[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.