[32] The day that my Stevey marched away, we drove into town for a
point of vantage from Emma’s front windows. As we passed the House on
Sycamore Street, there was our Dave astride its cupola, just like he
still belonged there. I can see him now. Small and square and firm, as
if the old house were a mare, and he were riding it, straight and sure
and calm, into the maelstrom. And yet how little he suggested to any of
us, as he sat there gazing thoughtfully into the confusion, that one
day he _was_ to ride out into that maelstrom ... a leader of leaders.
[Illustration: Decorative Image]
_Chapter Twenty-two_
When Dora Tarkington was on the threshold of her ’teens, she was about
an inch and a half taller than Dave, with long honey-colored curls
that lay in a wide fan across her shoulders and a curved fringe of
bangs. These bangs, old Mammy, whose hand quivered, invariably cut a
little crookedly, because she kept one copying eye glued to a lovely
daguerreotype of Dora’s mother propped on the washstand beside her.
Dora used to study that daguerreotype herself. The sweet, straight
eyes, the elaborately high, honey-colored hair with the curve of
bang that Mammy tried to imitate. The fitted basque, with the heavy
festoonings of gold chains and brooches. The tapering waist, supporting
the little, urn-shaped swell of bust and shoulders.
Dora was of sturdier heft than this mother who had died at her birth.
There was more of her father in the molding of her longer, lither legs
and torso. But at eleven, the bright gold prettiness of the mother, who
had dashed through her youth on the spirited horseflesh of a Kentucky
farm, lay over Dora like pollen, conjuring memories before her father’s
eyes, in a hundred ways.
Every year Dora had a birthday-party and a cake with pink candles
and colored-tissue caps that popped as they were pulled open. For
these occasions old Mammy, relic from the days when the girl in the
daguerreotype had ridden bareback through Kentucky grass, made large
batches of cup-cakes with pink icing; decorated the round birthday-cake
in “red-hots”; froze the vanilla ice-cream in a home-made contrivance
of galvanized bucket and chopped ice, and then set about fluting Dora’s
neck-ruffles and cuff bands, as well as the edges of her own cap and
apron, with a hot-point iron.
Dave had attended these annual events, up to the time the Schuylers
moved to the Igrotte house.
He had been meticulously invited to every subsequent one, in fact
so meticulously that to Mathilda, unreasonably enough, the courtesy
savoured of patronage.
Dave was never to attend one of these functions after the move from
the House on Sycamore Street. To begin with, he had a particularly
fierce kind of pride where Dora was concerned, and besides, his
mid-afternoons, those subsequent years, were scarcely a matter of
girls’ birthday-parties and candles.
Then, too, since the crash, the Old Gentleman had taken on what
amounted to an unreasonable animosity to Len Tarkington. A resentment
that the gentleman-farming methods of his old neighbor should lead
to the gradual growth from the scrawny acres Len had inherited from
his grandfather, to the present more than triple and vastly prolific
pasturages.
It was the Old Gentleman’s contention, never beyond his own fireside
it is true, that Len Tarkington was “God’s laziest white man,” working
three hours a day as compared with his own fifteen.
Len’s doings rankled in the Old Gentleman. His politics! He had never
forgiven him for voting Bryan in 1896. Len was a negligent farmer,
an indifferent judge of cattle, and notoriously slow pay. One of
those devilishly likable fellows who get results out of two-thirds
personality and one-third efficiency.
Beware of a man who lets his rail fences go; who votes a mixed ticket;
who will borrow your pipe off you; who could sit on his side verandah
and whittle a clothes-pin into a doll for his daughter, with his hay
still outlying, and clouds lowering.
It rankled to have Dave help at Tarkington early-morning chores, except
that the deal was one strictly between old Nemo and the boy and there
was no getting around it—that eighty cents a week helped!
That, probably more than any one other thing, was the realization that
used to cause the Old Gentleman, lying beside Mathilda in the ponderous
old bedstead that filled their room, to hide his screwed and suffering
face into the crook of his arm and lie with his toes climbing over each
other with the pain of frustration, until the crack of dawn, when he
rose. Eighty cents a week mattered!
At the first of her birthday-parties that Davey did not attend, Dora
had clouded up and cried tears all over her birthday prettiness, while
Davey, with a throat that hurt him the long afternoon through, went
about the business of leading a foal, for a consideration of fifteen
cents, from one pasture to a two-mile-distant one, for a petty farmer
known as Rocky Toe.
It was the following week that Davey, emerging from the Tarkington
barn on Saturday morning, from helping Nemo at currying, beheld
her making grimaces, by darting her little pink adder of a tongue
in and out, as she stood on the safe side of her hedge, and struck
outlandish attitudes at a boy called Desmond Riley, whose father was
new superintendent of Giles Tool Works and who had just moved into the
neighborhood.
There was, about Desmond, a precision both of manner and of dress that
was antagonizing. That verdict, after his first weeks in the Centralia
Second District School, was the cruelest of all for a child to bear.
What antagonism Desmond excited was the kind to relegate him to
oblivion. Desmond became what you might call permanently unnoticed. The
children shunned his selfish little moon-faced complacency. Not a boy
offered to fight him.
The awful failure of obscurity was his.
Not so passive, however, was Dora’s animosity. His sleek, brushed,
brown ball of a head sat in front of her throughout the school-day. He
chose the best pen-points and wet sponges, just before the monitors
reached her. Desmond had fat, soft little cheeks that quivered like
jelly; and that too, infuriated her.
She was sticking out her tongue to the jell of those cheeks the morning
that Dave beheld her across her hedge-top and paused, as if to study
the facial contractions by which she achieved her magnificent effects.
“Dare you to wallop him!” cried Dora to Dave, as the small, square
figure hove in sight. “Land him one for me! Dickery, dickery, docks,
his mama makes him wear socks!”
So she did. Tan ones, with plaid tops that reached just below the knee!
“Dare you, Dave—wallop him! One for me and one for good measure.”
The wallop had its time and place. Somehow, Desmond, standing there
hypnotized and not belligerent, offered neither.
“Aw—no!”
“Scared? ’Fraid-cat. If I was a fellow and afraid to wallop another
fellow!”
Bitter. Bitter. Standing there, barefoot, his fingers curling into
palms, anger smote Dave. A slow anger. Not at Desmond. But at the
shrill little voice of his tyrant. If she were a fellow and afraid to
wallop another fellow. What kind of talk was that? Why wallop Desmond?
His animosity would not rise to it.
“’Fraid! Snidey! Poof! ’Fraid. Poof! Poof! Poof!”
Suddenly Dave’s arm shot out and banged Desmond one in the stomach so
that he doubled and ran.
The wallop had not been for Desmond at all. But for the circumstance
of naughty, adorable Dora up there, meting out injustice. That was the
dreadful part. The blow had been for Dora.
And before he could rush to Desmond, to right it with him, there was
the wonder and the glory of small Dora screaming upon him from her
vantage. Having goaded him on to attack the stranger, and now turning
on him with a fury that had probably never had counterpart in her small
breast.
“You didn’t need to hit him thataway. In the stomach. Oh, you! Oh,
you! Why didencha listen—I only meant—just to hit something. Not him.
I meant—hit out against what’s no good—oh, I don’t know what I meant,
but why didencha listen?”
Suddenly, in the blind rage of relief and the shock of the identical
quality of their impulses, he was over the fence and pummeling Dora
until her teeth shook. Until her eyes popped and saw twice.
“You—you!” she said on the breath that was jerked out of her, and sat
down flat, like a doll-baby.
* * * * *
And yet, in the end, that scene confused David.
Dora had a mind of her own only where trifling things were concerned.
She would wrest from him an inch of concession, and then, with her
matchless capacity for sweetness, give him back an ell.[33]
The second time that Dave did not show up at her birthday-party, it was
almost six of the hard and wearying months since they had met.
She had run out one lovely clover-smelling summer dawn, while Davey,
in denim jumpers, and Nemo were currying down a filly which Tarkington
sometimes still drove before a light gig.
She was in her nightgown and bare feet, and she and another girl, named
Minnie Ryan, who had been spending the night with her, were tearing out
toward the clover-field for the early-morning lark of a dash through
the dew.
Walk, fair maiden, through the morning dew,
If you crave beauty and a sweetheart true!
That was the phrase Dora had drawn from a fortune-telling gypsy girl,
whose green parrakeet on a stick had plucked the slip of paper from a
box.
... crave beauty and a sweetheart true!
Dora and Minnie craved beauty and a sweetheart true.
At the sight of Dave, currying away there at the near flank of the
horse, the two girls turned squealing and scurrying back toward the
house. Dora last, her lovely long curls flying back in a banner, her
body flashing, and the rosy soles of her feet repeating themselves
again and again as she fled.
This was the most disturbing thing that had ever happened to David.
His heart seemed to fly out of his chest, leaving him standing like
an empty meal-sack. Then the rest of his body seemed to rise to his
throat. To congest his breathing and blind him so that the currying
became merely a series of strange motions over which he had no control.
Once, on that run down Sycamore Street beside the boys that were
marching down it into the lanes of war, the blood had beaten that way
in his ears. But to the roar of drums and of hoarse throats shouting.
It was probably the beginning of the normal adolescence of his
awareness of Dora. Suddenly, just Dora, who was undoubtedly the
nicest of all girls, but who could stick out her stomach and make
ugly grimaces and slide belly-buster down a hill, was something as
lovely, as remote, as an angel on the merit-card you received in
Sunday-school if you were Desmond Riley. Flash of Dora in her sweet
muslin nightdress, with her hair flowing and the lovely insinuation of
her rosy young body flickering through.
And yet she was not as remote as one of those picture-card angels with
trumpets and soaring bodies that rise on a slant through ether. Dora
was warm and beautiful and naughty in an adorable way that was not
angelic.
Dora was beautiful. The soles of her pink, flying feet that you
saw over and over again as they flashed, were beautiful. There was
something sweet and rosy about them. They were Dora’s.
That was the way his adolescence came in. A fastidious worship of the
beauty that flashed to him that dew-drenched clover-smelling sunrise.
It was to remain that. A curiously delicate and perfect love-life for
a man born to a destiny of tempestuous and dramatic and world-shaping
events. But withal, a man born into his time as snugly as a bug into
his rug. Forward-looking. Backward-heeding. Un-neurotic. Normal.
Cross-currents aplenty were to riffle the course of the true love
of David and Dora, torturous ones, but from the day that he was
thirteen, and had looked upon that flash of the innocent sweetness
of Dora-in-nightdress flashing from his sight, she was installed and
remained the woman of his love and his life and his reverence.[34]
For a six-month after this morning apparition of her, with her
loveliness across his eyeballs as he went to sleep nights, and his
first waking-thought of her, he did not so much as again clap eyes on
Dora face to face. Dodging her, if he happened to be errand-bent in
Centralia and saw her coming down a street, avoiding the lanes she
frequented and attending the little Sunday-school at Seven Mile, sooner
than run the risk of encountering her in town.
Countless the asafœtida-bags that Mathilda hung about his protesting
neck these days.
Dave, with the immemorial gesture of young love, paled, and secretly
observed but outwardly ignored by Henry, retreated uncommunicative
within himself. Took on a pinched look about the mouth that prompted
Bek to comment privately and worriedly to Winslow, and acquired a
nervous habit of cracking his finger joints that was enormously
irritating to the Old Gentleman.
The change of Sunday-school was a matter of some argument, since, on
fair Sundays, the Old Gentleman and Mathilda rode into Centralia in the
phaeton, hitched to a pasture horse rented from Rocky Toe for fifty
cents the morning, to Second Avenue Rock Church. For thirty years the
Schuylers had paid pew dues there, and even now, when those dues were
no longer sent by check, but sparsely dropped into the contribution
plate, they occupied the same seats by the insistent courtesy of
everyone connected with the church.
But Dave, privately conscious that his shoes, even when blacked, were
nicked, had reached the stage where for want of long trousers, his legs
felt long and gawky. Besides, Dora with her hair in the spread of curls
and a red cap that had a pompon, rode to Second Avenue Rock Church,
either in her father’s light spider-gig, or in the new Chevrolet
roadster.
That in itself, made one feel more of a gawk than if she too had just
walked.
So in the end, every day of the six-month that intervened, Dave, with
the torment of the desire to see her hot within his heart, carefully
avoided her.
Then one day, crawling out from under a runway in the hen-house
which he had been whitewashing for Nemo, bespattered, even his heavy
thatch of hair with a white smear across it, he came upon her, face
to face as she came out of the kitchen door with a small pan of fine
white-bread-mash for her sick pet of a hen, a prize leg-horn “Smooty,”
which her father had once brought her from the Lexington County Fair.
It was ignominious beyond anything he had ever dreaded, her unexpected
dashing out in this fashion from the house. Scarcely a day that he
did not reckon with the possibility of her happening to rise at
five of a mornning, timing his appearance meticulously to avoid its
happening. And now here he was on all-fours, calcimine-stained,
daub-faced, crawling out from under, like a rabbit from a hutch, into
the very path of Dora, so fresh in her blue percale with three white
bands of tape around her slim waist and the hem of her skirt, and all
the morning-light there was, caught in the curls that lay along her
shoulders.
“Smarty, Smarty, gave a party, and nobody came,” was the incredible,
the panicky phrase that flew from his agonized lips, while Dora,
with the pan of warm mash in her hands, toppled a little forward, of
naughty, simulated surprise, as if she had not expected him there.
With what was more of a reflex than a desire, she shot her tongue
at him in reply to this, and her stomach too, in the old absurd
contortion. Dora, who was almost thirteen now and would no longer
shinny trees, for fear of showing her panties.
“Smarty, Smarty, didn’t want you nohow at my party.”
There was a stunned flash of silence between these two, to whom David’s
absence from that party had been, to each, a little agony; a flash
of silence filled with the noise old Nemo made pouring water into a
pig-trough, and with the floating fragrance of Mammy’s breakfast bacon,
and with the echoes of Dora’s mockery. For six months she had been
slowly gathering courage to burst this way upon David. And now, the
whirlwind of that ruse accomplished, there she stood puckering, and
trying not to cry.
“Out in county school, where I used to go,” said Dave, “you skip stocks
and bonds and then go right from algebra to geometry.”
“Honest?” said Dora, as if his remark were relevant to her innermost
thoughts.
It was a master-stroke. He was never to know, delving into his
psychology later, just how he achieved it. This bit of floating
information, springing full-grown to his rescue at the moment of his
almost complete immersion under lime and humiliation.
It broke the ice. It broke the ice of Dora’s startled, frozen lips. It
broke the ice of the long months that had lain chilled, without the sun
of her presence, against his heart.
“We’re on the Monroe Doctrine,” said Dora.
“The Monroe Doctrine,” began David, his eyes focusing as they always
did from his trick of visualizing the page from which he memorized, “is
the principle of non-in-ter-ven-tion of European Powers in American
af——”
“Oh lookie, Davie, you’re all tangling yourself up in Queen Anne’s lace
handkerchief.”
Wretched David. It was his ruse, standing there spouting his erudition,
to kick, as if casually, the frail, pale stuff growing in profusion
outside the barn door, in an attempt to cleanse his bare legs of the
lime.
Who could have thought, after the years of childhood they had played
through together, Dave most of the time in a single garment of blue
jumper and Dora with her neat skirts flying to reveal her little
pantie-clad legs, that lime spattered across Dave’s legs could matter
so to him. Matter so that his tongue began to dry and swell in his
mouth like a rusk.
“I work.”
“That’s nothing.”
“’Tis, too.”
“’Tisn’t.”
“’Tis.”
“Puf!” She was still flushed with shame at the atavism of having stuck
out her tongue and her stomach.
“I know something I could tell if I wanted to.”
“What?”
“About ants. Me and Nemo watch ants same as you and Henry.”
“Me and Henry have a red-ant-hill now! You know what, there’s a species
of——”
“There’s ants in our pantry. Mammy can’t keep sugar there any more.”
All this, savoring doubtless to the uninitiated of slight irrelevance,
had bearing upon hours they had spent in the days of the House on
Sycamore Street, lying belly-flat, with their noses close to the
performance of ant-hills. Sometimes Henry, who had a magnifying glass
that stood on a little tripod, had come down under the grape-arbor
and observed with them, and read aloud out of a book called _Communism
Among Ants_.
Davey knew those ants to the habit, many a time remaining stretched
on his stomach long periods after Dora had danced away home. Now it
was her little device for wriggling her away back into grace on this
particular one of his hobbies.
“The little ants in our sugar haven’t got any an-ten-næ at all.”
“They have so, Dora!”
“Well, anyway, none that you can see without Henry’s magnifying glass.”
“I work,” resumed Dave, stubbornly, and still kicking into the Queen
Anne’s lace handkerchief.
The reiteration scarcely penetrated her conciliatory zeal.
“We’re on frogs in physiology, Dave. If you pull one leg, the other
thinks it’s getting pulled too. Toads give warts, frogs don’t.”
“I work.”
This time, her sweet eyes glittered at him, making his eyes seem to
smart, as they did when he stared at the sun.
“I work, or I’d ’a’ come to your party.”
“I’d rather had you at my party, Dave, than anybody.”
“Would you?”
“I cried.”
How sweet she was in the early morning of that beauty of hers;
a freshness of beauty which the years were to find absolutely
unquenchable. The sparkle of world-sweetheart was over her that day.[35]
“I cried, honest.”
“Dora! I—oh—last tag!”
Presently they were tearing through the Queen Anne’s lace handkerchief,
as if into foam.
At home, in the Igrotte barn, a half dozen rather scrawny rams were
pressing their none-too-finicky noses to the crack of a door, bleating
and waiting for their young shepherd to release them to the joys of
pasture.
Finally, the Old Gentleman, who was weighing a heifer on a scale, had
to hobble and do it himself.
“Drat that boy, where is he?”
Davey was wooing.