[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]