[39] ... that was the winter Stevey’s eldest child Pauline accompanied
her father and me to Washington, and the young Marquis de Fressac fell
so immediately in love with her. From the very first, her interest in
politics was to run neck and neck with the social lures her beauty
and personality created about her. It was characteristic of Pauline
that she should choose both. Considering the part she played during
her senatorship, and the influence she exerted both in France and in
America as a social force, it is difficult to estimate in which field
my granddaughter is succeeding most brilliantly. As my son-in-law de
Fressac puts it in his delightfully French manner, “Eet ees een both.”
[40] ... growing up, as she did, in a generation of girls to whom
handiwork was practically an obsolete art, loving gayety, filled
with a social instinct and with a brilliant gift for popularity,
Dora, in a curious way, was not quite of her time. She rode horseback
and crocheted all the edgings for her underwear. She won the local
golf-championship the year her piccalilli took first prize at the State
Fair. Never in his married life did Dave wear a shirt or a tie that was
not personally selected by her.
[41] ... looking back, I can see now, how early this idea was boring
itself into Davey’s brain. In her monograph about him, the late Eda
Eberhardt, Centralia’s librarian, relates how she was obliged to
deprive him of reading-room privileges one week because of his habit
of poring over maps and pencil-marking the deserts, mountains, and
prairies.
He once related to me, word for word, the doctrine of Malthusianism,
as it had been passed on to him by Henry, drawing his own critical
deductions, and evidently thinking about the relativity of population
and land.
He could never bear to see idle land. Even the stony little nooks and
corners surrounding the Igrotte house gave up odds and ends of the most
heterogeneous yield. Mushrooms under the back porch. A potato-patch
he had somehow scratched into being, on a rocky little ledge of land
behind the barns. Even out of the powdery, dry front yard he had eked
beets and carrots.
Much of my own later success with crop-rotation I owe to his helpful
co-operation in those days when his significant back-to-the-farm
policies must just have been taking shape in his mind.
[Illustration: Decorative Image]
_Chapter Twenty-five_
The following afternoon, at the Igrotte house, where Claire had enticed
an inert Stevey for a five-mile walk through the somnolence of a
Sunday, Claire remarked to Dave, who came up on the back porch looking
sweaty from having rubbed down a mare:
“Did you know Dora Tarkington has her lunches at our house now, Dave?
She’s in her second year at Tallahassee High.”
“No,” said David, breathing very softly as if by that device he could
restrain the fact that, at Claire’s remark, every pore in his body
seemed to leap to attention.
“Yes. Ought to see her. Right young-ladyfied. Gets herself escorted to
the very door by Kenneth Chipman, if you please, and is going to take
the kindergarten course when she finishes Tallahassee.”
“Yeh,” said Davey. He was sitting on the railing of the back porch,
Claire on the topmost step, hulling a pan of peas for Mathilda. They
made little tin-dripping sounds, as they clattered from under her
fingers. To Davey, sitting there, swinging one bare foot, and trying to
watch them casually, his eyes felt as if they were smeared across his
face.
Claire felt rather than saw them, and with the blurting lack of tact,
worthy of sweet Emma’s sweet daughter, shot out an eager, friendly arm.
“You’re twice the fellow Kenneth is, Davey, if you pull yourself
together and get yourself started.”
“Aw!”
“Dora’s smitten with Kenneth because he’s sort of what you would call
an up-and-comer. Naturally, he’s so much older than you, but she’d
throw him over like that, for you, if you’d give her half a chance,
Dave, by sort of striking out and making your start in life.”
A rush of words, of remonstrances, of shame, clogged into Davey’s
throat, so that he turned toward her a flaming face, which finally
decided to save itself from tears by a flare of anger.
“What’s Dora Tarkington and Kenneth Chipman got to do with me?” he shot
out. “I’d like to know that! I would! What’s anything about—anything
got to do with me. Pumph! as if I care!”
“Oh, then, Dave, you do!”
“Pumph!” When David was just turned fifteen, his face was still almost
the child’s face of square, unset-looking contour, and bangs that he
was just beginning to train backward, but which still persisted in
drooping square-cut over his brow. A lean, childish-looking face, with
eyes that seemed all out of proportion, because the cheeks needed
filling in. Straight, friendly, brown eyes, level as Bek’s, and square
white teeth against tan. It was a young face, even for the lean,
gangling, childish body. A body of the most astonishing sinuosity.
Tough as fibre.[42]
At seventeen, his arms, knobby at the wrists, seemed endless, and his
legs, knobby at the ankles, seemed longer than they were to appear in
his full maturity.
The farm had put its print on David. Drawn him out long and lean and
brown, so that store-clothes struck him mid-arm-and-leg. Even overalls
hit him too high at the waist, and petered out considerably above his
ankles.
Straddling the porch-rail, swinging bare heels into the side of the
house, there was something wounded and cloudy about him and something
of absurd adolescence.
“Pumph! Good gosh! Dora and Kenneth. ’Sthat to me! Good gosh, can’t a
girl and a fellow walk from Tallahassee High to lunch? Good gosh! Good
gosh!”
Poor Claire, on the thought that she was about as subtle as spinach,
Steve could sometimes kiss the lobe of her ear, a little ashamed that
it endeared her. So now:
“I just thought, Davey,” she said to the ring of the quick peas dancing
down into the pan,—“I just kinda thought—you and Dora—growing up
together—maybe you—maybe she—it’s nice to see girls and boys that grow
up together sort of go on together—that is, if—of course, only, that
is, only if——”
“Well, ’tain’t,” said Dave, and jumped down off the frail rail,
and walked with a casual whistling toward the barn, and crawled as
high into the hayloft as he could, burrowing in and in and in, like
something wounded that wanted to lie hurt and alone.