of one long
accustomed to preparing her own solitary snack-like meals, and then
sitting down to table for the lusterless business of dining alone.

And yet, to Mathilda, who drank her mug of felicitous cider to
Henriette and Henry, the most outstanding figure of all that
Thanksgiving day was the figure of Dave, there among the in-laws
and the cousins, the nieces, the nephews, and the aunts; grave and
courteous, in the solemn, detached way he had.

There was a lead pendulum to the beat of Mathilda’s heart. David, light
of her wintry years—boy who had come to her long after she had ceased
to smile, and could only dote silently—boy, who was so strangely,
doubly dear with the dual preciousness of child and grandchild.
To have begot a child again, after the climactic birth-throes of
grandchildren—there was in that something beyond the telling. Not
one of her big women daughters, who had borne and borne again, could
quite sense that. And what was further beyond the telling, indeed
almost beyond the admitting even to herself, was her sense of failure
toward David. Her secret fear that she had been a wintry, distant
mother to him, full of a sense of embarrassment toward him, the same
embarrassment that had flooded her face at another Thanksgiving years
before.

He had grown up around her tired old knees. The forest of the knees of
the grown-ups. And of all the grown ups, Mathilda had been the most
timid with, and of, him. Sometimes a fierce flame of jealous anger
flared in Mathilda toward the Old Gentleman. His ability to synchronize
with youth. To lean out of years that had never got him in their
clutch. Life was not the serious business to the Old Gentleman that it
was to Mathilda. Never had been. He was on back-slapping terms with
it. It was to his father that Dave brought a joyous and adoring kind
of irreverence that Mathilda coveted, in place of the timid kind of
tenderness he had for her.

The Old Gentleman and Bek and Henry had somehow, each in a special way,
got better acquainted with her boy.

And now, scarcely had she become accustomed to this late visitor into a
household that had turned a lean shoulder to him almost from the very
year of his birth, than here he was, like all the rest, turning his
young face outward and away. Almost before she had begun to know him;
begun to dare to know this boy, to whom books and long silences and
heavy chores had been the order of his days.

In the same pale, secret way that she had endured the somehow less
poignant passing of Phil and Clara, Emma and Bek from the nest of her
household, so now must she endure the going of the last of them.

This last of them, who had been born so curiously into two worlds. One
foot, as it were, straddling a pre-war and strangely remote universe,
the other on a soil that was forever to remain strange to Mathilda. A
mad, horrid, fascinating kind of world. A world thumbing its nose at
most of the things Mathilda held dear.

David was going out now into it. In a half-dozen ways, he had been
the least assertive of her children. Denied practically all of the
advantages of the nicely-moderate wealth her others had enjoyed, there
was something about his acceptance of the lean, menial days of his
youth that could grip Mathilda by the tonsils any time she dared to let
her mind dwell upon it.

How denied he had been. Denied even the warm, full breasts at which her
other children had suckled. The founts of her being had been dry and
runty to the pulling lips of the infant Dave.

He had been her only bottle-babe.

It had cost her secret shame before her husband and family every time
she had inserted the viscid rubber nipple of a milk-bottle between his
lips. He had not demurred, but had taken even his weaning gratefully.
That was Dave all over for you. Had not demurred, but had drunk
gratefully.

Then the long, arid days of pasturing, when her other children had
enjoyed the advantages of the Centralia schools.

Squalid, pinched boyhood, spent mostly at such past-times as the flat
of his back over Henry’s books, or dickering about over his ant-hills,
or whooping at the game of Indian-in-the-corn, in a mangy little suit
left over from Stevey, or exploring the Pacific Ocean from the top of a
knoll in the cow-patch that overlooked the dry, cracked bed of an old
duck-pond.

Many an afternoon, gazing from her window, Mathilda had watched him
climb, while his handful of sheep grazed, to the mock eminence of
the knoll, and there peer with much magniloquence of gesture, and
occasionally with an old, lensless pair of Henry’s field-glasses, out
over the Pacific of the duck-pond.

She had never known its exact meaning, except that it was one of the
toyless games of her lonely and deprived youngest.

All the others seemed to understand better. Henry. Bek. Even Phil, to
whom he was now going, would get to know him better. _She_ wanted to
know him better. That way. It was to her that he turned with tenderness
that was like the laying-on of hands. A diminished-seventh of a
difference in his voice. A little bitterly, Mathilda did not want that
diminished-seventh. With his father, he was a play-boy, wary alike of
the Old Gentleman’s digging humor and the stern old eye of rebuke. To
Bek, the boy turned for the swift sure quality of her understanding;
and with Henry, this boy of hers was a new boy. Hero worshipper.
Climber of mountains. Balboa overlooking the Pacific of his duck-pond.
Star-struck with the swimming beauty of planets and the red lamp of
Antares. Gripped by the communism of ants. Led by this older brother of
the strange wisdoms and the half-smile, into intellectual tourney and
jousts long before he knew that they were that.

It was, of course, priceless to have his tenderness. Perhaps, after
all, it would have been her choice of the gifts he had to bestow. But,
cruel paradox, it nevertheless kept in her heart, ache over David. Ache
over what he was to her and over what she could never be to him. There
was no time. Her life was too well burned along the wick. And now he
was going....

Life was a pecking jackdaw, after her precious morsel.

Dora Tarkington was a pecking little jackdaw after her precious morsel.
Mathilda knew! Well, so had she known long before Bek and Phil and
Emma and Clara had quite seemed to know these sorts of things for
themselves.

Mathilda had known this from the days when, beside her back window of
the spacious house on Sycamore Street, she could see David shinny his
way through the hole in the hedge.

In all the years of his very young boyhood, during the months and whole
winters that he had never so much as clapped eyes upon Dora, Mathilda
had known. She knew it now on the eve of his going-away. She knew it
bitterly, jealously, longingly, lovingly.

Mathilda loved Dora where Davey was not concerned. But as one of the
daws at the precious morsel of her boy, she dreaded her jealously.[65]

All through the whirl of that crowded Thanksgiving in the quarters that
were so woefully too small; all through the national performance of
the dishing-up the mucilaginous miscellany of stuffed gobbler; jellied
cranberries; candied sweet-potatoes; creamed cauliflower; hot biscuit;
strained honey; pumpkin, lemon-meringue, and Boston cream-pie; candied
apples; crystallized ginger quince-preserves; nut-fudge, and cider—the
eyes Mathilda were like scars.

“Blessed are the meek in spirit,” intoned the Old Gentleman, from a
tome with all of Mathilda’s multi-colored ribbon book-marks dangling
from the end. “For they shall inherit the earth.”

“For they shall inherit the earth,” mumbled Mathilda and the comings
and goings of her big-shouldered daughters, eager to unburden her frail
hands, began again.

  “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness; for
  they shall be filled.

  “—Sing unto the Lord with Thanksgiving. Sing praises upon the harp
  unto our God.”

Thank God for Henry! Years of the unreasoning jealousy, born of
possessive instinct, that had rankled against Henriette, were
dissipated already. It was good that Henry should have taken to himself
Henriette as wife. It was right and it was good, and the heart of
Mathilda, that had been sore, was rich with an honest gratitude that
was fitting unto the day.

Thank God for Henrietta to round out the wise thoughtful years of this
strangely practical, absolutely improvident eldest child of hers.

Thank God for the vigor and the grandeur of Bel and the plodding energy
of Phil and good Clara of sweet Emma. Thank God for the radiance of
grand children and great-grandchildren. Thank God even for Leslie,
whom Bek had somehow managed to keep in the sweetness and the light of
childhood, until God had taken him back.

Thank God for the flesh of her flesh that crowded this Igrotte house
that day.

Thank God for the man with whom she shared all this living, vigorous
splendor. Thank God for the vigorous, living splendor of the Old
Gentleman himself, whose sense of duty was drawn along his mouth,
making it straight as a bolt, and whose sense of humor shimmered in his
eyes and made them like hospitable windows inviting the intruder to
ignore the bolt and climb the sill.

Thank God—even—for Davey—going away. Thank God, of course, for vesting
him with vigorous manhood, the pale, square face, the clear and seeing
and sometimes too brilliant eyes. But the Old Gentleman’s mouth of
restraint was Dave’s, too. Thank God for that. The time had come—Thank
God, of course, for this man-child about to flutter from the sparse,
old unfeathered nest. Thank God—of course—ah, yes—Thank God——

It seemed to Mathilda, glancing up over her mumbling lips three or four
times as he read the blessing at table, that Thanksgiving Day, that the
Old Gentleman’s voice might give out.

It must have seemed that way to Henry, too, who shoved him a glass of
water.


FOOTNOTES:

[63] ... for a wiry kind of power of endurance, I have never known
Mother’s equal. The least-robust member of all her husky family, it
seemed to us as if, at sixty, her capacity for hard work had reached
its peak. Remonstrate as we would, Mother began her day somewhere
between four and five of the sleetiest, bitterest mornings. It was the
only subject upon which I ever knew Father to be ugly with her. It
angered and dismayed and humiliated him, as it did us all, for that
matter.

Perhaps if Mother had taken better care of herself, she might have
lived to even a riper old age. And yet, who knows but what the very
rigors to which she subjected herself, were not the secret of her
endurance. Thank God again and again that she at least lived to see the
first of the great days for us that were to be followed by one epochal
event after another.

[64] Coming into the home of my parents as she (Henriette) did, on
the eve of Dave’s departure for Springfield, was nothing short of a
blessing for Mother. From the first, Henriette fitted herself helpfully
and synthetically into the life of the Igrotte farm. Mother was by
no means easy to live around that winter. While you might never have
guessed it from any outward demonstration, indeed, I doubt if she
guessed it herself, my mother’s dependence upon Dave, what with all
of us in homes of our own with interests of our own, was perhaps the
motivating force of her whole existence. It was Henriette, I feel so
sure, who saved her that winter from the throes of a nervous breakdown.
I remember Father coming over one blustery winter evening, when he
should never have ventured out, and begging me with ill-concealed tears
in his bewildered old eyes to try and coax Mother to consent to a visit
from Doctor Dan. As a matter of fact, all of us knew, Dave most of
all, whose letters came to her regularly as clockwork, that what ailed
Mother was heartache for Dave, who had never been absent from her side
more than an overnight, in all his life.

[65] ... nor was Dave an exception. Mother reacted toward Dora, even
back in her childhood, precisely as she had reacted to all of her
“in-laws,” Sam, Rita, and Winslow. A dear, darling kind of jealousy of
these pirate persons who came to carry off her children. There came
a time, of course, when Mother would laughingly relate all this to
Dora. Her jealousy of the little girl in pigtails, even back in the
days when she had watched the squirmy form of her son, his blue-denim
trousers-seats usually patched, wriggling through the hedge. Her
prophetic awareness of these two, long before the boy and the girl had
yet come into their rapture! I always say of Mother, she knew about
Winslow and me before I had ever even clapped eyes on him. Oh, my dear
Mother, sometimes, when I think back, it seems I must tear away this
veil that divides you in your hereafter from me, and make up to you in
sweetness what I fear me I may have failed in during your life....




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Forty_


The impending event of conclave shone in the Old Gentleman’s eyes all
through the hours of serving, of eating, of the rushing of the women
hither and thither of the tilting of the pitchers of cider, the ladling
of the gravy and the vegetable-dishes, of the high, querulous voices of
the children, grand and great-grand; through Mathilda’s fluty voice,
importuning her young, her very young, and her middle-aged to partake
more freely, or not too freely, of the bounty she quivered and fussed
and rushed to place before them. Platters, held high to avoid spill and
collision, clicked with narrowness of escape. Rose the rich, hot smells
of winter foods that had simmered in their juices. The spice of cider.
The flicker of blue flame across the dome of suet-pudding. The popping
of the toy balloons that Winslow had ordered Bek to order by catalogue.
And through all this charivari of the Schuylers, the Old Gentleman, his
grandchildren from time to time crawling over his legs and matting up
his beard, looked out upon the scene and waited. Waited while he joked
with his daughters, rebuked, dandled, teased the youngsters, put out a
sly foot to trip his Bek, as she slid her large frame into the narrows
gauge between tables to remove plates.

“Father, that’s just terrible to do a crude thing like that! Bek might
have fallen. Besides, I don’t think it’s a bit funny to do before the
children either,” remonstrated sweet Emma in her treble.

“Aunt Emma is mad at great-grandpa,” said the Old Gentleman, mushing
his lips against the soft, yellow hair of Steve’s eldest little girl.

“Puppa,” quavered Mathilda faintly, “a little dignity before the
children, please!”

“Dignity comes cheap. Cigar-store Indians have it.”

“Well, we won’t argue it, Father,” said Bek, “only please don’t trip
up your stout, middle-aged daughters as they try to serve you candied
yams. It just isn’t done.”

He leaned back in his chair to regard her, his sly old face
foreshortened and his eyes creased into a sucking swirl of wrinkles.

“My daughter’s been a good son to me.”

Almost without precedent for her, she leaned over and pecked a kiss on
the wrinkled old mat of a face.

“Not one of us is good enough, Father! Hadn’t you better clear out the
youngsters? They’re getting restless.”

It was then that the Old Gentleman brought down his fist as if it were
a gavel.

“Clear out the children and close those folding-doors. Dave, sit over
here.”

Conclave was on. Not a Schuyler but knew the call. A Schuyler about to
be born. About to be praised. About to be rebuked. About to be reminded
that the stern ideals of the House were the stern ideals of the Mosaic
Law. Commandments. To be written on the tablet of the heart. A humble
house, but one that already had plunged root deeply and proudly into
three generations of the soil. The same soil that had first fostered
the Old Gentleman with the straight bolt of duty for a mouth, and
the pallid Mathilda, whose eyes were no less steadfast than the
straightness of that mouth.

Bek bundled off the last of the grandchildren.

Finally, the doors closed, the shades drawn, the ugly little Igrotte
dining-room cleared of the extra table and jammed with the Schuyler
faces, every member of the family knew, without the first word having
been spoken: that this wasn’t really Henriette’s and Henry’s day at all.

This was David’s conclave.

He sat on the arm of Henry’s chair, a lank fellow of square, white
face that flickered behind his spectacles with a nervous batting
of his eyes; and, above the soft blue collar of the adult shirts
he was beginning to inherit from the well-worn stock of Henry, his
Adam’s-apple rode like a buoy.

By now, there was a marked Schuyler-cast to his face. The something
in the bone-structure of it that made it four-cornered. Cheek-bones
strictly vertical above jawbones. Brow that was set across with the
perfectly horizontal adjustment of a key pediment.

The Old Gentleman and most of his offspring—with the exception of
Steve’s little boy, who was Mathilda all over again, and Emma, who was
like a big, flowering Viking out of nowhere—had that rectangular type
of face.

A great-grandfather, named Hans Milton Schuyler, who had been his own
plow-ox on a Swiss farm sixty-eight years before, had been known as
far as Engeborg and as wide as Saalsberg, as “Breitgesicht,” which in
Swiss means “square-face.” It was just about now that David, ceasing
to gangle his way upward into greater height, was to begin to settle
tightly into the squat hewn and thewed look of face and figure that
was to make him even more susceptible to cartoon and caricature than
Roosevelt.[66]

He might easily have been the son of Henry, as he sat there on the
arm of his chair, dangling a long, loose leg and batting his nervous
eyelids under the circling buckshot of Schuyler eyes that were slowly
swinging into tribal circle.

Conclave was on, and it was characteristic of the Old Gentleman not to
bandy words.

“Dave, come here!”

His mother flung up a protesting flutter of hand against her throat, as
if a pain had smote her.

The boy strode immediately beside his father, the dignity of his swift,
sure obedience blurred a bit by the batting eyelids and that violent
thing, his Adam’s-apple, beating relentlessly against his collar.

“Phil,” said the Old Gentleman, taking his youngest’s hand and swinging
his quizzical old head round to where sat his rotund second son,
“Dave’s made up his mind to go to Springfield.”

“That’s all right with us, Father. Isn’t it, Rita?”

“Indeed it is, Father Schuyler.”

Rita, who always wore large, pink pearls in her ears and against her
soft and fat white neck, had an invariable gesture of seeming to
protect the beads against the tugs of her youngest child. She was a
soft, voluble little person, prematurely gone fat, given to a certain
amount of self-pity but outstandingly generous in her sympathies
toward others. The too-ready tear, the too-ready laugh, hung on the
brink of Rita’s eye and lip. All her life, small partridge of a person
that she was, she was destined to be interrupted in the middle of a
sentence. They came so volubly. In such quick succession. So sure-fire
commonplace. Even her children had a way of chopping her off along
about the middle of the predicate.

“As I always say to Phil, we haven’t got much but, what we have got is
...”

“I think Dave has made a pretty good decision, Father. Maybe you
wouldn’t judge so from my present performance, but what I said to him a
year ago, holds today. Springfield hasn’t licked me yet by a long shot.
It’s a live town for a live fellow.”

“St. Louis is a good town,” interposed Clara into this concatenation of
family-events. “If Sam had only had the gumption when he was a younger
man! Why, most of the men in the big wholesale-shoe crowd on Washington
Avenue started in as city-salesmen!”

Years of bitterness on this subject had worn down Clara’s voice to a
whine when she broached it. St. Louis, which she chose to denounce upon
every occasion as a city which had throttled her dreams and initiated
her into the scrimped existence of the wife of a city-salesman, had
long since shed its first years of strangeness to her. Now, after
eighteen years, it was secretly near and dear to her. But she still
nagged persistently to Sam, that life there, so remote from her home
and parents, was a meager and thankless affair.

As a matter of fact, at the close of the first few days of her annual
visits home, an actual nostalgia for the scenes and friends of the
city of her constant denunciations began to set in. Her eldest
daughter was already a prize pupil in the third grade of the St. Louis
public schools and Sam practically a pillar, by now, of the Second
Presbyterian Church. They shared the upper floor of a “St. Louis flat”
with a family who owned a Buick sedan and was generous with it. Clara
herself belonged to a sewing, a bridge, and a window-garden club, and
was beginning to enjoy contacts with the wives of men who were in
business for themselves.

Clara’s Mecca. Business for themselves! Sometimes to Sam, who was a
steady, plodding man of modest desires, that phrase could close like a
tomb around his contentment. “Business for himself.” That phrase was a
din in his ears.

“I’m a great believer that the boy who starts out in life with his eye
on getting himself into business for himself as soon as possible, is
the one who will escape the rut.”

Clara’s relationship to David was something as baffling to her as it
was abstruse. Eight years after her marriage to Sam and her subsequent
removal to St. Louis, David had been born.

He was a perpetual shock to her on her return visits. For the life of
her, she could not associate him with her girlhood background.

Her own children were full of curious questions about him that she
could not quite answer. It smote her one middle-of-the-night that he
would be great uncle to her first grandchild, and she wakened the
snoring Sam at her side to put the fantastical idea before him.

It is doubtful, if in all, Clara and Dave had ever exchanged an hour’s
talk, and that never sustained beyond the casual. And yet here he was,
this remote brother of hers, who might have been son, needing something
she felt it part of her tribal responsibility to be able to give him,
and feeling somehow, a smoldering anger against the absent Sam.

“If only Sam were in business for himself, instead of a man on a small
salary, Dave could come to us and learn the wholesale shoe-trade. Sam
says St. Louis is the coming shoe-center of the—whole world!”

“Know what I was thinking the other night, Henry? S’pose you double
the grazing-area of this country by raising reindeer in Alaska. Well,
double the grazing area and see how it affects the leather-industry——”

“Well, I don’t know anything about that, but I do know that if Sam had
been the man to push himself——”

“Your point is well taken, boy,” said Henry, and the large, slow smile
began to shoot in wrinkles from his eye-corners—“well taken, but out of
order, I should say.”

With a sensitiveness to the slightest rebuke or poke of fun from Henry
that was never to leave him, the sides of David’s head seemed to
lighten suddenly with the flash of two pink ears, and a flooding flush
of embarrassment ran down into the soft, blue, attached collar of a
shirt that had already served Henry and served him well.

“It just kinda came to me, all of a sudden, is all I meant.”

“That’s exactly Dave’s difficulty,” said Bek, her eyes, that always
flowed beneficence for him, full of a mock despair. “I’m sure that
right now he’s standing there trying to decide at the last minute
whether he’s starting out to be an astronomer, a taxidermist, or a——”

“God forbid!”

“A policeman, a Senator, a veterinary, a bank teller, a sheep-herder,
an explorer, a wholesale shoe-merchant, a doctor, a lawyer, a merchant,
a chief, or a——”

“Many the good veterinarian that has been sacrificed to the United
States Senate.”

“Hennery!”

“Well, we don’t need any veterinarians in the family.”

“Better in the family, Bek, than in the Senate!”

“Nonsense, a veterinarian in the Senate is worth two in the family.”

“What’s all this talk about a vegetarian in the family?”

“A veterinarian, Father!”

“What’s the difference, they are both for letting the animal live,
aren’t they?”

Paula, who outside of her teaching had started a batik,
painted-shoe-trees, character-doll, telephone-doll, hot-muffin, jasmine
teas, book-ends, art-smock, and candied-praline shop in Cleveland,
in partnership with a teacher in night school (who had advanced the
initial two hundred dollars), leaned over to her brother Steve.

“Isn’t the darling priceless? I could get him big time in vaudeville.”

“Or Sing Sing,” laughed Steve and laid a friendly and conservative
wallop across his grandfather’s shoulders.

“At my age,” said the Old Gentleman, “I don’t expect big time any more.
In Sing Sing, or out of it.”

“Puppa!”

“Guess, Mother, why my life is like a tail.”

“Puppa!”

“Because it’s all behind me. Sometimes I think it’s ahead of Davey, but
like a tail, too, and one that he’s trying to put salt on.”

“Father—don’t tease!”

“But, Father—my mind’s made up for sure—this time!”

“That’s a fact, Father, all joking aside. Dave’s been over this thing
with me same as he has with you. That’s the hurry idea of putting it
up to Phil and Rita now. Dave’s missed three weeks of the evening
law-session down Springfield now, as I understand. Dave’s come through
about this present plan on his own voluntary decision. Isn’t that about
it, Dave?” said Henry, fixing on him the eye of an ally.

“That’s it, Father,” said Dave, on a gulp, and looking around at
the fortress of friendly faces, began to bat his eyes. “Not much to
herding—is there—for a fellow like me——”

“There’s not much to herding except to a fellow that was born to be a
herder.”

“Be surprised, though, Father—fellow learns a lot about how ants and
sheep and butterflies and chipmunks and field-mice and skunks manage
their world.”

“Skunks,” said Phil, “that’s a mighty helpful part of a fellow’s
education!”

“Mebbe, if it helps you recognize a human skunk when you meet one. The
world’s full of them without the smell.”

“Puppa!”

“Yea, and watching butterflies—they’ll get you pretty far, Kid, in the
world you happen to be born into. Try concentrating on cream-separators
or garbage-incinerators. They’ll get you further.”

“Oh, Phil,” cried Rita, with a ripple across a face that was seldom
marred by petulance. “What’s funny in that? Can’t you let the boy
alone?”

“I knew a fellow once, up St. Louis way,” said the Old Gentleman,
“made a fortune out of some sort of a dredging-machine. Got the idea
from lying on his back in the park zoo Sunday afternoons, watching the
rhinoceros dig himself out of some Missouri mud they’d spilt in his
tank.”

“Dave’s got more information,” said Henry, “up there in that kinda
blockhead of his, than you’d think, offhand, Phil.”

“Don’t I know it? Can’t anybody around here stand a little kidding?”

“Cut it out, Henry. I don’t need anybody tooting my horn.”

“You see, Phil, the boy’s idea in going to Springfield is a sound one.”

“Sure it is. I’ve been after him to come to us for a year. Springfield
is a live town, and a boy in a wholesale grocery-firm can work his way
either in or out of it.”

“Exactly, and as Dave has figured it out, what with your offer to roof
him, it’s as good a place as any, and maybe a little better, to—get his
start in.”

“Better, I’ll say!”

“Exactly. To get himself a law-education evenings and at the same time
scrape together his meal-ticket on a daytime job. That about it, Dave?”

“Yes,” said David, and stood up suddenly with a click of his muddy
heels, in the attitude that was to be so characteristic of him on
rostrum and lecture-platform. A rather defiant, inelegant throwback
of figure, elbows hugging his sides, head tilted, and his legs in the
attitude of a trained runner about to swing into motion.[67]

“You see, Father, I’m no good at inventing or engineering or exploring
or any of those things that some fellows have done to move the world
along. But Henry and I know that as sure as we’re standing here, the
time is coming when aeroplanes are going dipping around the world
just as plentiful as trains. No man-control at all, but operated
by wireless. Well, that’s the way I feel about a job. I’m no good
at inventing the wireless, but if I could get a job where I’m the
wireless-apparatus itself ... that’s where I’d come in.”

“Times are better for a young fellow now than they were when I first
went to Springfield,” said Phil, with sagging, disappointed lines
springing about his mouth. “It’s the age of nerve and it’s the young
have the most of it. Take the building-trade in my town. I took my
plunge just ten years too soon.”

“I think I’d like the building-business, Phil! You know what? Henry, I
was thinking. Take the lay-out of towns today. The whole system has got
to change in the next twenty years. People ten miles out won’t be in
the suburbs any more. They’ll be ten minutes by plane from....”

“The building-business, eh? Well, how would you like to go
into the automobile, Oriental-rug, the ladies’-wear, the
coffin-manufacturing, the vacuum-cleaner, the banking, the baking, or
the breeding-of-tadpoles business? Or would you compromise on taking a
twelve-dollar-a-week job licking stamps for a fellow named Ox White,
whose got a _mail_-order business, selling radios?”

“I’d like that fine, Phil! Funny thing, but I was thinking to myself
last night in bed, know something that will save a lot of time and
money for the Government? Get before them, so they see what you’re
talking about, the idea of the further development of the C.O.D.
mail-delivery and it’s going to revolutionize——”

“Save it, or try it out on Ox. He’s a great one for ideas and cigar
coupons!”

“Phil!” called Rita, and looked with her sweet eyes at Dave, as if she
could cry for him.

“Oh, let me alone, can’t you, Rita? The kid’s got to get practical
sooner or later, doesn’t he?”

“Oh, I know what I’m up against, all right.”

“I wonder!” said Bek. “I wonder!”

“He’s never had advantages like my other children,” suddenly bleated
Mathilda, coming up behind the chair of her youngest. She was like a
wraith of hunger, of yearning, and of torment of self-indictment. “He’s
had just scraps all his life.”

“Nonsense, Mother!” said Henry, frowning. “What the rest of us had in
advantages, he’s made up for in his way, and don’t you forget it! The
boy’s all there—a little nutty on the speed-age, it’s true, without
ever asking himself where all this speed is going to take us!”

“But, Henry, you’re the one who sees it as much as I do. More!”

“What if I do? Whither, is what I’m asking—now that we’ve got it, what
are we going to do with it?”

“Davey!” There was his mother’s hand on his shoulder again. It was
light as a leaf. It was lighter. It was as veined and as palsied as if
a wind were trembling it. It made him want to cry. The lightness, the
timidity and the fact that even with its frailty, its callous places
hooked onto the nap of his coat. How doggedly and persistently, ever
since he had known those small, claw-like hands, they had poured out
twice the strength of which they seemed capable.

Her children like to tell of her, a little wistfully and a little
humorously, how she had once lugged a kicking calf who had poked his
luckless head into a hornet’s nest, moaning and plunging, the two miles
from the ravine where she found it, back to the Igrotte house, where
she deposited it in the barn and fainted.

The odor of lye and soft soap hung chillily about Mathilda. Every
day that Davey had ever known her, the gray wisp of her figure had
lumbered through the dawns, bent at some chore too heavy for her.
The bluish smoke of frying foods enveloped this sudden heart-hurting
procession of his memories of her, as her hand lay like a flake upon
his shoulder. She was forever at doing things that curved her thin back
into a hook. Winding a windlass to raise a bucket of water. Stooping
to draw her pans of well-risen bread out of the oven. Sweeping out a
hen-roost, her head wrapped in the blue bandanna kerchief that hung
behind the kitchen door, waiting for her.

The bandages she had wound! Not only around Davey, but around the
quinsy sore throats, the cut fingers, the twisted ankles of farm-hand,
neighbor, man, woman, and child. The liniment she had rubbed! The
ducklings, the bulls, the rams, the ewes, the kittens, the colts, the
calves, the chickens, she had ministered to, moving through the soft or
freezing dawns, as the case might be, barn and barnyard flickering to
the swinging of her lantern.

Once, when Dave was eight and had a diphtheritic sore throat, and
hoof-and-mouth disease was among the cattle, and a cow with calf was
giving dangerous and premature birth, she had fluctuated, the night
through, between helping the Old Gentleman in the barn, returning
to the house every so often to strip off her clothing for garments
that had not been exposed to the cattle; then to the swabbing of
David’s throat and back into the gray slip of a cotton dress with the
blood-spots on it; out once more into a blackness that seemed to cut
her in two as it struck her on the walk from the kitchen across the
chicken-yard to the low, red building that was filled with the sobbing
of a cow in labor.

There was no attitude of a human being in toil or fatigue that
all through his life was not to suggest to David, his mother. A
figure lugging a pail of water across a field as his train sped by.
A sway-back woman with her arms filled. A head lolling on tired
shoulders. A pair of knotted hands that, in repose, were stiff and
ill-at-ease looking.

How frequently she went about her service, drawing on the secret spring
of her strength, her large, milky eyes tired, yet full of the strange
exultation of self-torture.

The way she pressed food upon her menfolk, almost with the fanatical
zeal of one whose own hungers could be vicariously assuaged by the
sight of their indulgence.

For years the Old Gentleman had wailed, “Mother, stop watching me eat!
Come eat with me!”

When her children, including Dave, had grown in years and weight to an
age where she could scarcely bear up under the burden of lugging them
in arms, she had continued to carry them, glorying with perhaps the
inner exultation of sacrifice, in the burdens that her Lord had seen
fit to bestow.

She was like a stone at the heart of her family, Mathilda was. Every
one of her children, and the Old Gentleman as well, was sooner or later
to come to know the bitter sweetness of heartache for Mathilda.[68]

Her relentless industry. Her fanaticism for service. Her mute power of
reproach. Not reproach against those she served, but because under her
very feet, as it were, her world, that she labored so to conserve, ran
away from under her like sands.

Her hands were not only horny, but empty. She had gathered a harvest by
their productivity, and the reproductivity of her body, only in order
that she might lose it.

The granaries of her house and her heart were continually emptying
themselves faster than they were restored. And now David, who had come
into her autumn and was leaving her in the dead of her winter.

It was not merely as if the hand on Dave’s shoulder pressed against the
nap of his coat and the nap of his flesh, it was more as if it melted
and ran along through his veins, into their stream and pumping through
his heart, made it ache.

Bek knew precisely what David was feeling then. That same pain racked
her most when she woke up during the low-ebb hours of the night, with a
troubled awareness of that small, shriveled figure of her mother lying
two miles away in the Igrotte house.

Henry knew the ache that went with contemplation of his mother. It made
him sometimes brusque with her.

Clara too, to whom events back home, as she viewed them from St. Louis,
were somehow as through the wrong end of the opera-glasses, and Phil,
who took the background of family too much for granted to notice,
did regard his mother, once in a rare while, with something of an
indefinable pain for the manner in which the years had gnarled her.

Mathilda somehow had grown old in the way of a fruit tree that had
borne long and richly.

Emma sometimes frankly cried to Bek, asking passionately and
rebelliously what Mother ever got out of it, she’d like to know.

Why—why—nonsense, Mother got plenty out of it.

The Old Gentleman, who loved her, and who was slightly afraid of her
terrible meekness and the hint of hurt disapproval that it shrouded,
thought too, when he thought about it at all, which was seldom, that
Mathilda had got plenty out of it. Love and fear of her Protestant God.
A good wifehood. A superb motherhood. A family consistently striking
deeper and deeper root into a soil that had fostered it.

The Old Gentleman could strut of this sense of his Americanism.
Probably once a year he got his yellowing citizenship-papers out of a
drawer in his desk he kept locked, and with his steel-rimmed spectacles
low on his nose, reread them. It pleased him to think that his children
had never one of them set foot out of America. Americans all.[69]

Henry was the only possible exception. But as the old Ex-Governor
had once put it, he was perhaps the best American of them all. That
he dared, benignly, to challenge the cardinal virtue of patriotism,
one-hundred-per-centism, Protestantism, Rotarianism was Henry’s way.
Not to be taken seriously.

Mathilda herself never challenged. She was only hurt, deep down into
the very sinews of her being, with the pain that she carried about
with her into her barnyards. To her churning. To her perpetual task of
laying patches against men’s clothing, and opening the squeaking beaks
of poultry to the medicine-dropper.

It was as vague, this pain, as her sense of the surface of her body.
She could not have analyzed it. But it was what her young son, standing
there in the abashed throes of family-analysis, seemed to feel melting
in the shape of her hand through his coat, into his blood, and washing
painfully around his heart.

“It’s not easy for a boy with no advantages these days. Our Dave hasn’t
had them....”

“Mother,” he cried, and turned passionately toward the hovering gray
of her figure—“quit saying that, can’t you? I’ll get on all right. I’m
going to get me a good job in a good town.”

“Attaboy, Dave,” cried Phil, “the boy that starts right in that town
today, can clean it up and run it—I came ten years too soon.”

“Sure I am, Mother.”

“Attaboy,” cried Phil, and whacked him on the back so that his
spectacles jumped.

“Quit!”

Mathilda regarded her youngest with eyes that seemed to crawl out
toward him with their love and gratitude.

“I’ve got you ready, son. Six as new shirts as a boy ever left home
with. Flannels and middle-weights. There’s a patch had to be laid on
the blue serge, Dave, but it’s an excellent suit for every-day—with
overalls, for sweeping out office of a morning. You can travel in it,
son. The patch won’t show up, son, if you’re right careful about your
stoops.”

“Mother,” cried Dave and sprang back from the stroke of her thin hand,
“not that old serge to travel in! What if Dor—what if somebody’s down
at the train to see me off. Wouldn’t I be a pretty sight—backing away?
Gee, a fellow’s got to look right, traveling, Mother.”

“You can have my middle-weight gray pants,” said Henry, rising as if
to conclude the occasion. “You’re right. A fellow on his way to the
conquest of Springfield is entitled to a pair he is not ashamed to turn
his back on his home-town in.”

“Hen-nery!” fluttered Mathilda, “be refined!”


FOOTNOTES:

[66] ... a young and enormously talented fellow named Donald Wight,
who graduated from Harvard with my grandson, has done some of the most
delightfully eloquent caricatures of my brother that have ever been
made. The originals of these are in the portfolio collection of Paula’s
second daughter. The strip of cartoons which I am pasting on this page
is by no less an artist than the celebrated Nea. The one at the end,
right, done in exactly six strokes, suggests in masterly fashion the
square, rather pugnacious qualities of my brother. The second, with
those quick, exaggerated quirks to the eyebrow and corners of the
mouth, suggests, in uncanny fashion, the winged, visionary look that
was characteristic of him in certain moods. The last, perhaps, is the
most wittily characteristic of all. The four-square solidity of a man
whose feet are to the ground and whose nose is sniffing stars.

[67] ... Henry Gothard says of him (David) that half of his
platform-power (my brother was not a fluent speaker) lay in that
almost eccentric pose of a squat, low, tight-sinewed man, self-flailed
to endurance. Blierot’s statue of him, which stands at the head of
Hudson Boulevard and Three Hundred and Thirty-sixth Street, suggests
that dogged quality. The painting by Rockwell Bosworth, which hangs
in the National Gallery at Washington, is still my favorite, however.
Incidentally, it was while he was posing for that portrait that he is
said to have dictated his Conciliation Message to Russia. I know that
to be erroneous. That document was composed six months later, in the
summer White House.

[68] The morning of the day of my dear mother’s death, on one of those
telepathic and not quite explainable impulses, I drove over to the
Igrotte house in the forenoon, although it was my usual custom to
arrive there about four in the afternoon in time to lift Mother, who
was so dreadfully crippled of inflammatory rheumatism that winter, from
her couch into her bed.

To my horror, I found her this day (it was actually the day of her
death, dear darling) trying, with her pain-crammed fingers, to knit a
blue neck-scarf for Steve’s eldest daughter, Pauline.

I shall never forget the stab of pain with which I beheld those
tortured fingers working their laborious way along the needles....

[69] ... the first member of our large family to go abroad, was my son
Steve, who flew to England, _via_ Newfoundland and Ireland, the year
he became president of the International Air Corporation. During his
lifetime, Father, for some curious reason, was never sympathetic to the
idea.

For a while, Phil and Rita were extremely anxious to send their second
daughter to school in Switzerland, but out of deference to Father’s
wishes, abandoned the idea.




[Illustration: Decorative Image]




_Chapter Forty-one_


The sleet came down and hopped off shoulders and blew and bounced along
the streets and then finally formed a coating of ice that shellacked
the windward side of buildings and trees and made walking a matter of
balancing.

High Street wore its coating promptly away into a mucilaginous ooze
of mud, but the tributary streets, except where housewives leaned
from the top steps of their porches and threw out handfuls of ashes,
or ice-cream salt, glittered in an armor of thin ice, and the naked
branches of the double rows of maples along Sycamore Street shone like
a regiment of fountains with their ornamental waters frozen in action.
Shrubbery in front yards sagged under ice. Horses pedaled for footing
and struck sparks. In front of the Five and Ten Cent Store, one was
down, with a driver sitting on his head, while they shoveled ashes
under his plunging hoofs. The pair of iron stags on the Court House
lawn had ice beards.

In winter, Henry Schuyler persisted in wearing a veteran coon-skin cap
with ear-flaps, probably the only one still extant in Centralia.

When he came down out of his office to emerge into the sleet, these
flaps were tied down over his ears in a little bow of black tape under
his chin. In his short reefer, coon-skin mittens, and goloshes that
he lashed closer to his thin legs with a winding of hemp, there was a
lanky Ichabod-look to him, as he strode surefootedly along the perilous
streets.

David was leaving on the one-forty-nine. Henry had left Senator Jim
Kearney, who wanted unprofessional advice on an extradition case he
was handling in Cincinnati, waiting with his feet up against the
base-runner, while he made the dash around to the station. As the
Senator put it, he had just dropped in. As a matter of fact, Henry
knew, and the Senator suspected that Henry knew, that he had made the
trip to Centralia for the express purpose of the interview with Henry.

The one-forty-nine was due in ten minutes.

Henry hurried.

David, and his father, and Mathilda in an outlandish-looking dolman
cape with ball fringe that gave her coachman’s shoulders, and Dora
Tarkington in her white wool cap, were standing around a stove in the
waiting-room, with their clothes steaming and smelling.

Tom Willets had raised the ticket-window grating and was leaning along
the outer sill to talk with the Old Gentleman.

Katie, old Trina’s niece, who before her marriage had done day-work
in the House on Sycamore Street, getting wind of Davey’s departure,
had driven in on her husband’s dirt-cart from Ideola with her
three-year-old twins, who kept up a constant trekking across the room
to the water-cooler, Katie constantly after them for keeping the spigot
open.

There were two other passengers for the one-forty-nine. A salesman
with his sample-case and a shawled woman with a live chicken in a chip
basket.

The sleet beat against the smoke-smeared windows in a monotonous tattoo.

“It’s a bad day for travel, son,” said Mathilda for the fourth time.

“Oh no, Mrs. Schuyler!” cried Dora. “I just love to travel on a rainy
day. There’s something so cozy about being right out in the middle of
the weather and not a bit of it able to get at you. Don’t you think so,
Dave?”

David thought so.

“Of course, I know what you mean, Mrs. Schuyler. There’s something
depressing about people going away in the rain. Sad-like.”

Dora’s voice was too high. It had a nervous pitch to it from talking to
David’s mother. She was not quite herself. They were a little fierce
together, these two, a rush of excitement out over them just from being
in each other’s presence. Mathilda, without quite knowing it, full of
unease, as if something were rubbing against the grain of her very
being.

Pretty Dora. David’s shy eyes these last moments were furtively for her.

Mathilda knew it by the tight feeling behind her eyes.

Dora, by that same token, knew that Mathilda knew. With all of her
astonishing capacity for rising to the demands of almost any sort of
moment, Dora, even with her throat so hot and dry and nervous-feeling,
knew that there must be just one right sort of kindness to make this
moment more endurable to Mathilda.

In a way, she almost accomplished that miracle. Except for the
overstrain in her manner, which David wanted passionately not to be
there.

It kept her too eager. Too high-voiced. Too voluble. And not more than
once did she let her glance be caught and pinioned by David, whose eyes
ached to be caught and pinioned.

“Don’t you think it fun to travel in the rain, Dave?”

“Dora isn’t really this way, Mother,” he wanted to shout. “She’s sweet
and neat and cozy. She isn’t really this way, Mother.”

“You do think it’s fun to travel in the rain, Dave?”

“You bet!”

He had a dry throat that kept breaking his sentences into gulps. There
was even one between the “you” and the “bet.”

How beautiful she was in that woolly cap that shone against the dirty
morning. And she had cut her hair. The curls that had romped through
a thousand of his fancies of her, were gone now from their yellowish
riot along her shoulders. And strangely, incredibly, the little bang
of yellow that escaped her cap, and the short, straight line of
yellow that lay along her cheeks, and the furry little peak where
it petered out in the back of her head, like a boy’s, were just as
goose-fleshingly lovely as the curls had been.

How beautiful she was. The secret thing between them that he had
whispered to his mother a thousand times with the secret lips of his
heart, was obscured for the moment by the enormous casualness of her
manner. Too casual. Too obviously casual, he thought. Even strangers
could be expected to meet eye-to-eye. The eyes that must serve him as
lamps now. Two shining lamps down in his heart.

Yet there they stood, scraping their feet along the fender of the
stove, dilly-dallying through the infinitesimally small talk of waiting
for a train.

“When Father took me to Springfield when Aunt Genevieve died, we ate in
a dining-car!”

Gabble. Gabble. Dora’s tongue was like the hum of his mother’s
sewing-machine. Gabble. Gabble. Dear gabble, gabble.

“Of course, with local trains, it’s different....”

It made all the commotion of his emotions somehow subservient to just
her nearness and dearness.

Once it seemed to him that something shining lay along her lashes as
she half raised them to him. Only half, but it swept the plunging
excitement higher and dryer into his throat.

“Only ten minutes, Dave,” said Mathilda, her words seeming to collapse
against the rim of her lips.

“Yes, Mother.”

How beautiful she was. Dora.

“You’ll remember, Davey, to make a package of your dirty wash
every-other-week and parcel-post it home.”

Dirty wash! At least she might have put it “soiled linen.” Mother!

“Rita’s got her hands full with her own family. Besides, son, it will
be almost like having you back. The clothes—you’ve worn—close—to you.
Don’t forget to change regular, son.”

“Mother.” What if he should cry. His throat ached so.

“I’ve put in two weights, Dave. The ones with the little red ’D’
embroidered on the drawers are the heavies, son.”

Drawers! How terrible. How Terrible. How TERRIBLE. In front of Dora.
Dora, whose sweet eyes were almost looking into his now. Dora, whose
sweet eyes were violets. Red “D” on the belt of his drawers. Ignominy
drenched him. It made red signals of his ears. It made a throttle of
his Adam’s-apple.

“Mother!”

“Dora knows, son,” said Mathilda, and fixed her ineffably tired eyes
upon the two of them, standing flaming in the murk of the clogged air
of that waiting-room which they enchanted for each other. “Dora knows
such things have to be thought about. No right-thinking girl, Davey,
is ever above thinking about those kind of things,” said Mathilda, and
began to cry miserably and in sniffles that screwed her face cruelly
because she tried to hold them back.

“Oh, Mother, Mother, Mother!” cried Davey to himself, as if his heart
were turning to sand and running away from him.

And yet he only stood and gulped the Adam’s-apple that would not stay
gulped.

“Dear Mrs. Schuyler,” cried Dora, and stepped over the impediment
of Dave’s cheap, light-yellow suitcase and neatly-wrapped shoe-box
of lunch, which he had consistently tried to keep kicked out of her
sight, “look what I’ve brought him, if he thinks you’re kind of fussy
about—about little things. I knitted it myself. All but the orange
stripe. Mary Chipman was sleeping with me one Saturday night, and she
knows the zigzag stitch—she did the stripe.”

“A muffler! For me—all but the stripe—gee, swell—fellow needs
muffler—all but the stripe—gee——”

“He—wouldn’t let me put the one I knitted for him in,” sobbed Mathilda,
the words tumbling off her lips like coals, and then making a forward
jump as if she would scrape them all back again.

“Why, you darling, of course he wouldn’t. No son in the world ever
would.”

“He—he—said—no——”

“Mother, I didn’t mean——”

“You did!” said Dora, who had an armful of Mathilda, and stamped her
foot. “You did! You were horrid! You did!”

“He didn’t!” cried Mathilda. “You see, it was a gray one. Of a bit of
wool left over from his father’s socks. He was always a child liked
color. It’s the orange in this one. He didn’t!”

“That’s exactly what I meant, dear—he did—I mean he didn’t—I—mean—of
course I mean he did.”

Oh, Dora—Dora—sweet, appeasing, ever-ready Dora——

Things began to happen then, starting with the faint shivering of the
timbers under their feet and a blast of whistle. A door blew open on a
gust of sleet.

Tom Willets slammed down the ticket grating and the straggle of
travelers made stooping dives for their luggage. Katie hoisted her
babies. Henry strode in, and as if shooed, the group began to move out
to the ice-sheeted platform.

“Got your ticket, Dave?”

“Yep, Henry.”

“Remember us to the folks down Springfield, Dave.”

“Yep.”

“Don’t forget to give Rita that strip of red flannel, son. It’s packed
under your shirts. Phil writes baby had quite another spell of croup.”

“No’m.”

“Write a body, son, and come home by the first holiday they give you.
Don’t bang that shoe-box, Dave. There’s a jar of cole-slaw in it. Don’t
throw the glass away. Take it to Rita for her jelly-time. There’s
mustard in a separate paper for the sliced bologna, son. Plenty of it
the way you like.”

How terrible. How Terrible. How TERRIBLE. Dora’s eyes laughing—at him!

“Mother!”

“I hope you put in a good dill-pickle, Mrs. Schuyler. He used to steal
them for me out of your crocks and squirm through the hedge with large,
green, luscious beauties for me.”

“Two of them are in there, Dave. And a bit of corned-beef to munch with
the cole-slaw. He’s a great one for corned-beef and cole-slaw, Dora.
Queer combination. Never saw the like.”[70]

“Corned-beef and cole-slaw,” in front of Dora, when his heart was
bursting to tell her that her eyes were violets! Tears would come.
Humiliated hot ones which he kept swallowing back. Corned beef——

“Goodby, Dave! I’ll be waiting.”

“Dora! Dora! goodby, Dora!”

“Goodby, son! God bless you!”

“Mother, goodby!”

“Boy! Boy! Boy!”

“Yes, Mother!”

“Goodby, son! God bless you!”

“Father—oh, Father!”

“Carry your own torch, son, for what you think is right, even if it’s a
torch no bigger than a lightning-bug.”

“Yes—Father—goodby!”

“Goodby, Davey—Trina sends word, goodby, too.”

“Goodby, Katie——”

“Tell my twins goodby, Davey!”

“Goodby, youngsters!”

The train dove in then, parting the sleet like a curtain and Charlie
Herkhimer sprang up out of nowhere, in furiously greasy overalls and a
torch, and began poking in and out of the day-coach entrails.

“So long, Dave! Luck!”

“S’long, Charlie! Well, well! Guess I’m off Henry!”

“Yep!”

“All aboard!”

“Oh, Davey—there comes Bek!”

“Goodby, Dave! Catch! It’s a sack of chestnuts Roasted them for you
this morning.”

“Thanks, Bek! Goodby, Bek!”

“Don’t eat them, son; they’re bad for your headaches Take them to Phil.”

“Mother—Father—all—Bek—Dora—Goodby!”

“Your shoe-box, son! Don’t crush! It’s lunch!”

“Wave goodby to my twins, Davey!”

“’By, twins!”

“Oh!”

Sleet bounced down against the shoulders of the little group on the
platform, as the train that bore David Schuyler out of the years of his
childhood, wound like snake around the end of the old South Meadow of
the now historic House on Sycamore Street.

FINIS


FOOTNOTES:

[70] The night of his (David’s) election to second term (the most
overwhelming landslide in the history of our country), he and Dora
spent the larger part of that exciting evening quietly in my brother’s
private study, viewing the street scenes of New York, Chicago and
Denver through the television. Henry and Henriette, Winslow and I, and
Stevey’s eldest daughter, the Senator, had flown over to New York to
see the returns come in at Phil’s, who was bedridden at the time, with
a broken leg, at his home in Upper Level, Park Avenue. We were all
invited, however, upon our return from New York that midnight, to join
Dora and David at a late snack of supper.

While wires hummed and buzzed around us, and messages the world over
were pouring in, there we sat cozily sealed against it all, watching
scenes in Nome, Alaska, and Bangor, Maine, through the television,
and talking among ourselves. It was over corned-beef and cole-slaw,
personally prepared by Dora, that my brother practically thought aloud,
Henry taking it down shorthand and interpolating here and there,
the first draft of an idea long discussed with Henry and which was
beginning to take concrete shape in his mind.

It was his Superstate World-policy, which needs no explanation here.




_This book is set in_ Caslon Old Style _and_ Caslon Old Face _types,
following the lines of those originally designed by_ WILLIAM CASLON
_in the early part of the eighteenth century. Working at a time when
type designing had fallen into a state of uninspired mediocrity_,
CASLON, _by the beauty of his new types, did much to revitalize the
art of printing. After two centuries of constant use, they are still
considered the finest faces for book composition, embodying, as they
do, both pleasing grace of line and maximum readability._ _The text is
printed on Lorette laid stock from_ Perkins & Squier Company, _bound in
glazed black Holliston vellum, stamped in art gold with linoleum-block
printed sides designed by_ A.W. Rushmore. _Set, printed, and bound by
the_ Haddon Craftsmen _in Camden, New Jersey, for the publishers_,
HARPER & BROTHERS

[Illustration: Decorative Image]




Transcriber’s Notes


  New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the
  public domain.

  Some of the original text was printed very close to the margin, and
  in some cases, the last letter of the line was stamped twice or cut
  off. Every effort was made to preserve the original intent of the
  author.

  While the original text was described as printed in Caslon Old Style,
  the typeface for the digital copy of this book has been left at
  default for readability.

  p17 “yodle” changed to (used to yodel thus).
  p55 “snivvle” changed to (nothing to snivel over.)
  p69 Opening quote added to (“Now I lay me down to sleep.)
  p84 “planging” changed to (made a great clanging sound).
  p88 “whose” changed to (who’s coming home today?)
  p120 Opening quote added to (“... but you cannot—make him drink,”).
  p124 Double quotes changed to single in (‘The spokes in a wheel.’)
  p134 “It” added to (It had about the consistency).
  p186 Opening quotes removed from (It can’t be true!)
  p214 Period added to (Jesse James—The Boy.)
  p273 “Dolly” changed to (from Dolley Madison).
  p274 “phaëton” changed to (rode into Centralia in the phaeton).
  p275 “calcimime-stained” changed to (calcimine-stained, daub-faced).
  p278 “manifying” changed to (without Henry’s magnifying glass.)
  p290 “Panzas” changed to (like Sancho Panza on mules.)
  p294 “pace” changed to (had fallen into place.)
  p302 “Mathus” changed to (Malthus, it seems, was).
  p345 “turnnel” changed to (funny little tunnel).
  p329 “phäeton” changed to (But the Old Gentleman’s phaeton).
  p378 “heir” changed to (grayed her hair.)
  p406 “aeroplane-field” changed to (shine of the Tallahassee
        Aeroplane Field).
  p409 “didincha” changed to (why the dickens didencha say so?)
  p454 “lenseless” changed to (lensless pair of Henry’s field-glasses).


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