[53] Leslie died yesterday. I suppose we were what you would call
prepared for the end. Winslow closed his eyes. The President of the
United States drew a sheet up over his face. He lies downstairs in a
white coffin. At forty-eight Leslie’s coffin would have to be white.
He never had any age to him. Only youth. I can’t realize that my boy
who remained a child for me is gone. To think I must go on waking up
every day and never again know what it is to be needed by him—my dear
darling——
[Illustration: Decorative Image]
_Chapter Thirty-three_
For thirty years, the Howey family, with a wealth of social and
intermarriage connections that extended beyond the state to the Eastern
seaboard and Europe, had exchanged the niceties of Christmas puddings,
cider and Thanksgiving, walnuts off the Howey trees, and minced meat
out of Mathilda’s larders. And every fall, up to the year of her death,
Kate Howey had sent Mathilda the first cuttings of dill from her
kitchen garden. A custom which Shirley, the eldest Howey girl, Princess
von Windigger now of Vienna, kept alive, along with others of her
mother’s homely habits, cabling instructions to the caretaker of the
old homestead.
Every Christmas, the Governor, who was indebted to Henry on a hundred
counts (not least among them the hushing-up of an ugly land-deal
involving Loring Howey the Governor’s second son) sent him, whether
from Madrid, Washington, Paris, or Buenos Aires, where Loring now had
headquarters, a box of fifty Habana cigars and a gray-silk muffler.
The remaining two Howey boys, Tom and Weston never failed to drop into
the office above the hardware store on their infrequent visits “back
home.”
There existed a rather formal _entente cordiale_ between the home-grown
Schuylers and the globe-trotting Howeys.
A Schuyler was always sure of a gracious reception from a Howey. A
Howey was known to cater to a vote long after the immediate need for it
was past.
This relationship had never been tested beyond this insular one of the
neighborhood. Bek Schuyler and Shirley Howey were within six months
of the same age. But while Shirley had been educated in Switzerland,
Bek had attended Centralia public schools. Henry had attended the
state-endowed university, and Tom Howey, who was also a lawyer, Yale.
The Howeys respected the Schuylers. Although not one of them would
admit it, except perhaps Emma, who was a family-joke on the subject,
and to whom a Howey was a Cabot, every Schuyler secretly nourished a
wistful kind of admiration for the Howeys; an admiration that dated
back somewhere from childhood. The preponderant magnificence of
gubernatorial prestige. The fine old Howey homestead. The debonair
habits of wealth. The comings and the goings of the Howeys in
motor-cars, years before the Ford and the tractor had inundated the
countryside with the fecundity of locusts. Shirley Howey was the first
woman in the county to ride a horse astride. Loring Howey laid out a
nine-hole golf-course along the left flank of his father’s estate,
years before the Whittier Country Club was even dreamed of. The Howeys
dressed for dinner. With the exception of Henry, a Schuyler had never
owned a dress-suit.
A Howey was perennially exciting to a Schuyler, exotic, mysteriously
and a little splendidly, alien.
Claire cut out _Spur_ and _Vanity Fair_ photographs of Shirley von
Windigger, and every other imaginable snapshot of her she could lay
hands on, and tried, with her own pale and fluffy hair, to imitate her
sleek-groomed coiffures, and from one photograph of her, with her two
little girls, charming in their Kate Greenaway dresses, proceeded to
dress her own little girls in like manner.
A Schuyler just naturally revered a Howey.
Another favorite family-joke was to get Phil, who was Loring’s age,
started at defending the rather notoriously black sheep of the Howey
family. They had been boys together during the period of a scrum
baseball-team and swimming-hole days, before Loring was shipped off to
Grout’s Academy in Pennsylvania. Phil could be bitter with loyalty to
Loring.
The Ex-Governor, who at eighty-seven still had the aggressive
bison-like lunge of head that had crashed him through two of the most
tumultuous terms in the history of the state’s legislation, was seated,
the night Bek arrived on her mission, in his small study of red leather
and mahogany, that was dominated by an oil-panel of himself, painted by
Sargent, the year of his election to second term.
It was little more than an anteroom, and smelled of camphor and
slip-covers. Except his bedroom, it was in fact, the only room there
had been time to unwrap for him on the heels of his wire, announcing
his coming.
The old Ex-Governor who had dined alone off a small table drawn up
before the fireplace, greeted her with his inquisitive, appraising
eyes, in a face more shrunken than she recalled it, but their alertness
and their shrewdness undimmed by the years which had got at his body so
and gnarled it.
“By Gad, Bek, you haven’t changed a hair in the last ten years,” he
said, and lied gallantly and with the politician’s reflex for the
diplomatic word at any price.
Bek had gained thirty pounds in that period. And knew it.
“Nor you, Governor,” she lied back. “Where do you get your own special
kind of immunity from the years?”
“Don’t!” he said, with the shadow of almost his only fear flickering
across the uneven surface of his face. “I’m a goner, Bek! Angina
pectoris. Fatal as hell. Two years at the outside will see my finish.”
“Nonsense!”
“How’s your father?”
“Father holds his own, considering.”
“Ever get a penny out of that hound Milliken?”
“He died two years ago, intestate, so far as we were able to find out.”
“And his son?”
“One of the heaviest tax-payers in Toronto.”
“One of the orneriest scoundrels ever came out of his state.”
“They’ve made it hard sledding for us, Governor.”
“Hit the whole gang of you, eh?”
“Yes, we seem to be like that. As my brother Phil puts it, united we
stood and united we fell.”
“Phil’s the third one, isn’t he? How’s he doing?”
“Well, Phil’s the kind of fellow, Governor, good head on him, but
somehow always standing just on the verge of something big that never
quite comes off. As a matter of fact, he hasn’t done much more than
make a living since—since our—crash. But I understand he’s got some
right good prospects now on some sort of an airship deal a group of
Springfield business men are trying to negotiate with the Government.”
“Wish it to him. And Henry? Still trapesing along, wasting himself on
a one-horse town? There’s a fellow could have brought himself and his
state glory, if he’d had guts. I was never so fixed, you know that,
Bek, what with conditions I had to contend with in office, that I
could throw as much in his way as I’d liked to, but he knew, from me
a-telling him, I’d have backed him for anything within reason.”
“Henry Schuyler, Governor, is a big tragedy to everybody in this state
except himself. And, possibly—me. No man is a failure, Governor, if
he has eyes that er—a—as we say it in elocution—see the glory of the
coming of the dawn. Henry wouldn’t turn a hand to earn for himself some
of that glory—but he sees it, all right.”
“Well, all that’s pretty fine for the hymn-books, but where’s it got
him? One-horse lawyer to every two-by-four case in the county. All
right for a man to sponsor the under dog, so long as he doesn’t weaken
his power for helping by remaining one of the under-dogs himself.”
“Lot in what you say, Governor. Here’s Henry, who’s probably handed out
back-stair wisdom in every important case in this state in the last
twenty years, barely eking out a living for himself and for the fund
we somehow manage to keep going among us children for the old folks,
without their knowing just exactly what it is keeps them going.”
“Old Gentleman won’t stand for any out-and-out hell from his children,
eh? I’ll wager that. Great character there. Stuff that the salt and the
magnesia of the earth are made of. Old fellows like him are what the
language manipulators, down Washington, are always referring to as the
bulwarks of society.”
“If ever a man stood for just that, I guess it is Father. Pretty much
of a crude proposition on the outside, but at heart, he’s the most
uncompromising idealist I know. Father’s been a rich man and a poor
man in his day but the one quality in him that hasn’t swerved with his
fortunes is his integrity. He hasn’t got much of any thing to show for
it in a worldly way, but Father’s far from a failure in my eyes. He’s
lived what he believes.”
“Well,” said the Governor, with his eyes suddenly seeming to shrivel
into two scars, “maybe he hasn’t got much of anything to show for the
years, and maybe he has. At least he hasn’t got a brace of sons that
have taken his life’s blood. You don’t need me to tell you Bek, the
pretty penny my two boys have cost me since the day they were born, to
say nothing of—of—keeping one of them out of penitentiary.”
Bek didn’t. Her knowing it so well, and his referring to it at this
time, made what she had come to ask the harder.
“I understand Governor, indeed I do. No, Father’s not had what you’d
call a particularly brilliant brood of us, but—well—our boys have
spared father much of what you’ve been through.”
“Spared. Your father has a fine bunch of men to show. How’s the
after-thought the Old Gentleman sprung on us some years back? That boy
ought to be along in his teens now.”
“Davey’s—let me see—going on eighteen——”
“You don’t tell me! Lord, don’t a fellow ever get old enough to get
over surprise at the way time sneaks up on him. I remember meeting the
Old Gentleman down at the bank, day or two after the boy was born—‘Hi,
Schuyler,’ I said to him, ‘hear you been doin’ some tardy propagatin’
of this here vale of tears. Don’t you know there’s a birth-control
bill up in this state?’ ‘Birth-control,’ barks the Old Gentleman,
‘birth-control poppycock! All that’s the matter with propagation is the
quality. More and better propagation is my slogan.’ There’s a card for
you, if ever there was one. ‘More and better propagation,’ he says to
me. ‘Well, sir, I hope that last kid is more and better propagatin’.’”
“Davey—well, Dave’s a peculiar child, Governor. Coming along as he did,
so long after the rest of us—growing up alone, you might say—Mother,
bless her heart, treating him more like a grandchild than one of her
own, most of his uncles and nieces twice his age, war coming along
right in the middle of his childhood, Father’s reverses, well—somehow,
never has seemed to me Dave’s had a ghost of a chance.”
“You mean he isn’t ...”
“Oh, he’s got the levelest head of any child you ever saw. Good bit of
a dreamer, too. Dave’s the kind of a child you can’t tell much about
while he’s growing up, and, all of a sudden, he turns out to be—a
something or just—just a kind of nothing. Know what I mean Governor?”
“You mean, if he’s a dog, he’s a dog, or if he’s leopard, the spots
haven’t come through yet?”
“Sort of. I just mean Dave’s what you might call still-water in a way,
but I’ve the feeling about him that he not only runs deep, but that he
runs wide. A regular little Mississippi.”
“What’s he doing?”
“Well, I guess you might say, not much of anything That is—I think
what I have just been telling you is why Dave isn’t doing more than
he is in a—a regular sort of way, I mean. Dave’s had no schooling to
speak of but Henry’s influence, I always say, is more than a college
certificate. Dave’s got curiosity, Governor. ‘Intellectual curiosity,’
Henry labels it. Nothing satisfies that boy short of learning
everything there is to know about everything.”
“What did you say he’s doing now?”
“Oh, well—truth of it is—Dave’s just around the farm yet. No job in the
regular sense. The Igrotte place isn’t much more than kitchen garden,
but—well it’s just as I say, Governor, Davey hasn’t had the deal the
rest of us children had. He just growed, like Topsy. Father’s needing
him most of the time for herding and chores. Course he’s had Henry.
Even without what you might call proper schooling, that’s an influence
not one boy in a thousand comes under.”
“Great deal in what you say.”
“Except that Henry’s not what you’d call, in this age we live in,
much of a live-wire. It’s made Davey kinda what you’d call a stagnant
little fellow. Hope to goodness it don’t mean he’s going through life
thataway. It’s the wrong age to be born into, if you’re slow-going.
But unless I miss my bet, Dave’s the kind that spends his time growing
cone-shaped, and then watch your cyclone. Not that I mean—well, I guess
about all I can out-and-out say to your question, Governor, is that, at
present, Dave’s tinkering around the farm.”
“Humph!”
“Just the same, his information for a boy is surprising. He can tell
you the distance of a star or recite the Fourteen Points, or, all of
a sudden, tell you something out of Greek literature. He’s got one of
those curious combinations of conservatism and imagination, if you get
what I mean.”
“Humph! Guess you’re about the pick of the crowd, Bek.”
She sat before him, with the scarf fallen back from her large, capable
face, her hair with the gray in it straggling a little from under the
plait of it on top of her head, and her square hands clamping down
tightly on each knee.
“Coming to that. Fact is, at this moment, I’m the failure of the
family, Governor,” she said, forcing his gaze to meet hers, squarely,
“and you know why.”
“I’ve never talked over our business arrangements with you, Bek,
knowing that’s all fixed between you and my overseer, but you know that
I know, from what he tells me, that you’ve done as well with High Ridge
as anybody could—considering two droughts, hoof-and-mouth disease, and
bad crop-conditions the last five years—all things considered——”
How shrewd he was. As if he had not scanned to the penny the detailed
fidelities of her annual reports. He knew to precisely what extent
the High Ridge was a going-concern, and to what extent its expert
first-hand control had enabled it to yield richly on his investment
Sly old rogue. He knew, and his old eyes slid under her square gaze for
the moment, but she captured them fast again with her own.
“All things considered. You mean High Ridge hasn’t paid?”
“Not exactly that——”
“I can show you, Governor, a five-per-cent yield even on your war
years.”
“Five per cent to a man who makes his money earn almost twice that,
isn’t such a hell of a good investment my dear Bek, if you’ll pardon my
‘hell’.”
“As a matter of fact, Governor, the average of the last four years had
been considerably over that, if you figure——”
“In total, perhaps, but the alfalfa fiasco——”
“You know how I advised against that.”
“Whatever the situation was—and mind you, in any other hands than
yours, there is no doubt but what the case would have been much
worse—the total results from the farm haven’t yet averaged a
particularly good return for my money.”
He lied down her own knowledge of her own figure without as much as the
batting of an old crocodile eyelid, and lying, knew that she knew he
lied.
“You’ve averaged over six per cent on your money,” she repeated,
standing her ground with a cold and even voice.
“Wrong, there. Can show you the figures. What with the cost of upkeep.
Now if we could cut down on the expense of operation——”
So that was what made the old Governor so cagey. Fear that she had come
to demand an increase.
“Governor, you feeling as you do, listen to this. Here’s a proposition.
I’ll buy the place back.”
“Eh?”
“I’ll pay you seven per cent on your money.”
With the lightning perception that his great age had not dimmed, he
saw his trap almost before she had the words out, and with the same
lightning perception, saw its cunning mesh.
What a woman! Damn fine shrewd old girl. Should have been a man. Worth
the whole bunch put together. And as the situation flowed over him, he
began to laugh until his bent old figure rippled along his blue brocade
dressing-gown.
“So! So!”
“With that three-acre triangle just below Algahr’s, and not counting
the artesian well in the drilling, and the two tractors on order, and
the electric milkers, I’ll pay you—forty thousand dollars. Exactly
twenty-five per cent more than the last mortgages I held from you
on practically the same property. The matter of the slightly above
the usual six per cent will be a private matter between you and me.
Six-year term of mortgage, subject to extension for same period.”
“By Gad, I——”
“It’s my land, Governor. That farm’s my child. My very roots are down
in that soil. That’s why, since I’ve lost the land, it has been as if
an arm or a leg of mine were buried somewhere, and keeps hurting even
though it is no longer part of me.”
A curious, half-fanatical flame crept along Bek’s face.
“Sell me back my farm, Governor,” she said, and thrust her burning
countenance closer and closer to his vision. “You’ve so much land. To
you, land is just so much income. So many bushels of wheat. So many
heads of cattle. So many mowing-machines to make it yield. But land, to
me—that land, of that farm, to me—it’s a bosom breathing, Governor!”
“Come, come, now, Bek. Not like you to talk business on a woman-basis.
That’s woman-bosh. If this farm that you know from A to Z is worth that
much to you why isn’t it worth that much to me?”
“I’m glad you asked that Governor, because I can tell you why. It’s
because, with all the conscientiousness in the world, I can’t make
it worth that much to you. Why? Because I’ve lost the creative thing
in me that made me mother to that farm. I’m just its wet-nurse now.
God knows, I’ve given you just about one hundred and one cents on the
dollar, Governor. No glory to me but just on the principle that I’d go
the limit for a child of mine, even though I’d given it out to another
family for adoption. But just the same, Governor, I’ve lost the fire in
me that made me the creator of that farm. I can’t fight for her while
she’s not all mine. It’s not in me. I’m hired. Sell me back my farm,
Governor?”
“You are prepared to buy a forty-thousand-dollar farm?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
She looked at him, aware that her face must be pulled to reveal a
terrible state of eagerness which she did not want revealed to him.
“Right big business, Bek. Forty-thousand-dollar deal! What’s your
proposition?”
“I’ve given it to you.”
“In detail?”
“I’ll pay you out, Governor, barring the first year for
breathing-space, on any—any conditions as to time and amount you
think—fair.”
“How much down?”
She captured his gaze again, squarely to the center of his eyeballs.
“Come now, Governor.”
“Fair question.”
“Nothing—down.”
He drew on a beautifully colored but draughty old meerschaum pipe, with
two ivory antelopes with locked horns on its hump, and laughed softly,
so that the brocade rippled again.
“You’re the best business man in this room, Bek.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised, Governor.”
That tickled him more, so that he laughed out into a high thin, very
old man’s cackle.
“But it takes even a smarter man than you to get curd-and-whey out of
water.”
“You’ve nothing to lose, Governor, by taking a chance on my
legerdemain.”
“Why haven’t I?” he barked.
“Why, if I don’t meet my obligations—the mortgage is in your hands—as
before——”
“So you propose to meet those obligations on a zero foundation?”
“The moment I become even theoretic owner of my farm once more, my
foundation ceases to be zero.”
“How do you mean?”
“I’m a Samson shorn of my locks now, Governor. I’m tied hand and foot.
I’m a hired-hand.”
“Who tied you?”
“You, Governor. Not in so many words; but with somebody else’s
property, one goes safety-first. I’ve had half a dozen schemes in the
last five years I’d have put into practice, if I’d been risking on
my own. On one of my schemes alone, I’d be in a small fortune now.
I’d have gone in for sheep-raising on a new scale hereabouts. I’ve an
experimental-dairy idea that’s been brewing for years. I see money
in alfalfa. Not under the conditions you made me plant three years
ago, but according to my own theories. Remember, I wired you and
you vetoed? I’ve an idea up my sleeve that’ll turn those acres of
corn-fields into quick-turn-over money. Experimental, perhaps, but a
person will experiment with his own, when he won’t take a chance for
another.”
“Something in that.”
“As long as I’m working for you, Governor, I’ll give you the best there
is in me. But the very best isn’t there. I’m a dead thing. My vision
and my imagination and my courage are in my shoes. Sell me back my
land, Governor. Take a sporting-chance on me and I won’t fail you.”
“I won’t live to see whether you do or not,” he said, drily, his eyes
going dull, as if they were mirrors and someone had breathed on them.
“Sell me back my land, Governor. It’s part of my state. It’s part of my
country. It’s part of me.”
“Don’t know but what I will,” drawled the Ex-Governor and sat back
in his leather chair and pulled hard on his pipe with the two ivory
antelopes. “Rotten bad business tactics, but, by Gad—don’t know but
what I will, Bek.”
[Illustration: Decorative Image]
_Chapter Thirty-four_
It was at this precise moment that Dave, after Dora had dashed from him
into the long row of elms, reached the little eminence of land, on his
way home, from where he could see, on one side, the remote, low-lying
roofs of High Ridge, and, on the other, the roof of the Igrotte place.
The moon had come out of its snow-bank, wafer-thin, and throwing a
light the color of steel over the countryside. Fields billowed around
him, as if under his very feet, he could feel the movement of their
flow. Valley whose magnesia of the soil was the soil of his own
make-up. He had that sense of oneness with the ground, as if the roots
of him, like the roots of a tree, flowed down through layers of the
curiously alive earth into sub-strata——
Years of his dreams, dreamed from the flat of his back, had risen off
that soil. Folded close to the deep, the loamy, the fructifying dirt,
what countless times he had dropped his book on its face, to float off
to worlds of pirate and raft, shark and Tartar. North Pole. Airship.
Submarine. Dick Needham. Later, Ivanhoe. de Galis. Tom Brown. Cecil
Rhodes. Galileo. Captain Kidd. Peary. Teddy! Marconi. Orville Wright.
Othello.
Everyone of them had sat on the slope of his hill that slid down on one
side toward Bek’s and on the other side toward the Igrotte house.
Why, buried somewhere on the left slope of hillside was a copy of
Darwin’s _Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication_. He had
played at Captain Kidd burying his treasure on damp spring afternoons.
That was his treasure. For months, it had lain moldering there, waiting
for him to find time to go searching the spot, over which tufts of
grass had grown meanwhile, erasing trace of the ritual.
Dreams had been dreamed here, and now culminating within him, in what
seemed actual spurts of energy, came the first concrete impulse to be
up-and-doing he had ever known.
Here was his soil flowing into a future that seemed suddenly to draw
aside one of its many thicknesses of curtain for him. The future that
was to be flecked with the rise and dip of aeroplanes. The future when
this soil must run fertile and yielding as far as Stefansson had been
able to visualize in the _Northward Course of Empire_. The future that
suddenly was something to arm cap-a-pie for. That he must rush to meet.
The future that suddenly, amidst the vision, the dipping of the planes,
the onward rush of empire, had its nucleus under his feet and stretched
out to new horizons. Suddenly that future became alive. A future of men
whose ideals must rise above the soaring of the planes, or who would be
crashed to earth by them.
A future that was suddenly luminous, because it contained him and Dora
under the rooftree of a semi-detached home of their own making, in a
town called Springfield.
How suddenly and gloriously alive this future, starting under his
feet and radiating outward, chiefly toward Springfield! Clerkship.
Husbandship. Dora!
Something else, too. The something else that was part of that future.
Uncorrelated. The fields all about him were soaked with his dreams;
with his inchoate impulses. To launch new ships. Dreadnoughts, with
nothing to dread, were the only kind of ships that ultimately must
mark man’s ability to rise above his mechanical age.
One thought a great deal about that. Henry said, what good is the
telephone, the telegraph, the aeroplane, the motor-car, if man use
these magnificences of his own inventive brain against himself....
Henry said. Henry said ... Henry said ... somehow swam out of the
vast ether of moving molecules—Henry said! Impulse to warn men lest
the power of brain prove to be a boomerang. Impulse to jerk the world
into compactness by quick navigation of air. To make men less strange
to one another, less afraid of one another, by annihilating distance.
Supremacy of the air must mean just that—not the power of poison-gas.
Henry said——
To tread new altitudes that back, through the ages, only eagles had
dared. To seek new pastures. A world to be tamed by its mechanical
magnificence, not made savage by it. A world to leap to the stars on
the quick mechanical steeds of its achievement, not to hurl bombs from
them—not to rush to intellectual, spiritual, idealistic destruction on
them. Henry said—Henry said——
The impulse to straddle the world as if it were Pegasus gone mad and
check-rein it—Henry’s words—Henry’s words were kindling in one. To
ride toward the stars, instead of into destruction, on a steed with
mechanical entrails and seven-thousand-league hoofs.
And above all, to come back to Dora four years hence, with money in the
pockets of a blue serge suit that was nattier than Kenneth Chipman’s,
and carry her back to a Springfield that had a shingle over his office
door, a client on his books, and a first month’s rent planked down on a
two-family house! Dora!
Against the horizon, from the direction of the Howey place, her
silhouette unmistakable, climbed the figure of his sister Bek, at
enormous stride, even for her. A stride that seemed to spin the road,
a little contemptuously back from under her strong feet. A stride that
somehow, as he stood on his eminence of small hilltop, with a rising
wind flapping his shabby, baggy trousers, filled him with a curious and
comforting sense of inheritance.
Some of that power that made his sister magnificent and his father like
a stanch old phaeton that would carry its burden even when the spring
groaned; that made his brother full of a wisdom that seemed to begin
far behind things and leap so far ahead of them—some of that power must
be his!
There were new ships to launch—somewhere—air ships! Dream-ships come
true. Power!
Why, he had seen his mother, who was full of years and had
fainting-spells, deny her chilblains and walk miles on feet that must
have been fiery and icy furnaces under her. He had seen her, who
sickened at blood finish sticking a knife into a pig, when a farm-hand
cut himself. Even his nephew Stephen, whom he had seen kick in the side
of a dog, had a valor that had pulled him through.
Some of that power, flowing like a mill-stream through his family, must
be in him. Big wheels to turn. Why not? Half of a two-family house in
Springfield—someday—who knows—there was a future to law—corporation
law—if Kenneth Chipman could—well—if Kenneth Chipman could——
His dreams must be struck into life, as one would strike a match into
flame.
As Dora had struck the match of him into flame!
[Illustration: Decorative Image]
_Chapter Thirty-five_
Lopsidedly, the rust-colored, pot-bellied stove in Henry’s office had
whirred through its twenty winters. Second-hand originally, in setting
it up the fourth leg had come off, so that from the beginning, it had
stood propped on two wooden blocks. Its hoarse, hurried whisper was
indissolubly associated with that flimsy-walled room in one of the few
frame buildings that remained on High Street.
It was probably the only coal-stove left in a High Street office. It
had a gaseous, soft-coal breath that hovered over the place even when
August crowded its humidity into the little room. Its soot lay along
the mountain-ridges of the relief-map of North America that occupied
one entire wall, like the grime in the wrinkles of an old gypsy’s face.
There was never a time within Davey’s recollection, when the Socrates
on the bookcase had not grime in the curlicues of his hair or along
the deep sills of his eye-sockets, or when the top of Henry’s yellow
oak table, that served as desk, was not gritty to the touch. Usually
Henry sat in a swivel-chair, with one bony knee crooked against the
table-edge, and foot dangling free of the floor. Except when a client
was present. Then it was his idiosyncrasy to seat the client in the
swivel-chair, where the hard light from the window fell upon his face,
and himself occupy the casual straight chair alongside.
It was a motley, ill-ordered table-top. For as long as Davey could
remember, a horseshoe had dangled from a nail at one end, and to which
nail the countless zigzag rents in Henry’s seersucker coat bore witness.
Briefs piled in stacks had slid down along themselves. A magnificent
plaster-of-Paris Holstein-Friesian bull, of the vintage of a
Nineteen-Hundred-and-One State Fair browsed in the center of a litter
of ink and mucilage pots. Above the table was a flecked picture of
Abraham Lincoln, that had once been given away, on his birthday with
a Sunday edition of the _Kansas City Star_. An excerpt from his
Gettysburg speech was pasted alongside:
... that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that
cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we
here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that
government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not
perish from the earth.
It might be said of Henry that he dallied for hours in his swivel to
the rhythm of that segment of the speech. Not consciously. The text
of it was almost part of his very texture. In that speech was Henry
fluttering for flight. In that speech his cry, his plea, his dread,
his hope, his passionate yet passive caring about men and their
emancipations. Tilted in his swivel for hours, he could regard the bit
of print, without actually seeing it, but soaked in its rhythm, which
was the rhythm to which he swung his knee and tilted in his chair and
passed his days. Alone. As much as they would let him be. Flies had
specked it, and a celluloid campaign-button, from the first Howey
campaign of 1896, was dug into one corner.
There were road-maps and wavy stacks of books, half-a-man high,
staggering from the floor above the table-top; an engineer’s map of
the plan of a proposed spur-railroad off the main line from Centralia
to Springfield; a blue-print of a thirty-mile stretch of a new state
highway; a plan of a negro-shanty, where a murder had been committed
in the name of chicken-thievery. A black-and-white print of President
Wilson. Charts for a proposed clearing of a swamp known as Nigger
Hollow. A hand-made map of the States of Ohio and Indiana, with
red-headed pins outlining sources of water-power. A photograph of Phil
Schuyler’s one-time pretentious home in Springfield, with Phil and Rita
and the children seated on the porch rail.
A country-bumpkin of an office. Probably the only one of its kind
left in a small city that now boasted its Chamber of Commerce, two
ten-story, fire-proof skyscrapers, a Federal bank, the largest
tool-works west of Massachusetts, two five-and-ten-cents stores, a
daily Blue Plate Business Men’s lunch served in the Rotarian Rooms,
two radio-shops screaming out onto the sidewalks, omnibus-service to
Seven Mile, Cottage Corner, Tallahassee Dam, and Middleton, and a bill
pending for the inclusion of Seven Mile within the city limits, thereby
adding one-fifth to the population.
And, curiously enough, in that antiquated office over the
hardware-store, from his tilted swivel up there, where for hours on end
he could make chapel of his ten fingers, and gaze with mild, amused,
sardonic eyes upon the flow of High Street, it was Henry Schuyler who
had his long, lean finger in all of these pies of progress.
A finger that never bothered to draw out a plum.
There was something inscrutable in this smile with which Henry
surveyed the scene from his window. The hurrying clang of bright
new street-cars. He had been instrumental in wrenching a franchise
from political interests. The new concrete viaduct jerking Seven
Mile greedily closer to the flank of Centralia. The machinery of
the appropriation for that considerable piece of engineering had
passed through his hands. The World War Soldiers’ Memorial Park that
had threatened to take the form of a block of marble, until he had
intervened. The distant shine of the Tallahassee Aeroplane Field and
hangars, which he had influenced old Hiram Tallahassee to endow in his
will.
The town, bustling, banging, rattling in its small way with the
things that mattered to it. Its increasing and growing canning- and
foundry-industries, attracted by bonuses that Henry helped appropriate;
its modern pressed-brick schoolhouses, with sunlight-factory exteriors
and every modern device for the presentation of not-so-modern
curricula. Its paved highways for easier and swifter mileage, its
cinema-houses for surcease from the too crushing reality of days filled
with the quest for more capital, more speed, more lust for water-power,
horse-power, candle-power, man-power. All this spread itself before the
mild, sad eyes of Henry Schuyler, like a satirical play in which he had
unwittingly collaborated.
“These first twenty-five years of this century are undoubtedly the
greatest in bulk of achievement in the history of the world,” he used
to say. “Of course, it is true that invention makes history. For lack
of a telescope, Aristotle’s astronomy is a tissue of childish romance.
For lack of a microscope, his biology wanders endlessly astray. It
was her low power in industrial and technical achievement that kept
Greece below the general standard set by her unparalleled intellectual
achievement. And yet, here we are in the age that excels along those
lines, skimming under seas and over mountains, and annihilating
distance with the jerking of a lever. What bothers me a little bit,
though, is, whither? Is the aeroplane going to do as much for humanity
as Socrates did, who sat on a coping in his home town most of his life,
and thought out loud to folks who had the time to listen to him? Where
are we rushing? Strikes me we’re all dressed-up and no place to go.”
Henry was not dressed-up. His office was pretty much his coping, in
which he sat, in seersucker, intoning to his world, which he seemed to
regard as infinitely younger than he. Inviting definition from all with
whom he came in contact, but usually ending by giving it himself.[54]
In the swivel, before his brother’s littered table, the light from High
Street hard against his squaring young face, and Henry seated by in
the casual attitude of visitor, David faced his brother, the morning
following his encounter with Dora in the wind-swept twilight. They
might have been father and son, but in the largely impersonal way that
Henry somehow seemed paternal to the world he lived in.
There were small, rigid places at the edges of David’s mouth,
occasioned by a sort of misery at what he was doing. He was asking
of his brother a loan; and knowing, as he did, his financial status,
the moment was pretty obnoxious to him. Furthermore, sitting there
stammering out his request, his eyes fixed unhappily upon a sheet of
paper sprawling on the table before him, suddenly, as he stammered
along, the blur of typewritten letters shaped themselves into words,
and the words into meaning.
It was a letter from a firm of solicitors in Middleton, holding to
account Henry Stephen Schuyler for the sum of four hundred and fifty
dollars, for which he had gone bond for a young farmer named Edwin
Penwhistle, who had defaulted payment by disappearing from the state
two days before said moneys fell due.
It made the hard, jade-white areas along the side of David’s nose
quiver and flatten as he limped along with his recital. The snagged
places on Henry’s shabby seersucker coat too, kept hooking onto his hot
and tortured gaze. Not that under conditions of the most fantastic:
financial well-being could he imagine his brother in an unsnagged
seersucker, but just the same, those little repetitious triangles kept
jerking up his words, making him stammer and stumble, and finally end
up by just sitting in the middle of a sentence and regarding Henry with
stinging, miserable eyes.
“—hate like the dickens ... come to fellow like you for a loan—but it’s
the poor help the poor—money don’t seem to mean much to the poor.”
“Something a little wise in that, boy. The poor remain poor, as a rule,
because they spend easily. They’ve never known the gloating of watching
a bank-account grow.”
“It’s asking a lot, Henry. Two hundred. You see, though, that could
tide me over the winter-tuition. I can’t very well ride Phil, the way
he’s got to hustle to make their ends meet—his kids and all. Looks like
you’re the only one, Henry, a fellow can sort of turn to. You couldn’t
see your way clear, could you, Henry, to let me have that coupla
hundred? If I’m going to do the law nights, I’m already three weeks
late for the beginning of the term.”
“What determined you, boy, so all of a sudden?”
“That’s why I caught the milk-truck in, so we could talk in town.
Private.”
“Quite right. But last time we tried to get anywhere, talking this
matter over, Dave, you were all heated up about the Wheeler book
and had decided to devote your life to zoölogy, and then _Arabia
Deserta_ and Stefansson got you het up about reclaiming the waste
places of the earth, and it looked like engineering or Cecil Rhodes
empire-stuff; then, if I remember rightly, Wilson’s perplexities got
you thinking about international law, and then forestry seemed a good
bet, and then, ’long toward the last, wasn’t it ovibos-breeding,
Antarctic exploration, ornithology, banking, lumber-jacking, astronomy,
shipbuilding?”
“Of course, if you’re going to rub that in....”
“Now, old fellow, don’t go getting sore. I think the idea of taking
that job Phil can swing for you in Springfield with a grocery-firm,
where you can dig into the law nights, is bully.”
“Then why the dickens didencha say so?” said David, his dry lips lifted
back off his dry teeth and his eyes seeming to push up close to the
lenses of his spectacles.
“Well, I just do kinda say it now. It’s a darn good decision. A job by
day, and a law course to keep you out of mischief nights.”
“Law’s something a fellow can fasten his teeth into, Henry.”
“Knowledge of the laws men live under, Dave, even if you never do much
more with it than—well, I guess you’d have to do more with it than I
have, or strike a mark below zero—me being the zero—but what I started
to say, boy, knowledge of the laws men make for themselves to live
under is one way of getting at the knowledge of the kind of fellows
human beings are to have made them just that way.”
“That’s it, Henry. Even if I wasn’t ever to actually go out and
practice law—like you——”
“God forbid!”
“Sometimes, Henry—know what?”
“No, what?”
“Well, just a little turn of the wheel, and, all of a sudden, a
fellow’s got his bearings. Know what I mean?”
“Think I do. All of a sudden, well, just all of a sudden, something hit
you. That about it?”
“Exactly. Nothing so much in a grocery-job, but it’s wholesale, and,
anyways, Father’s always said he didn’t care so much whether he had all
silk purses in the family, just so he didn’t have any sow’s ears.”[55]
“I’d like mighty much to see you surprise the Old Gentleman with a
hundred-per-cent silk purse.”
“He’s a silk purse himself.”
“No, the Old Gentleman is more like the honestest woolen sock in the
world.”
“A sock that Mother knitted.”
Out of their laughter, a shadow fell across Henry’s face, as if a shade
had been lowered.
“Tenacious old folks, ours, Dave. Such old-fashioned and relentless
ideals as toil and integrity and loyalty are pretty much out-of-date.
Father yells and hollers about it all, but he’s the tree and root and
the sap of the soil all right. It’s fine to be an acorn off that kind
of oak. That’s what you are at your age, Dave. An acorn crammed with
future.”
“Remember what you said to me once, Henry, when you were reading
Aristotle to me? Inventions make history, but is history worth the
making? That wasn’t nice, Henry.”
“Of course it wasn’t, and of course history’s worth the making. The
hominy must have been scorched that morning for breakfast. What I
probably meant was something like—well, to make history really worth
the making, the age of invention should have preceded the age of
thought.”
“That’s what I say, Hen. What could those Greek fellows be expected to
know about some of the most ordinary facts of the world they lived
in, when they had no way of getting around it? No wonder old Aristotle
was way off on his astronomy. Didn’t even have a pocket telescope like
mine. Know what, Henry?”
“No, what?”
“Well, sir—looka this country. If Greece could do what she did without
inventions, what do you think we ought to be able to do, having them?
Looka the aeroplane. Didn’t we invent it? A pair of fellows right here
in the Middle West? And here’s France and all those countries getting
more use out of it than we are. What’s distance or cold or heat to us,
or any of the things that have kept other nations down? Yes, siree,
if I was practicing law in a live town like Springfield, living say
in a little attached house with a front yard to squirt evenings with
the garden hose, and plenty of time to think things out—oh, say—oh,
say—well—just ’oh, say,’ is all I got to say.”
“Yeh!” said Henry, fumbling among the litter of his table and
reaching across the body of the boy toward the far end. “Hand me that
check-book, Dave——”
It was a scrubby affair through which Henry’s wetted forefinger rustled.
“How’s a hundred and forty-three dollars and fifty-six cents on
account, boy?” he said, after some figuring on a margin, “That’s
fifty-six dollars and forty-four cents shy of the two hundred, but——”
“You mean, Henry—that’s all you’ve got?”
“I mean nothing of the sort. There’s always more coming in somehow.
Fellow up here in Tole County blew in last week and paid me
seventy-five dollars for a fee he’s owed me nine years back——”
“But——”
“Take it or leave it,” said his brother, scrawling on the check and
jerking it testily out of the book.
There was always in Henry’s manner toward his money-affairs, and in his
response to any and everybody’s inroads upon the notorious generosity,
a manner apt to be embarrassing to even the most hardened collector off
his bounty.