[36] ... we never referred to the great metropolis within thirty-one
miles of us, in any terms except “The City.” It is surprising, even
after the automobile had jerked us to its very flank, how seldom we
visited it.
[37] Long years before the existence of the Lucy Stone League, which
upholds the right of a married woman to still use her maiden-name, I
continued to be known after my marriage as Bek Schuyler, except where
it came to signature.
My brother was always to the fore in giving his sanction to the
unrestricted legal privilege of woman to decide for herself the matter
of name.
Theoretically, I agree that a married woman should have the legal right
to the use of her maiden-name. But law me, it is one of those questions
difficult to feel keenly about. As I always say, for the professional
or business woman, whose name is her asset, well and good and fine.
But for a plain country woman like me—don’t know as it makes much
difference what they call me.
[38] ... one of these rides in particular stands out in my memory. We
were six hands short on the farm, all of the second winter of the War.
With the cry going out everywhere for conservation, forty head of my
heifers were eating their heads off waiting for market, to say nothing
of hoof-and-mouth disease, and shipping at a standstill, owing to
quarantine.
Dave and I drove these forty in as far as Ivorydale one clear November
night.
I can see him as plainly as if that night were before me now, astride
his paste-board-looking filly (one that usually did sister work at the
plow beside a heavier chestnut), loping through the milk-and-pearl
fore-glow of a dawn about to break. Head back, the wind before the dawn
lifted his bangs to reveal squareness of brow, and his shabby heels dug
into the patient old horseflesh with the fervor of the vision he could
not get said.
_Chapter Twenty-four_
To David’s generation of boys, the World War was little more than a
remote, a magnificent circus, toward which perpetual parades were
pouring the older fellows but which never, as a big tent, came within
even brass-band distance of town.
All of the circumstances of life were to be altered by that war; and
yet, to the generation who were children through the years of its
duration, khaki, and gold-star mothers, and Huns, and Big Berthas, and
hysteria belonged to the scheme of things, as waterfall belonged to
Old Mill Road. Here was a generation born into a phraseology that was
new only to the adult. Imperialism of Central Europe. World Safe for
Democracy. Over there! Hoch der Kaiser. Russian Revolution. The Poppies
Grow in Flanders Field. Conscription. Liberty Bonds. Argonne. Doughboy.
Buddy. Transport. Treaty of Versailles. Patriotic cant of this and
that propaganda-source, calculated to raise the nap of the flesh of a
nation, even while the only palpable results were an impoverished and
desolated world.
Many who marched down those languid streets of Centralia as Dave and
Teddy ran after, were not to come back; but even that, to children who
had seen it consistently happening, did not bring the catastrophic
reality of war closer.
If a fellow came home with one leg—well, fellows were always coming
home thataway. And still the circus of war remained strangely removed,
except one day Pete came home, and a small and suddenly rather
sickish-feeling boy, who was lugging a pail of sour clabber from Bek’s
place to the Igrotte house, came face to face with him in the open road.
The lower half of Pete’s face had been blown away and replaced with
sort of a nickel-plated jaw. And his eyes were still looking as if they
had frozen there of what they saw.
“Davey, b’God! Hi, Kid!”
“Hi!”
For the first time war became a horror then, stalking with stiff eyes
and rigid jaw through those lanes of peace.
David was sick that night, and feverish. “Upset stummick,” diagnosed
Mathilda, and plied him with castor-oil.
Every Schuyler came home. Phil, who saw ambulance service. His eldest
son, who drove a truck under bombarded skies for sixteen months.
Clara’s boy, who lied about his age to qualify for enlistment and who
saw service as far front as Amiens. Paula, who did canteen service in
France. Stevey, who fought at Argonne, and whose eyes had seen the
horror of the splashing of human entrails across fields.
The war, which had crashed with such terrific interruption into the
more or less organized scheme in which David had spent the first few
years of his life, came to its portentous conclusion, the world held
the brief pose of a chastened, spiritualized humanity that had gone
down in blood that it might be cleansed, and then relapsed.
In later years, there seemed to David to be a certain subtle
demarkation in human beings. Those born before the Great War and who
stood astride the chasm of it, as it were, with one foot in each world,
and those born to the curious, old-eyed youth of a post-war world.
It was a fantastic phase of human experience to have lived through,
even as a child.
Around Davey’s head, while he was a youngster, Russia cracked her
shackles, France bled white, the Near East, the Far East scrambled
and squirmed free of chains that carried the rust of centuries. His
own country flung a faltering gesture. A man named Mussolini thrust
his hand down into the throat of Italy, gagged and then rode her,
magnificently. Czars and Kaisers galloped out of the human scene like
Sancho Panza on mules. Forensic peasants came into world-power, their
followers crawling like armies of worms out of darkness to live in
the Kremlin. One fine day in Davey’s boyhood, Great Britain handed
portfolio to its first labor-government.
Supper-table discussion between the Old Gentleman and Henry made the
light along the lamp-wick buzz and flare in the gale of explosives.
Tariff. Woodrow Wilson. Lloyd George. Reparations. Rasputin. Rheims.
Stanley Baldwin. D’Annunzio. Irish Free State. Colonel House. Henry
Ford. Prohibition. Joe Cannon. League of Nations. Mexico. Trotsky. Jim
Reed. Muscle Shoals. Eugene Debs. Borah. Senator Moses. La Follette.
Nicholas Murray Butler. Wells’ _Outline of History_. Fascisti.
Time and time again, off the rather weary sill of Henry’s lips,
there dropped sparks that set the dry tinder of the Old Gentleman’s
conservatisms leaping and flaming.
This was a curious tenacity to Henry. It bothered him to see the Old
Gentleman darken and redden in apoplectic fashion. Sometimes it even
terrified him. But for the life of him, he could not remain silent and
let one after another of his father’s reactionisms die into the quiet
of the evening meals.
“Well, sir, something, ought to be done about this here Red
situation. The Boston police-strike, the steelworkers’ strike, the
soft-coal miners’ strike and now this here railway-strike in England
starting up. Race-riots out in Chicago. Bomb-plot trying to smash
up Attorney-General Palmer’s home. Only way for a self-respecting
government to handle anarchy is call out the troops. Shoot ’em down.
That’s the way to cure these scalawag anarchists. Cowards at heart!”
“Father, every manifestation of social discontent is not necessarily a
form of anarchy.”
“Like to know what else you call a lot of lazy fellows up-and-revolting
against the finest government in the world.”
“Revolt is the soul of progress.”
“By Gad, not to my way of thinking. If you think a lot of lazy louts of
fellows that think they can milk a living out of the Government instead
of working for it are the soul of progress, then, by Gad, progress
has got a rotten soul that I wouldn’t lift a little finger to help
save. You and this here Emma Goldman they’re giving a free boat-ride
to are the kind they drive out of this country and keep out! I.W.W.
crowd—I-won’t-work-ers!”
“Father!”
“Puppa!”
“Well! I won’t have no anarchy talked in my house, where there’s a boy
growing up to listen to it.”
“If it weren’t for that youngster, Father, and my desire for him to
learn to look temperately at both sides of this troubled old world, I
wouldn’t even argue the matter with a biased person like you.”
“I’ve worked hard all my life, earned an honest living, and I never had
time to sit and criticize the government that——”
“Oh, Father, Father—won’t you try to think with your brain instead of
with your prejudice? I hold no brief for anarchy, any more than you do.
I’m merely trying to differentiate between——”
“You hold brief for shenanigans of I.W.W. fellows, who don’t mean no
good by the country.”
“Don’t shout, Father!”
“Puppa!”
“I will shout! Anarchists! Anarchists—that’s what they are—by Gad, if I
thought a son of mine was one, I—I——”
“I quit, Father! If you think I’m going to try and argue capital and
labor with a man who sees red the moment a more equable living-scheme
for humanity is broached, you’re mistaken. You see, Dave, what I was
trying to say to your father is not that this strike or that riot is
right or wrong. The point, David, I’m trying to make to your father is
that without revolt against oppression, ignorance and illiteracy, there
can be no human emancipation. Submission, throughout the history of the
world, has begotten autocracy.”
“And what have such lazy-lout strikes begotten? I.W.W. anarchists.
Anarchy——”
“You win, Father. I quit! God only knows how anyone can be so
hidebound.”
“Hennery!”
“Excuse me, Mother.”
“You should have quit long ago, son. You know how excitable your Puppa
is.”
“I know what Henry means. If the rich ones wasn’t so rich, and the poor
ones wasn’t so poor, then there wouldn’t be so much to fight about,
would there?”
“Exactly, Dave. But you can’t make your father be——”
“Can’t make—can’t make—I’ll break every bone in——”
“Puppa—Hennery—please.”
Turbulent evenings. Supper-table disharmonies that were to set into
motion atoms in the boy’s brain that might never have stirred otherwise.
Off Henry’s sardonic lips were to glitter phrases of curious and
significant prophecy. As if against the retina of his lusterless eye
was imprinted the ultimate significance of empire toward which all
these catastrophic events were scurrying a bewildered world.
World-unification. Annihilation of distance. Propinquity of races.
Tolerance. Fraternity. Lonely phrases in a land that presently was to
pursue its policies outside the League of Nations.
Presently, these phrases, dinned by Henry, came to be the only reality
of war left against Dave’s brain.
The boys were home and settled now.
Even Pete’s mask was no longer terrible.
Here was Stevey as if he had never marched away to the rolling of
drums, living in a semi-attached two-family house out on Tallahassee
Street, within walking distance of the Giles Tool Works, where he had a
desk job in the shipping department.
Something in the nature of one of those freak tornadoes that can seem
to appear in a crazy spiral of fury out of the blue had happened to
Steve. The craving for drink had been literally shot from him.
In all the hubbub of the prohibition which a returning army found
awaiting it and with the nation lying prone upon its stomach and
kicking its heels and squalling over a right that had been wrested
from it, the mere sight of a bottle of Scotch on a shelf was enough to
stiffen Steve, taut and squeamish with revulsion.
A kind of cure not without its rare precedent in medical annals.
The smell, or for that matter even the sight of spirituous liquor in
any form, was to bring back to Steve the odor and smear of a human
face in the act of becoming pulp.
One night, crouched down under a hill of wet mud, and guzzling from a
flask with two companions in the trench, he had seen the face of his
“buddy” literally torn off by shrapnel as he tilted the bottle Stevey
had just handed him, to his lips.
The mess and the splatter were to remain irretrievably mixed in Steve’s
mind with the taste of alcohol, the mere sight of it to recall the
terrible sight of a friend’s face in the act of being blown to pulp.
Here was Steve, almost through no volition of his own, swept into the
scheme of the little two-family house on Tallahassee Street, Claire,
plumpish by now, awaiting him evenings, a normal youngster at her
skirts, in a doorway that had his monogram embroidered in its lace
curtain.
The Steve Schuylers at Number 1569½ Tallahassee Street, rent-payers,
water-tax payers, seat- and presently pew-holders, had fallen into
place. The Schuyler escutcheon had remained unviolated; and the Old
Gentleman, as time went on, came more and more to cast prideful eye
upon his first great-grandchild, Pauline, as she toddled out to meet
him on his less and less frequent visits into Centralia.[39]
Another Schuyler rivet had tightened the impeccable family-machine.
Respectability. Conservatism. Republicanism (consistently up to
this time!). Law-abiders. Voters. God-fearers. Rotarians. Masons.
Policy-holders.
Two years after his return from the World War, Stevey was carrying
fifteen-hundred-dollars life-insurance, depositing one dime a day in
a toy bank toward his daughter’s Vassar College education, lunching
once a week at a Blue Plate Booster’s Club in the Renchler Block,
voting the straight Republican ticket for Harding, and spending his
Sunday mornings flat on his back under the Ford five-seater in the
corrugated portable garage which he shared with the second tenant of
the two-family dwelling.
In the shy coming-together of Stevey and Claire after the convulsion
of their flying-apart, the bone, true to physiology, seemed to have
cemented more firmly than before the break.
Years after, when the name of a Schuyler was up before the state for
the highest honor bestowable upon one of its citizens, someone in
opposing political ranks did attempt the moss-grown device of trying
to probe out an irregularity in the social history of David Schuyler’s
nephew Stephen. A far-fetched gesture at best, and one, even had it
been successful, that was almost sure to have proved futile.
But to try to penetrate the Schuyler armor of social integrity was like
trying to wound the flank of the Himalayas with a bow and arrow.
It was the year that Stevey, with what he considered the hindrance,
rather than the advantage of an uncle the governor of his state, and a
mother the first woman alderman of the town of Centralia, was elected
second vice-president and treasurer of the Giles Tool Works.
Someone’s faint scent of something hurried connected with the marriage
was too faint for even the political vandals to fasten upon. To be
sure, Steve Schuyler and his wife were first-cousins. Scarcely a fact
to unmake governors.
When Bek Schuyler heard of the feeble intrigue, she smiled. A skeleton,
and not much of a one at that, and whose bones by now were soft with
decay, could scarcely be expected to rattle for the political gentlemen.
* * * * *
So far as Dave was concerned, Claire’s little house on Tallahassee
Street was to become the center around which an assorted set of his
adolescent emotions were to dash themselves.
When Dora Tarkington was sixteen, and wore her curls in two round, flat
mats against her ears, she attended what was then known as the South
Tallahassee High School.
It was after a sharp attack of influenza, during one of the frequent
epidemics that swept the country those first years after the War, that
an arrangement was made for Dora to have her lunches hot at the Steve
Schuylers’, instead of the cold snack she was obliged to carry with her
the two miles from home.
Nowadays, when Steve returned from the Works for his midday meal, there
was Dora, whom they had known since she could toddle, to swell the
little family circle that drew up to table.
It pleased Claire to have special little daintinesses in her honor; and
since Len Tarkington had bartered in vain for some kind of a financial
arrangement to cover these lunches—Stevey withdrawing offended from the
argument—every day Dora, who was incomparable at handiwork, arrived
with some bit of surprise. A woolen chicken for Claire’s eldest little
girl. A sheer pink underthing for Claire herself, or a plover-egg with
a hand-painted face for the small boy who could crawl, and a tiny
crocheted cap for the baby.[40]
Claire’s little house in Tallahassee Street had to it the agreeable
untidiness of high, unevenly-drawn window-shades that admitted sunlight
in glaring streams across the rooms, youngsters crawling through them
and littering the floors with toys, building-blocks and noise-devices.
She was perpetual motion at stooping, snatching, admonishing, warning,
a wisp of her pretty, taffy hair constantly blown across her flustered
face; and in just such proportion as her activities seemed to increase,
her pretty kind of plumpness crept up on her.
Sweet Claire. She had feathered her nest. At noon and at evening, Steve
turned to it eagerly. Sometimes, at the corner, he consciously slowed
his step, to seem, from some perversity in him that gave him periods of
self-detestation, to enter the home she had made for him, a little less
enthusiastically.
Like her mother’s before her, Claire’s ineffable sweetness was like a
drug. It swam into the senses. It was into Stevey’s senses long before
he knew it. It had him quelled, caught, stabilized. It made a Rotarian
out of the rebel in him. It was sweet to submit to the little tropic
he had married himself into. The tropic of warm, sun-drenched, or
lamplight-drenched home, griddle-cake breakfasts, with the aroma of
little-pig sausages; the cleanest, deepest of beds; the warm, sweet
body of the woman who bore him warm, sweet children. Her intellectual
languor was part of her sweetness, just as it was part of her danger.
Along with the sweetness of those first years, there was just a little
terror of them. Submission. Old rebellions dying. Cravings—old inchoate
beauties—finally, just the sweetness.
The lace curtains in the front parlor of the house on Tallahassee
Street came to have for Steve the living, breathing quality of Claire
herself. She was so warmly behind them, at his coming. At his going.
They stirred faintly of her breath. They were a badge of her.
Sometimes Claire, who was even then locally and affectionately known
as a congenital match-maker, used to stand behind these lace curtains,
tiptoe, to watch for the noonday approach of Dora, usually in the
company of Kenneth Chipman, who was junior partner in his father’s
law-office, just across the street from Tallahassee High.
Kenneth was a campus-looking young fellow, with the first thatch of
patent-leather hair that had reached Centralia, and one of those
figures shaped like the map of South America. Heavy, flaring shoulders,
tapering off into slim, flat hips. He was a graduate of the State
University, a winner of a state oratorical contest; pounded a wicked
ukulele and already, his second year out of college, had his name
on the ground-glass door of the offices of Chipman and Lare, Patent
Attorneys.
His brother Lynn, killed at Amiens, had been the white hope of the
two white-haired senior members of that office. After his death, the
legend grew rapidly that Lynn had been the most brilliant young legal
mind to ever take up practice in Centralia. Nevertheless, even with
the precedent of this older brother, a capable enough young fellow,
whom time and a warrior’s death were to canonize into genius, Kenneth,
ukulele-pest that he could be of an evening, was regarded as one of the
up-and-coming younger men of the town.
The third time Claire stood behind her lace curtains and beheld Kenneth
raise his straw cady and walk briskly down the street with many a
backward glance at Dora as she danced upstairs, and another lift of
hat, and another, Claire remarked to her husband that night, as she was
rubbing tonic into his hair before they retired:
“You know, Stevey, looks to me as if young Chipman is smitten on Dora.”
“Rub a little toward the center, dear. Getting right thin, there.”
“Today’s the third time he’s walked from Tallahassee High with her,
noontime.”
“The way to massage the scalp, dear, is with a circular motion of the
fingers. Don’t shove.”
“Henry says he’s a chip off the old block, and already handling some of
his father’s cases, single-handed. Dora’s one darling girl.”
“’Fraid that’ll put Davey’s nose out of joint,” said Steve, hitching
his collar open.
“What do you mean, Davey?”
“Well, haven’t they been smitten with each other ever since they were
crawling?”
“Why, Stevey Renchler, what ever put that idea into your head? Those
two children! I was saying to Aunt Bek the other day, bright as Davey
is in some ways—you know sometimes—I—you know, Stevey, sometimes
I—think, in other ways, Dave’s not so bright.”
“It’s his manner, Claire. He’s either the smartest or the dumbest kid
on earth. Hanged if I can make out which.”
“The way he lies out there, day after day, herding his little old
handful of sheep, stretched by the hour on the flat of his tummy,
reading or mooning—I guess that’s what some folks call bright. He _is_
smart, of course, in a school way. Henriette says he’s ’way ahead of
any boy his age that’s had schooling regular and all—but in general—for
Davey’s age—oh, I don’t know—just kinda funny, loony-looking sort of
kid to me. Him and Dora! Why, poor Davey, I’ll bet he hasn’t more than
laid eyes on her since the family moved from the House on Sycamore
Street.”
“Why, you know better than that, Claire. The days when—when we—how
often did we use to see Dave and Dora playing around south of the
Igrotte house together. Kids, of course, but that’s all I’m saying.
He’s been sweet on her since he could toddle——”
“I wonder,” said Claire, and sat down thoughtfully, in the middle of
the act of unfastening the tiny pearl buttons of her pretty little
home-made house-dress. “Davey _is_ more her type—I guess.”
“The kid puzzles me,” said Steve and yanked hard at the rear button of
his collar. “Can’t make up my mind about him.”
“Oh, I don’t mean I really think he’s queer, Steve. I didn’t mean that.
It’s all of you nagging him, I think, that confuses him, as much as
anything. After all, he’s only seventeen. Dave happened to come along
in bad times. He’s never had the chance of mixing and schooling the
rest of you had. First came the family-crash and then the War and all.
After all, he’s only a youngster.”
“Old enough by now to know his own mind, you’d think.”
“Not a mind like Davey’s.”
“If you aren’t the greatest girl! Here you’ve been wondering why Dave
didn’t get a move on and take a real job, and the minute I agree——”
“But I mean, Stevey, lots of times a boy growing up—alone-like in a
big family—nobody much to talk to except Henry, who’s a pretty queer
darling duck too—a boy like that gets to feeling around with his mind
in every direction, and for all we know—some day—he may come out all
right.”
“Something in that. Shame he’s had the least schooling of us all. In
his way, Davey’s bright enough. Dave’s deep.”
“Maybe. Only it’s my observation that still water doesn’t necessarily
run deep. Maybe it doesn’t run at all.”
“Things just didn’t break right for him, or for the family, about the
time he came along.”
“’Course, he’s had Henry.”
“That’s something.”
“Something! Henry’s not appreciated in this town. A fellow like Henry
can have a far finer influence over a fellow than all the schools put
together. Look how thick they are. Always puttering together over books
and ant-hills and maps. Let me tell you, Henry’s a liberal education in
himself.”
“Yes, if he doesn’t go putting crazy ideas in the youngster’s head. You
see how far his brains have gotten Henry, don’t you? Look at what his
ideas on war got for him.”
“But there’s just one beauty about Dave. You can’t topple over that
youngster. He’s that square on his feet.”
“That’s true enough. Remember that time, over at Bek’s, Henry was
lecturing on the wrongness of making war possible, and up piped that
youngster from a corner where he’d been lying on his stomach with his
chin propped up in his palms, and says: ‘But, Henry, you can’t end war
by not fighting in it when the war comes. It’s folks you’ve got to
change beforehand, so there won’t be any war.’ Jove, I thought that
about said it in a nutshell. That kid’s got the kind of mind believes
in preventive medicines, so the world doesn’t get the measles. Not what
to do about it when the measles have come.”
“That’s too deep for me.”
“Other evening, when I went out to the Igrotte house to help
Grandfather and Dave lay those shingles, I was looking around for the
kid, and finally I find him lying barefoot, in his overalls, up against
a hay-rick, star-gazing. ‘Say, you’re getting pretty well along for
this barefoot-boy-and-cheeks-of-tan stuff,’ I said to him, ‘How do you
get that way?’ And what do you think he answered?”
“What?”
“‘You know, that fellow Malthus,’ he says. ‘Who?’ I asked. ‘Malthus.’
I thought at first he said Methuselah. Malthus, it seems, was a
fellow who worked out that the population of the world doubles every
twenty-five years!”
“My!”
“Well, Davey must have been lying there thinking about it.”
“Henry’s doings.”
“Because he said to me—‘Just suppose for argument, Malthus was
over-stating, and the population only doubles every fifty or a hundred
years. Where are we going to get food after a while? Eats and stuff.
Where are we going to have room enough to grow enough grain and graze
enough cattle, if the population crowds up the earth like that?’”
“Why, Stevey—working his brain on such stuff when we’ve plenty of
pasture-land around here can be rented for a song. Of all things....”
“That’s the whole point, Claire. There’s a kid with a long head on him.
That youngster, lying there, had thought out something for the future,
where most of us only have the brains to see what’s right under our
noses, and then only maybe.”
“You mean, Henry’s like that, and he’s making Dave like that?”
“No, sir. Henry had been reading to him about Malthus, all right, but
darned if the youngster hadn’t worked the rest out for himself.”
“Well, he’s either right smart or right dumb.”
“A dummy doesn’t work things out for himself. He got me thinking, too.
Just as the youngster said, if we can harness the air and electricity
and water and sun to work for us, why can’t we get busy on the
waste places of the world and make them produce for us. Hundreds of
thousands of miles of desert and prairie and sand are waiting for man’s
ingenuity to reclaim them—darn shame, Dave has seen leaner days than
any of the rest of us. I think it’s put age on the Old Gentleman and
Grandmother—just worrying about it.”[41]
“Well, you know the saying, Steve, you can’t keep a good man down,”
said Claire, with her mother’s rather dreadful amiability, and mouthing
her decrepit observation in the key of having discovered a truth.
“Well, I hope to heaven ‘good’ is the word. Certainly does seem a
fellow his age ought to have a preference for something by now. I
offered six months ago to chip in to pay the wage of a hired-man for
the Old Gentleman, in case Dave might be wanting to scratch around for
a job in town. The Old Gentleman himself keeps trying to oust him out
of the nest.”
“You know, I think Isaiah Clark would be willing to give Dave a job
in his Seed and Feed Store, seeing how Dave’s so interested in making
things grow.”
“Oh, Lord, honey, you see the point about as readily as Grandfather’s
old blind mare sees oats. Besides, Isaiah hasn’t had a boy in there
since Joe Mintz was killed in the War. I’m not in strong at the shops
enough to be asking any favors, but it looks to me as if I ought to be
able to get Davey in at the Works. There’s a future there for a boy
who’s willing to work up from the foundry. Look at Sime Giles!”
“So you think,” said Claire, still sitting in the huddle of
her half-open dress, her pretty pink mouth a little open,
“so—you—think—Davey’s sweet on Dora!”
“I don’t think!” said Steve, and went shushing off to the bathroom, in
bed-slippers hand-scalloped by Claire, “I _know_!”