[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.