[54] To the great embarrassment of his elders, David, as a boy, was a
great one to insist upon definition, urging detailed explanation of any
subject which caught his attention. There is little doubt but what my
brother Henry, who had one of the finest capacities for intellectual
curiosity I have ever known, was largely responsible for this trait.
Later, of course, he (David) came to be known as The Inquiring Mr.
Question Mark, and in the memorabilia of the Museum of Baltimore is the
original of the much-reproduced Glake cartoon, which is a most amusing
likeness of my brother, entirely drawn in small question-marks.
It is said of him, and I think rightly, that it was his insistence
upon definition that saved America from being party to the Allied
International Peace fiasco at Moscow.
[55] I shall never forget that rather murky November evening, when
I was out in what I always called Winslow’s garden, wrapping a
hydrangea-bush in straw, when, lo and behold, who should turn the
corner of the porch, but Henry. A most unusual thing for him to show up
at the farm.
“Bek,” he said to me, without an ado or introduction, “Dave’s made up
his mind to go to Springfield and take that job polishing spittoons and
the handles of the big front-door for a wholesale grocery-firm.”
It wasn’t anything to take on over, and yet I can never forget the
curious feeling that shot through me. Like dropping suddenly in one of
those thirty-story elevators I never can get used to.
“What on earth,” I cried, “made him decide that? Couldn’t he do that
good here in Centralia?”
“That’s just the fine part of it, Bek. The kid wants to go to
Springfield because there’s what they call an Extension Law Course he
can attend evenings. Beat that?”
Maybe you could have beaten it, but to Henry and me, standing there
grinning, in the cold, gray twilight, it didn’t seem beatable. It
lifted Dave’s going, for us, out of the dreariness we associated with
his job as grocer’s handy-boy.
“Know what I think, Bek?” Henry went on to me. “He’s sweet on some
girl. Wonder could it still be the Tarkington girl?”
“I wonder,” I said, smiling a smile that, as it stretched across my
face, made me feel as if I looked exactly like an old gray tabby we
had, called Sly.
[56] I have often wondered, in a practical family such as ours, reared
as we were to know the value of a nickel, where my brothers Henry and
Dave inherited their disregard for money. It is probable that each,
in his own way, was responsible for vast fortune after vast fortune
that was to fall into the hands of other men. While it is true that
our family-fortunes were destined to rise on the wings of a winged
invention, not one penny of that fortune was due to the business acumen
of these two men. Where their imagination and vision soared, it took
men like Phil and my Steve to capitalize the ideas from such minds as
Henry’s and Dave’s as they fell to the ground like feathers from an
eagle in flight.
[57] ... speaking of red tape, and his abhorrence of it, long after
his (Dave’s) official position would have given him precedence in any
important man’s anteroom, he never permitted himself to be ushered into
the private office ahead of those waiting their turn. If there was no
appointment, he insisted upon taking his place. I am in possession of
an amusing incident that had to do with this characteristic quality of
his consideration for others.
Once, while he was Police Commissioner of Springfield, and calling on
the then Governor of the State (Canfield), he sat next to a garrulous
old farmer in the anteroom, who, also waiting his turn, struck up a
conversation with my brother. In the course of it, the old fellow, whom
my brother had never seen before, began to describe to him the Police
Commissioner, whom he professed to know intimately.
“Quietest fellow you ever seen. Square Dave, the boys call him. Kinda
solid, square-looking fellow. Says a thing. Does that thing. Biggest
fighter for what he thinks right you ever seen and never lifts his
voice or his hand or his little finger so far’s anybody around him can
see. When them Russians and Pole factory-workers began copying them
Soviets two years ago, I was standing within a stone’s-throw of him.
But believe me, I was behind a pillar. Yes sir, I coulda put out my
hand and touched him. Well sir, I wanna say to you—I wanna say to you
that he stood on the little old balcony outside the Civic Building
window, square, plain-appearing fellow, full-blast where a bullet or
even a fist could have done for him. Did he budge? Not a budge. Some
pretty little lady, his wife, I reckon, poking her head outa the window
in back of his, was shivering all right, but never letting out a cheep.
“‘Attention,’ he snaps out suddenly, when the brick hit his cheek that
smashed his glasses. Not scared-like. ‘Attention—’ he says to the
militia quiet-like, as if he was telling them to drink a cup of tea.
‘It’s between principle and the people now. Principle must save the
people. Jerk them to their senses with three shots, and I’ll hold them
there. Attention—Fire!’ Just like that! And darned if that’s just what
he did do. On three shots, mind you. Three shots, mind you, and them
shots in the air.”
And all through this, my brother, who had never seen the fellow
before, listened gravely to this piecemeal picture of himself, mostly
inaccurate, and evidently garbled from newspaper accounts of the
opening explosion of the bloodless Springfield riots.
[58] I have always had the feeling, although neither my brother
nor Stevey ever referred to it, that Henry had more to do with the
salvation of my boy than any of us were ever to know.
[59] I suppose it may be said that The International Aircraft
Corporation virtually had its birth-pangs in my brother Henry’s office
whither Stevey had hurried that epoch-making day I have just described.
Destined, as it was, not only to affect our family-history, but to
become one of the great factors of its time in world-progress, how
little the three of them, maneuvering among themselves over the raising
of that tiny initial capital, could have foreseen the immensity of
circumstances that were to unfold out of that hour. For years, my son
Steve and Eugene Bymore vigorously contended that Henry and David were
entitled to large parcels of stock in the company, a concession which
both of my brothers consistently refused.
[60] Much has been made of the fact that David earned his first
year’s law-book money in Springfield by operating a sawing-machine
for a lumber company during his noon-hours and Saturday afternoons.
In fact, Elsworth Tappen in his monograph, goes so far as to say that
he earned enough money, what after paying his board, his lodging,
and sending money home, to pay for his law-books and accessories by
sawing wood. One way, I suppose, of interpreting the act of operating a
sawing-machine.
But, in any event, the American public loves to think of David as
literally sawing the wood.
[Illustration: Decorative Image]
_Chapter Thirty-six_
It was toward the evening of this day of cross-currents in the affairs
of Schuylers, that Henry, shaking down his pot-bellied stove, climbing
out of his seersucker into the gray herring-bone one with the shiny
shoulder-blades, and wrapping a gray wool string of a scarf about his
throat against the chill of the long ride home on the dairy-truck, was
interrupted by a final visitor, old Dr. Dan Kiskadden, who brought him
tidings that made the long, tired brackets around Henry’s mouth cut
grimly deeper.
For forty-five years, the Kiskadden brothers, like their father before
them, had practiced medicine in Centralia. Two months before, Eli, the
younger, had fallen over dead while he was writing a prescription for a
patient in the office he shared at one end of the old red-brick double
dwelling which the Eli and Dan families had occupied since the two
brothers had married the two Dinwiddie sisters at a double wedding that
had gone to make Centralia folk-lore.
“Doctor Dan,” as five counties knew him, had a high comb of thin, black
hair, which lay on top of his otherwise bald head in a fat finger-curl.
On his pipe-like legs, that were too slender and short for the paunch
of his torso, he did sort of a running-walk, his neck darting in and
out after the fashion of a rooster pecking gravel. His voice, completed
the analogy. It rose and fell in hollow clucks, with the dartings of
the neck. A squeaky little voice, emanating shrilly from the bantam
little body.
Sometimes Henry and Doctor Dan passed each other as often as three and
four times a day along High or Sycamore Streets, occasionally drifting
to a standstill for an exchange of local gossip that had to do with
business or politics.
The doctor was usually carrying on dietetic experiments with
guinea-pigs and rats in a laboratory he had rigged up, by courtesy of
the school board, in a small room adjoining the zoölogy laboratory of
Tallahassee High School. Sometimes, on Sunday mornings, Henry walked or
got a lift into town, to pore over the doctor’s charts with him in the
deserted, chalk-smelling school-building.
When Henry was seventeen, Doctor Dan had fought through a close case of
double pneumonia with him. A warm, curiously impersonal friendship had
persisted, although it was only the second or third time Doctor Dan had
ever appeared in his office.
In an age of specialization in medicine, there was something as
antiquated about the general practitioner as a horse-car. In the little
cubby-hole behind his office Doctor Dan still pulverized with his own
mortar and pestle, and measured out physic in an ungraduated glass.
Sometimes, for weeks, his prescription-pad lay untouched.
Their experiments in the fields of biometrics and dietetics had from
time to time brought one or the other of the Kiskadden brothers,
usually Eli, before frequent conventions and in important contributions
to scientific journals. An instrument for determining nerve-heat in
connection with caloritropic observation, called the Kiskadden fork, is
in common use.
But in the main, it was the older generation in Centralia still called
in Doctor Dan. The younger sought out more modern outer-office, with
white trained-nurse attendants and card-index systems. Those who could
afford it journeyed as far as Springfield, Chicago or Rochester for
diagnosis.
Doctor Dan still opened his own office door to the ring of a patient.
He neglected to send bills, except occasionally a mussy one made out by
his wife, when the ex-chequer loomed bare. He answered night bells. He
seldom operated for a pain in the side. He had a range of instruments
along the shelves of a glass case, but usually he preferred to probe
about in that sore throat with the handle of an old silver spoon he
kept lying about his desk. As a rule, but not invariably, he washed
his hands, between patients. His little grandson Denny’s kiddie-car
had a habit of cluttering up his office, and it was not unheard of for
Doctor Dan to commit the ethical breach of ministering to a sick dog
or cat. It was town lore that he had once answered a midnight call for
Harriet, Forbes’s three-legged cat, Timp. Doctor Dan kept no card-index
filing-system and he never inquired deeply into a patient’s history.
Usually he knew it beforehand, or did his best to figure it out for
himself.
He, and particularly his late brother, considered the wave of
vegetarianism sweeping the country as pernicious, in its way, as
the immoderate use of red meat. Rigorously ethical in his practice,
he none the less openly advocated birth-control, and was one of the
first physicians in good standing, in his state, to become actively
affiliated with the movement, and still keep that standing.
Every once in a while, he packed his bag and went off to Rochester to
watch the Mayos operate.
He entered Henry’s office with curt preliminaries.
“See you a minute, Henry?”
“Sit down. Glad to see you, Doc.”
“Henriette Simpson came to my office today after school. Have you seen
her since?”
“No.” A kind of pallor flickered along under the leathery toughness of
Henry’s skin. In streaks, as if it could not all get through. “Nothing
wrong, is there, Doc? She was well as usual when I saw her Saturday.”
“Wrong as wrong. Thought I ought to talk to somebody. Not asking too
much, is it, Henry, but I guess you’re about the first in line. Not a
relative to her name, so far as I know.”
“Right.”
“She’s a pretty sick woman.”
“Seemed all right. Don’t remember ever hearing her complain.”
“Astonishing constitution. Nasty cardiac condition there. Chronic
endocarditis. Enormously enlarged heart. Fluoroscope reveals half the
chest-area covered. Valvular leakage. One of those cases where she can
go any minute, or outlive us all. Seen it happen. Look at old lady
Beattie, up Middleton way. They were writing her burial certificate
twenty years ago, and she’s outlived her grandchildren.”
“You—didn’t tell Henriette of this?”
“No.”
“Right. Right.”
“That’s why I’m here. Told her there was nothing much to worry about,
and I’d drop in to look her over again in a day or so. Nothing to worry
about! There’s damn plenty to worry about.”
“What’s to be done?”
“How’s she fixed?”
“She’s still paying off on that little old house over on Ludlow Street
her father left mortgaged to the hilt. It sucks up her salary like
blotting-paper.”
“She’s got to quit teaching. Every inch of strain on that little body
of hers is to the bad. May outlive us all if she’s handled right. What
you say about her affairs don’t gee-up any too good with the situation,
but there it is.”
“I see ...”
“What ever became of that old friend of the family, ’Liza Simpson, used
to live with them so many years?”
“’Liza’s out in Arizona, Doc, taking care of her brother’s children.
Henriette sends what little she can spare, out there.”
“Nice woman, Henriette is,” said Doctor Dan, and sat with his
bandy-legs dangling, and his eyes, from which all fluids seemed long
since to have been drained, as twisted-looking as water being sucked
through a drain-hole.
“Leave it to me, Dr. Dan. I’ll take the matter in hand.”
“Thought you would. You understand the situation. Care, leisure, ease,
and she can live to be a hundred. Maybe. Maybe not. School-teaching’s
out of the question.”
“I’d rather you didn’t tell her anything until after I drop by
there this evening. And when you see her in the morning, just let
her know enough to see to it that she realizes the care she must
take of herself. I’ll find a way to break the news to her about the
teaching part myself. Telling her the truth would about kill her. Most
independent temperament in the world.”
“Sorry, Henry. Know what a friend—of yours, and of your family’s, she’s
been.”
“We’ll take a hand, Doc. Don’t worry.”
“S’long, Henry.”
“S’long, Doc.”
[Illustration: Decorative Image]
_Chapter Thirty-seven_
For five or six years, at intervals that had grown from semi-occasional
to occasional, tiny black flashes of vertigo had been laying hold of
Henriette. The first appreciable instance was once at a blackboard, as
she was diagraming the genealogy of the Tudor family for a class of
twenty-six girls and boys. Just for a moment, like one of her prankish
boys yanking the plait of the little girl ahead of him, something had
yanked one of Henriette’s breaths. It was something at first too quick,
and too slight, to feel quite sure it had happened. For all the world
like the little girl of the yanked braid turning her startled head.
Then it happened once or twice in church, or at Saturday-morning
teachers’ meeting; and one Saturday, while lunching with Henry at the
Blue Bird, she had been obliged to put down her coffee-cup and grip
the table-edge to hold herself steady, smiling all the while, but
unconscious of one word he was saying.
It was disquieting, but scarcely so disquieting as embarrassing. Her
lean, fibrous body had never, in all the years she had inhabited it, so
much as called attention to the frailties of its flesh. It was one of
Henriette’s rare boasts that she had never in all her life spent a day
in bed, or had so much as a headache.
There was something lean and ascetic and brown and tough about
Henriette’s body at forty-nine. The fibrous body of a woman whose flesh
had never dared to shimmer of those ecstasies that lay sleeping beneath
its surface.
And just as there was something shameful to Henriette about the girls
she passed on High Street, most of whom she knew by name and taught in
school, who permitted their dresses to sag off one bare shoulder and
their young breasts to tremble in outline behind their flimsy blouses,
so there was something shameful in these vertiginous signalings of a
body she had so rigorously held in subordination.
The one being for whom desire could awaken in that prim flesh, had by
the very decorum of all his years of friendship with her, held it so
in abeyance, that at forty-nine, the sight of Henriette to herself,
undressed before her mirror, would have been shock and anathema to her.
Nice Henriette. The chilled niceness of a little tomb.
Vertigo and that irrepressible rise of the nap of her flesh that the
sight and too often the mere thought of Henry could inspire, were
equally to be dismissed and despised.
For five years, Henriette, ashamed of the frailty, contemptuous of it,
unwilling to admit that the attacks were anything more than “nerves,”
had fought the panic of these moments of black suffocation and ignored
their recurrences.
Then one evening, seated at her little table in the tiny living-room
of her frame house on Ludlow Street, correcting examination papers on
fractions, proper and improper, she fainted suddenly down into them.
There was no ignoring it this time, because it so happened that when
Henriette sat down to the table and picked up the first sheet of
foolscap, with “Martin Giles, Grade four E, Class B, Arithmetic,”
written across the top in the monotonous, vertical chirography of
stubby fingers, the small, gilt shepherdess-clock on the mantel was
striking seven, in the bleating little fashion it had. When Henriette
struggled back out of the overwhelming kind of tight blackness that had
flowed over and seemed to drown her, the index finger to her right hand
still lay against Martin’s rather dreary conclusion and 3½ x 6¼ = 18½,
and the shepherdess-clock on the mantel was now pointing to twenty-two
minutes to eight.
The next day, after school, she paid her visit to Doctor Dan. The
cruel grilling before the fluoroscope had been a harrowing experience.
The baring of her breasts to the stethoscope. The close, personal
questions that made her lips quiver and recede back against dry teeth,
as she tried to answer them. The proddings and the punchings that only
the enormously impersonal procedure of Doctor Dan, whose eyes were
frighteningly attentive, but whose lips kept smiling, made endurable.
It had been a little awful, too, that moment before he called her back
into his office, after she had climbed back into her waist and hooked
the high-necked dickey close about her throat.
Not exactly awful with fear. Suppose, after all, there should turn out
to be something seriously wrong with her. Well, suppose. Henriette had
her God. A precious Presbyterian one. There were Simpsons, notably
her parents, who had been dear to her, gone on to a peace more vast
than anything finite she could hope to find. There were compensations,
even if Doctor Dan’s closely scrutinizing eyes should make findings.
Most of the time Henriette believed in her soul’s immortality. It
behooved her that this be one of those times. There was something about
the loneliness of stalking back into that office, to hear about the
possible death of a life that had not been lived, that made Henriette
need terribly to believe in her soul’s immortality.
But after all, she had stalked back in, and Doctor Dan had only
tilted in his swivel and made a church of his ten fingers and talked
of run-down condition—too close application—general overhauling—and
here she was at home again in her own chromesque sitting-room that
you entered by two short steps straight from the small bricked yard,
feeling a little sheepish after the frightening kind of aloneness of
that moment of waiting until Doctor Dan called her back into his office
after the examination.
Of course she was run down. Mid-year examinations. One of the most
nervous classes of youngsters she had had in years. Must cut down on
her Saturday Morning Club work. Resign from programme-committee. Dinah,
an old family-washerwoman, might be induced to come in once a week for
the general going-over of the little house. Yes, run-down. Doctor Dan
had been clever. Fortunately, it was Friday. She would sleep an hour
later tomorrow, and possibly pass up the Club, although Miriam Chipman
was to read a paper on Leonardo da Vinci she particularly wanted to
hear. Still, it might be a good idea to lie abed until time to meet
Henry at the Blue Bird.
Part of the appalling sense of loneliness, in that moment before her
re-entry into Doctor Dan’s office, had been so complexly interwoven
with Henry. Thoughts that she beat back from coming to life....
On Monday she was to call back at Doctor Dan’s for drops and further
instructions. Run-down. Nothing much to worry about. But served her
right for her absurd assurance, all these years, that her tough, lean
body somehow had exemption from decay.
Well, anyway, it was sweet and normal and cozy to be back home again
after the peep over the precipice into the abyss of loneliness that had
yawned so suddenly at her feet. It left her a little weak and woefully
in need of a cup of tea, which, somehow, she had not quite the energy
to go into the kitchen and brew for herself.
Instead, Henriette just sat in an unwonted kind of idleness in the
small sitting-room that smelled of dried grasses and chalk-powder,
rocking away in a low chair with sawed-off legs, when, by routine,
she should have been washing and peeling her usual two potatoes and
pounding herself a bit of round-steak to lay in the skillet to fry,
or fluffing up a pair of eggs into omelette. She just sat on, while
the twilight began to pour around her, and the footsteps of Henry, who
semi-occasionally of a Friday, stopped by to exchange a word about
Saturday’s plans, drew up at the door.
It was particularly nice to have him come this evening. It was part of
her grateful return to a world of warm normalcy that was safely remote
from the cold-steel curve of instruments and the odor of iodoform and
frightening kind of loneliness that had so suddenly pervaded her heart.
Yes, it was particularly nice to hurry across to light the gas and draw
the shades and drag the stiff-backed rocker with the cane inset that
Henry always occupied in a sitting-forward attitude, closer to the
table.
The dear delight of living, it flashed over her suddenly, was like a
flame, unbreakable, though it bend and double upon itself.
It was good and warm and all right to be opening the door for Henry.
They were always of few words together. She drew out his rocker and
took a bisque wheelbarrow from the mantel, into which he could rap his
pipe from time to time, and placed it on the table beside him. While he
lit up, she lighted a lamp on a small stand in an opposite end of the
room, that had a white china rose-painted shade, and drew up her own
chair primly opposite him.
“Getting right nippy,” she said, narrowing her shoulders.
“Is it? I’ve been thinking, Henriette,” he said.
She hoped he had not trumped up some afternoon excursion for their
tomorrow. It would be difficult to evade it without telling him of
Doctor Dan’s dictum that she take it easy for the next few days. She
would no more have told Henry of the ripple across the face of the
tranquillity of the routine he had learned to expect from her!
“Here’s an article, Henry, I cut out of _The Nation_. It’s right in
line with some of your ideas about the debt-cancellation. Bankers, it
goes on to say, are beginning to realize the idiocy of the Versailles
programme——”
“Nonsense! Neither Democrats nor Republicans will face the fact yet for
a while that the War was a colossal failure——”
“But this article goes on to say that we are asking a country to
mortgage not only itself but its children for two-thirds of a
century—it’s as if we were pledging all the little unborn babies to
give us their note for a war that took place in this world long before
they had ever arrived in it from the land of the unborn.”
“Well, Mr. Mellon and Mr. Hoover know that, and will doubtless let
their European friends know they know it; but no man out to get his
votes is likely to dare talk such commonsense. But all that’s beside
the point. I—I’ve been thinking, Henriette.”
Oh, dear—there _was_ something he must be wanting to do tomorrow!
“Yes?”
“Henriette, something hit me between the eyes today.”
For the moment, she seemed to take him literally, peering forward
anxiously.
“What?”
“A realization.”
“They do hit one—that way—sometimes,” she said, and, for no reason she
could diagnose, began to tremble.
“Life, Henriette, is passing us by.”
“Why, Henry Schuyler, what _are_ you talking about!”
“It’s been my fault. Twenty years of the rather despicable, detached
inertia of a man who thinks so long before he leaps, that by the time
he’s ready, the opportunity to leap has passed him by, that’s me.
Henriette, I hope the opportunity hasn’t really passed me by.”
“Why, Hen-ry Schuyler, what on earth are you talking about? Why, Henry
Schuyler!”
She had to say something. Anything. Because all of a sudden, around
Henriette’s brain was racing and racing the excitement of her lifetime.
“Let’s catch on to what there’s left of life. You and me, Henriette.”
“Why, Hen-ry—I believe you’re proposing to me.”
“I am.”
She looked at him in a little short-of-breath fashion that was to
become, from then on, a mannerism resulting from her ailment, as it
settled, but which made it appear as if life were suddenly too large
and delicious a gulp for her to swallow down easily.
“I think I’m going to giggle, Henry. It’s funny.”
“Let’s make it funnier, Henriette.”
“I never did!” said Henriette, and sat with her bony hands held up
against her breast, and her mouth slightly open with the thirsty-bird
look.
“You never did what?”
The impulse for hilarity was suddenly like a gale in Henriette. She
began to laugh.[61]
“I like to hear you do that, Henriette.”
“Oh, Henry! It is funny!”
“Let’s make it funnier! Marry me!”
“When?”
“What’s the matter with now? Good a time as any. Let’s walk over and
rout out Ed Sykes for a special license and carry it around to the
parsonage.”
She reached out suddenly and caught him by the arm.
“Henry Schuyler, look at me!”
“Yes?”
“Look me in the eye. Who’ve you seen today? Are you being noble?”
“No more so than usual.”
“Nobody’s been telling you I’m run-down or anything? And need a little
rest?”
“If they had, Henriette, I wouldn’t be proposing anything so arduous as
married life.”
“Sure you haven’t been talking to Doctor Dan——”
“Doctor Who?” he said, with a bland prevarication he was never known to
achieve before or after.
The sweet, eager look flowed back into her face.
“They won’t let me teach—married, Henry.”
“Dumb of them,” he said; “but it suits me exactly. My bank-account for
the moment is the shape of a hen’s egg, but we can indulge in the
amiable hallucination that two can live as cheaply as one.”
“I haven’t a thing to wear.”
“Take my coat, if you think it’s going to be damp talking over to the
Sykeses,” he said, and took his flimsy top-coat off a peg.
Her own was hanging on the same peg beside the door, but she slid into
his.
“Come.”
“Coming.”