[46] I can recall little in Dave’s boyhood that pointed to what was
later to become his capacity for public life. On the contrary, he was a
peculiarly diffident lad, never thrusting himself to the fore, unless
impelled to do so by the violence of the urge of an idea.
He was stiff, even gawkish with girls. His encounter with Kenneth
Chipman, Dora Tarkington, and the dog, told elsewhere in this
willy-nilly journal of mine, gives some idea of his adolescent aplomb
where the fair sex was concerned.
In a lifetime that was to be crowded with public addresses of the most
portentous kind, he has repeatedly told of himself, in the privacy
of a family-dinner, and to our reminiscent merriment, that he never
approached any rostrum with drier throat or stiffer tongue than he
experienced on a certain Saturday afternoon, when he directed his
footsteps toward the Tarkington place for his first formal visit to
Dora.
[47] AUTHOR’S NOTE.—The House on Sycamore Street has since been taken
over by the state, and is open to the public three days a week.
[48] ... when Dora’s Nemo died, the Tarkingtons held funeral for him in
their own parlor. David, who was then “spittoon and sawdust boy” for a
wholesale-grocery firm in Springfield, sent six carnations.
[49] So far as any of us seem to remember, David as a child did not
display propensity for public speaking. I do recall time and time again
seeing him, under strain or nervousness, use his famous arm-plunging
gesture. I particularly recall once, his running to me, over a really
terrible incident that had to do with his dog Teddy and my son. His
dramatic pantomime, as he tried to tell me that story, matches up with
some of his subsequent performances from the platform. But as a growing
boy, it is fair to say that my brother gave no prophecy whatsoever of
the oratorical force which was to penetrate his country to the core.
It was with an amazement that bordered upon actual incredulity, that
Phil and I sat in the little spectators’ gallery, the first year of his
election to state senate and heard him deliver a ringing and inspired
plea for a lowly sewerage-bill, that somehow, by his presentation, he
made magnificent in its scope.
[50] ... at a dinner given at the State Mansion in honor of a legation
about to depart for Russia on a tour of observation, Dora, telling
this story to a group of old Middleton and Centralia friends, stopped
short in the middle of it, heavy tears over her eyes, and regarded my
brother, the then Governor, quite helplessly, unable to proceed.
With his usual alertness to emergency, and his unfailing understanding
of her, he picked up the story where she had left off, concluding it in
a gale of merriment shared by the entire company.
Later, Dora confided to me that suddenly, the pathos of the memory of
that boy back there, battling for her so absurdly and so valiantly
through soapsuds, simply rose and choked her, making it impossible for
her to conclude an anecdote to which the Governor always listened with
the relish of hearing it for the first time.
It is characteristic of him that he never again asked her to tell the
story, or repeated it in her presence.
[Illustration: Decorative Image]
_Chapter Thirty_
There followed days and weeks, and then months, when the fervor for
his father’s patch of farm became an obsession. The security of long
days, sunk up to the aching arm-sockets in chores that had to do with a
clogged water-pipe, milking at dawn, currying for Nemo, sheep-driving
by starlight, manure that steamed as he pitched it, pip among the
wyandottes, new tin rain-gutters along the house, corn-shucking,
sheep-dipping, hay-pitching, well-digging, sheep-herding.
Then long, secure evenings of further escape from the reality of
humiliation. Flat on his stomach, his aching feet bare, his candle
burning softly through hours of boring concentration on the book in
hand.
During that winter, aided by Henry’s shelves, the Centralia Public
Library, the motley universes of land and sea and firmament jammed up
that little slapsided room under the eaves. Prehistoric monsters out
of Java larger than the Igrotte house itself, performed the miracle
of squatting within its walls. China seas swung within that room,
firmaments wide as Galileo’s, winds spiced in sandalwood.
Pages. Pages. Pages. _Wealth of Nations._ Spencer’s _First Principles_.
_Les Miserables._ _History of the Aztecs._ _Karl Marx._ Sinclair’s
_The Jungle_. _Uncle Tom’s Cabin._ _Famous Speeches of Famous Men._
The “All-Boy” series. _Romance of Pocahontas._ _King Arthur’s Round
Table._ _Tales from Shakespeare._ _History of Colorado._ _Ivanhoe._
_Conquest of Peru._ _Tariff and Its Ramifications._ _Governors of
Utah._ _The Growth of Illinois Transportation._ _Industrial Development
of the Middle West._ _Territorial Period._ _Life of Anthony Wayne._
_Hiawatha._ _Vision of Sir Launfal._ _Sea Reptiles and Mammals of
South America._ _Life of Cecil Rhodes._ Peary’s _The North Pole_.
_How to Build Your Own Hydroplane._ _Gem Collection of After-Dinner
Stories._ _The Five Years Antedating the Russian Revolution._ _Compleat
Angler._ _Vanishing Rights of the State._ _Raffles._ _Shandy._
_Japanese-American Relations._ _Two Boys and a Raft._ _Adonais._
_Cellini’s Autobiography._ _War and Peace._
He was sealed up that winter, all right. Silently. Something fierce
about his kind of silence.
Henry, who sometimes sat abstractedly in his office or room thinking
about it, said nothing.
Mathilda went up to him sometimes, as he sat at table finishing his
meal, as if she would place a hand on his shoulder and get said the
question that seemed perpetually hovering along her lips. Or often, as
he was climbing into his reefer for his dash out into the sleet-bitten
days of that long, cold winter, she would kiss him timidly on the
forehead and bleat of castor-oil.
Strangely, the Old Gentleman, not given to reticence, and communicative
enough, dear knows, on any number of controversial subjects those long
evenings indoors, lapsed into a silence not only toward, but concerning
his youngest. Not an ill-natured silence. Except suddenly the subject
seemed to have lost the power either to interest or irritate him.
Strange wisdoms sometimes were his.
There was about the box-shaped little house during this winter
that lashed it constantly with high winds and blew the dry snow in
tall, uneven drifts about it, a curious kind of abeyance. As if, by
unspoken assent, the moments, as they passed, must be sufficient unto
themselves.
Sometimes, usually with a book open to a chapter that had stumped him,
David crept down to Henry’s room, invariably sure to find him awake and
reading; his feet wrapped in an old gray blanket against the creeping
cold of the house, and his body hunched low in the chair beside his
reading-lamp. Then, for more hours with David huddled alongside of
Henry on the arm of the Morris chair, they pored, and sometimes read
aloud, alternately.
Long, rich, slow evenings, without once a reference to anything except
that which pertained to the world of ideas and homely chores into which
David was so obviously and hermetically sealing himself.
If the family discussed among themselves this prolonged, this
somewhat startling state of hiatus in the case of Davey, it was among
themselves, and then usually not in the presence of Henry.
One day, Bek, striding into the Igrotte house in one of Winslow’s
ulsters, collar turned up and her skirts tucked down into her knee-high
boots, inquired from her mother David’s whereabouts, and then strode
off into the barn where her young brother was fitting an improvised
rope halter across the horns of a young steer.
“Where are you going, Dave?”
“Down to Herkhimer’s with this here steer. Father’s traded him in for
two red sows.”
“Good! I’ll hike along. Old Herk’s got some money coming to him for
putting those Howey red terriers to stud last spring. I’ve got two
pretty sick ewes and a ram over at the farm, Dave. Mind coming back the
long way and stopping to take a look at them? You’ve luck with them.”
“Sure, I’ll come.”
They started off through an afternoon the color of wet slate. Banks
of low snow-clouds, full-looking as udders, blew along. Gusts of damp
air, like wet cloths, flapped against the face. A chilled gray waste of
an afternoon, farmhouses, that could gleam in sun, absolutely shrunk
and huddled-looking, and the back road writhing along in two frozen
wheel-ruts.
Suddenly Bek stopped, and with a lack of diplomacy that characterized
her, tilted back David’s face with her large, mittened hand.
“What’s the matter, Dave? Bilious or in love?”
He jerked away sore and hurt.
“Quit!”
“I’d much rather it was your liver than your heart, Dave.”
“Fine way to talk.”
“Why?”
“There’s some things just aren’t talked about.”
“What? Livers?”
“No.”
“Hearts?”
“For goodness’ sake, Bek—honest—such talk makes me sick.”
“But, at least, if it’s the liver, you can talk about it in terms as
definite as calomel. Is it, Dave?”
“Honestly, Bek, if that’s what you’ve come along for ...”
“I’m a great believer in preventive medicine. But if it’s heart,
there’s not much to do about it but let it run its course, and kill or
cure. My own experience, and my children’s, have taught me that.”
“Well, then—well, then—it’s a good thing to profit by experience.”
She touched his cheek lightly with her mittened hand. Poor old Dave!
The rushing sensation was immediately behind his tonsils again, and
the appalling fear that, behind his high-power glasses, tears would
spurt; and, that these might not, he broke into a laugh. A laugh
that cut against the grain, because it was so absurd and young and
pain-addled. It moved his sister to want to put out her hand and tuck
him somewhere close inside Winslow’s ulster. But she did nothing of the
sort. Instead, she swung a little ahead, level almost with the steer’s
lightly roped horns, looking quite away from him across the stubble of
corn-fields that were stiff with old runts, and rattled.
“Life isn’t so black as it can sometimes seem at seventeen, Dave. As a
matter of fact, fellows like your brother Henry and Phil were pretty
confirmed misanthropes before they were twenty. Are you at that stage
Dave?”
“You’re always tabulating people, Bek. A fellow can’t pass an ordinary
remark without you trying to fit him into one of your pigeonholes of
life.”
“Adolescence pigeonholes rather easily, Davey.”
“I’m not talking about adolescence, I’m talking about life.”
“It’s adolescence makes you talk that way about life.”
“Well, any blamed fool can sing a song of sixpence about it. What’s it
to sing about, anyways? The poets are your truly sensitive spirits.
‘Things are not what they seem, life is but an empty dream.’ Know that
one? It’s by——”
“And you’re the boy who used to talk to me about the men who fly and
the men who explore and the men who rule and the men who do! Why, you
used to act as if everything mattered to you so terribly, that you
couldn’t make up your mind which mattered most.”
“Then and—and now are two different matters.”
“How different?”
He turned on her a pair of scarred-looking boyish eyes that scowled and
blinked behind their glasses.
“Don’t!” he said.
“Don’t what?”
“Quiz—please——”
They marched through the soupy gray in silence, except for the clopping
hoofs of the steer and the low moan of wind rattling the corn-runts.
At the Herkhimer farm, a mean one, of squat building and outhouses,
Gramaw Herkhimer, a furiously old walnut of a woman, in a perpetual
gray head-shawl against neuralgia, came limping around to the barn at
sight of Bek; and nothing short of coffee in her small and spotless
kitchen, and chunks of corn-bread, just from the hot stove-top, would
do. Dave, and one of the Herkhimer boys, a great loutish fellow of
twenty, of the group who told sickening stories about country-bumpkin
girls, must come in too, and take their coffee out of great, ironstone,
thick-lipped cups, into which the corn-bread “dunked” deliciously.
A coal-range of magnificent draught roared in one corner, and a huge
pan of Gramaw Herkhimer’s dough, rising to the yeast, overflowed its
sides like a fat pig. A warm, sour-smelling little old kitchen, which
Bek seemed to cram to the raftered ceiling with her enormous presence.
Her incredible capacity for detail with these people! No subject
too small to snag her interest. Gramaw Herkhimer’s tatting. Old man
Herkhimer’s chilblain. Chest-protectors for Herkhimer babies. There
were three of them lying asleep alongside her ailing daughter in
another room. Woolen wristlets. Geranium-cuttings. Drunken son-in-law.
First-communion veil for little Maggie Herkhimer. Bacon-cracklings.
Then nothing would do but a jar of apple-butter to be wrapped and sent
home to Winslow. Back in the old days, High Ridge Farm had practically
fed the Herkhimers. Maggie Herkhimer, gaunt and pale, and interminably
tall in a mother-hubbard that hit her above breast, elbows, and ankles,
came in, all rumpled from napping, to thank Bek for the loan of a
small crutch for her second boy, who had broken a leg, in almost the
identical position Stew had at that same age. They had gone to school
together, Maggie Herkhimer and Bek. They both looked their age. The one
rather magnificently. Maggie, as if the years had hamstrung her.
It was a warming, heartening, little interval. It made the walk back to
Bek’s farm silent, this time, because facing the wind, it caught at the
breath and shortened it, seem not so penetratingly damp and cold.
The two ewes and the ram, sunk in clean straw, went in the smaller
of the two splendidly-equipped barns. Their nozzles came up softly;
and just as Dave was putting aside the medicine-dropper, after having
ministered to the shivering creatures with a curiously adhesive touch
of hand that was never to desert him, this overwhelming thing happened:
Bek, who had gone directly up to the house, came into the barn,
Winslow’s reefer removed now, and a white sweater hanging across her
shoulders.
“Dave, I wish you would wait a minute.”
“Mother needs wood——”
“——and walk Dora Tarkington home as you go back. She’s spent the day
here, helping Winslow paper the dining-room in that pretty grass-cloth
they’re using now. Paula sent it. I wouldn’t let him touch the Howe
walls, so between the two of them, they’ve made a set of panels that
fit on. They say at school, Dora’s that tasty she ought to take up
interior decoration. It’s long walk, and those snow-clouds make it
seem dusk so early. Here she comes now, Davey. Walk her home.”
The figure of Dora, in a woolly white sweater and woolly white cap, and
her short, pleated skirts flying, came down the walk.
“Why!” she said, and stopped short, the light popping out in her eyes
and her cheeks, “I didn’t know—Dave was here.”
“Didn’t you?” said Bek drily. “Well, he is,” and walked off toward the
house, and slam, bang, into it.[51]