[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.”