[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.