[62] ... that evening, when I arrived home from having supper with
Steve and Claire, who were both in a great state of excitement over
my son’s impending aeroplane venture which Henry and David had just
made possible, I was met at the door by Winslow with the overwhelming
news that Father had just telephoned out that Henry and Henriette had
been married. And indeed you must add, lived happy ever after. With a
chivalry that almost passeth the telling, and at a time when under the
conditions, it almost amounted to foolhardiness, my brother took over
what had hitherto been the prim little life of Henriette Simpson. While
she was never again to be robust, and all the remainder of her life
was to be subject to fainting-spells, against which my brother was on
constant guard, she was destined to outlive many of those of her own
generation about her.
For four years subsequent to their marriage, they remained in the home
of my parents, the Igrotte place, which has since burned to the ground.
After the death of my parents, my brother and his wife spent the
greater part of each year in Washington, where they had an apartment in
H Street.
It was in this apartment that my sister-in-law Henrietta died of a
singular and distressing accident.
Leaning out of the thirty-ninth-story window of the fine building in
H Street, Level II, one morning, to wave my brother au-revoir, as was
her invariable habit, she turned in the window-frame to look up at him,
as his little two-passenger aeroplane slid from the hangar atop the
building, just as the heavy window-sash gave way and fell across her
chest, killing her instantly.
[Illustration: Decorative Image]
_Chapter Thirty-nine_
Thanksgiving again. A decade and a half since a sheepish-faced Old
Gentleman had faced the bombardment of eyes most immediately concerned
with the impending event of another Schuyler about to be born.
There were Schuylers assembled again about the board of the Old
Gentleman. This time, a far more meager board in the sagging old
house set into a patch of scrubby farm-land that was all shot with
rock-stratifications which every so often came to the surface suddenly
in sparkling little micaceous platforms.
The latter years of her life were to witness a recrudescence of power
in Mathilda that amazed her children and husband even while it dismayed.
She continued to outdo in menial labor any hired-hand that came to
the place. As her face paled and shriveled and certain diabetic
tendencies began to manifest themselves, the iron power of her hands—at
scrub-and-rub over a washtub, at churning, at lugging, at beating rugs,
which she flung single-handed across a sill, at red-washing the brick
walk that led from the kitchen, at calcimining hen-houses, sawing,
smoking hams, salting pork, rendering geese, even to cooking lye in
vats for its use about the barns—seemed to mount with the years, rather
than decline.[63]
It kept her full of miseries that asserted themselves in backaches
and swollen joints and the effects of chilblains which shriveled her
valiant face into knots of pain for winter months on end. But there was
no restraining the stern flagellation of toil that Mathilda had imposed
upon herself, even back in the days when prosperity sat upon her house.
Her hands and face were horny with it. In an age when grandmothers had
silhouettes and stalked on tall heels, Mathilda was as gray as a moth.
A moth with shriveled wings.
Strangely enough, in a way her children hoarded this horny-handed
grayness of hers and the faded little streaks of her hair only barely
covering the scalp, the corded hands and neck, the furiously wrinkled
eyelids, like dried leaves, and the pointed basques she wore all inset
with whalebones.
“Thank goodness, Mother has had the sense to grow old honestly,” was
one of Bek’s frequent explosions. “If Mother looked like some of the
freak old women one sees around, with their puttied-up faces and their
diddering about all over the place with swollen ankles that sag down
over their French heels, well, I—well, I just don’t know _what_ I’d do.”
“Mother’s got too much sense to make a caricature of herself,” was
Phil’s invariable contribution.
“Why, I just wouldn’t feel like I had a mother if I had to fumble
around for an unpainted spot to lay a kiss on, the way the Whittier
girls do their mother,” trebled sweet Emma.
“I wouldn’t change her for fifty thousand of the green coupons it
takes to get a covered vegetable-dish,” was the caliber of the Old
Gentleman’s summing it up. Pleasantries like that hit Mathilda right
across her hungry heart. He could be so outrageously inconsiderate of
her in the trifles. He could have kissed her small, tired feet, out of
reverence for her, and yet the slightest compliment he ever paid her
was a mocking one, in the key of the covered vegetable-dish.
She regarded him unsmilingly most of the time, sitting mute and
unamused at his effulgences.
There was something of a fierce, lean look of hunger in Mathilda’s eyes
when she regarded her husband. She adored him. She wanted his caresses.
Instead, he gave her persiflage, of this variety, and always in the
hearing of others, which cut her even more.
She wanted something else, and the Old Gentleman, who gave so freely,
and who would have cut off his right hand rather than hurt her, went on
hurting her and did not know.
Forty years of being hurt and feeling herself on the rim of the life
of a man by nature more intense, more gregarious, more boisterously
alive than she, had taken any semblance of smile out of Mathilda. She
regarded her husband, her children, her grandchildren, with solemn,
worshiping, terribly concerned eyes. Concern for her husband’s loose,
easy ways with what sparse moneys came his way and which he brought
to her, except when someone intercepted him first, and placed in her
hands like a child. Money she used with frugality and wisdom. Concerns
of this sort kept Mathilda’s face a little stern. Concern for a
grandchild’s first tooth, a daughter-in-law’s watery damson-preserves,
Bek’s astonishing deal with the Governor, the incredible happening of
the bringing-home of Henriette Simpson, a bride.[64]
Except for the eighteen-pound turkey gobbler, a basket of grapefruit
and oranges which Phil and Rita had brought down from Springfield,
Emma’s usual offering of five pounds of hard candies from the St. Louis
Busy Bee, and Claire’s candied apples for the children, every dish of
that Thanksgiving-dinner-to-eighteen, had been personally prepared by
Mathilda.
There were two tables rigged up in the dining-room, another one in the
kitchen, and the sewing-table spread in the hall for Rita’s youngest
two children and Clara’s twelve-year-old, whom she had brought from
St. Louis this time. Even then, neither Bek nor Claire nor Rita nor
Mathilda sat down.
Henriette, with high red spots in her lean cheeks and a blue-checked
apron on over her spotted-silk foulard (net dickey out!), was eager
to join the brigade of the serving women. But the family, all of them
aware of what she was unaware, would have none of it. After all, in a
way, it was her day, only the seventh after her marriage. And Henry,
who was already displaying what were to be, with him, chronic symptoms
of concern at tiring her, forced her down into a chair beside the Old
Gentleman, who took immediately to serving her with enormous helpings
that overwhelmed and indeed defeated the prim appetite of one long
accustomed to preparing her own solitary snack-like meals, and then
sitting down to table for the lusterless business of dining alone.
And yet, to Mathilda, who drank her mug of felicitous cider to
Henriette and Henry, the most outstanding figure of all that
Thanksgiving day was the figure of Dave, there among the in-laws
and the cousins, the nieces, the nephews, and the aunts; grave and
courteous, in the solemn, detached way he had.
There was a lead pendulum to the beat of Mathilda’s heart. David, light
of her wintry years—boy who had come to her long after she had ceased
to smile, and could only dote silently—boy, who was so strangely,
doubly dear with the dual preciousness of child and grandchild.
To have begot a child again, after the climactic birth-throes of
grandchildren—there was in that something beyond the telling. Not
one of her big women daughters, who had borne and borne again, could
quite sense that. And what was further beyond the telling, indeed
almost beyond the admitting even to herself, was her sense of failure
toward David. Her secret fear that she had been a wintry, distant
mother to him, full of a sense of embarrassment toward him, the same
embarrassment that had flooded her face at another Thanksgiving years
before.
He had grown up around her tired old knees. The forest of the knees of
the grown-ups. And of all the grown ups, Mathilda had been the most
timid with, and of, him. Sometimes a fierce flame of jealous anger
flared in Mathilda toward the Old Gentleman. His ability to synchronize
with youth. To lean out of years that had never got him in their
clutch. Life was not the serious business to the Old Gentleman that it
was to Mathilda. Never had been. He was on back-slapping terms with
it. It was to his father that Dave brought a joyous and adoring kind
of irreverence that Mathilda coveted, in place of the timid kind of
tenderness he had for her.
The Old Gentleman and Bek and Henry had somehow, each in a special way,
got better acquainted with her boy.
And now, scarcely had she become accustomed to this late visitor into a
household that had turned a lean shoulder to him almost from the very
year of his birth, than here he was, like all the rest, turning his
young face outward and away. Almost before she had begun to know him;
begun to dare to know this boy, to whom books and long silences and
heavy chores had been the order of his days.
In the same pale, secret way that she had endured the somehow less
poignant passing of Phil and Clara, Emma and Bek from the nest of her
household, so now must she endure the going of the last of them.
This last of them, who had been born so curiously into two worlds. One
foot, as it were, straddling a pre-war and strangely remote universe,
the other on a soil that was forever to remain strange to Mathilda. A
mad, horrid, fascinating kind of world. A world thumbing its nose at
most of the things Mathilda held dear.
David was going out now into it. In a half-dozen ways, he had been
the least assertive of her children. Denied practically all of the
advantages of the nicely-moderate wealth her others had enjoyed, there
was something about his acceptance of the lean, menial days of his
youth that could grip Mathilda by the tonsils any time she dared to let
her mind dwell upon it.
How denied he had been. Denied even the warm, full breasts at which her
other children had suckled. The founts of her being had been dry and
runty to the pulling lips of the infant Dave.
He had been her only bottle-babe.
It had cost her secret shame before her husband and family every time
she had inserted the viscid rubber nipple of a milk-bottle between his
lips. He had not demurred, but had taken even his weaning gratefully.
That was Dave all over for you. Had not demurred, but had drunk
gratefully.
Then the long, arid days of pasturing, when her other children had
enjoyed the advantages of the Centralia schools.
Squalid, pinched boyhood, spent mostly at such past-times as the flat
of his back over Henry’s books, or dickering about over his ant-hills,
or whooping at the game of Indian-in-the-corn, in a mangy little suit
left over from Stevey, or exploring the Pacific Ocean from the top of a
knoll in the cow-patch that overlooked the dry, cracked bed of an old
duck-pond.
Many an afternoon, gazing from her window, Mathilda had watched him
climb, while his handful of sheep grazed, to the mock eminence of
the knoll, and there peer with much magniloquence of gesture, and
occasionally with an old, lensless pair of Henry’s field-glasses, out
over the Pacific of the duck-pond.
She had never known its exact meaning, except that it was one of the
toyless games of her lonely and deprived youngest.
All the others seemed to understand better. Henry. Bek. Even Phil, to
whom he was now going, would get to know him better. _She_ wanted to
know him better. That way. It was to her that he turned with tenderness
that was like the laying-on of hands. A diminished-seventh of a
difference in his voice. A little bitterly, Mathilda did not want that
diminished-seventh. With his father, he was a play-boy, wary alike of
the Old Gentleman’s digging humor and the stern old eye of rebuke. To
Bek, the boy turned for the swift sure quality of her understanding;
and with Henry, this boy of hers was a new boy. Hero worshipper.
Climber of mountains. Balboa overlooking the Pacific of his duck-pond.
Star-struck with the swimming beauty of planets and the red lamp of
Antares. Gripped by the communism of ants. Led by this older brother of
the strange wisdoms and the half-smile, into intellectual tourney and
jousts long before he knew that they were that.
It was, of course, priceless to have his tenderness. Perhaps, after
all, it would have been her choice of the gifts he had to bestow. But,
cruel paradox, it nevertheless kept in her heart, ache over David. Ache
over what he was to her and over what she could never be to him. There
was no time. Her life was too well burned along the wick. And now he
was going....
Life was a pecking jackdaw, after her precious morsel.
Dora Tarkington was a pecking little jackdaw after her precious morsel.
Mathilda knew! Well, so had she known long before Bek and Phil and
Emma and Clara had quite seemed to know these sorts of things for
themselves.
Mathilda had known this from the days when, beside her back window of
the spacious house on Sycamore Street, she could see David shinny his
way through the hole in the hedge.
In all the years of his very young boyhood, during the months and whole
winters that he had never so much as clapped eyes upon Dora, Mathilda
had known. She knew it now on the eve of his going-away. She knew it
bitterly, jealously, longingly, lovingly.
Mathilda loved Dora where Davey was not concerned. But as one of the
daws at the precious morsel of her boy, she dreaded her jealously.[65]
All through the whirl of that crowded Thanksgiving in the quarters that
were so woefully too small; all through the national performance of
the dishing-up the mucilaginous miscellany of stuffed gobbler; jellied
cranberries; candied sweet-potatoes; creamed cauliflower; hot biscuit;
strained honey; pumpkin, lemon-meringue, and Boston cream-pie; candied
apples; crystallized ginger quince-preserves; nut-fudge, and cider—the
eyes Mathilda were like scars.
“Blessed are the meek in spirit,” intoned the Old Gentleman, from a
tome with all of Mathilda’s multi-colored ribbon book-marks dangling
from the end. “For they shall inherit the earth.”
“For they shall inherit the earth,” mumbled Mathilda and the comings
and goings of her big-shouldered daughters, eager to unburden her frail
hands, began again.
“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness; for
they shall be filled.
“—Sing unto the Lord with Thanksgiving. Sing praises upon the harp
unto our God.”
Thank God for Henry! Years of the unreasoning jealousy, born of
possessive instinct, that had rankled against Henriette, were
dissipated already. It was good that Henry should have taken to himself
Henriette as wife. It was right and it was good, and the heart of
Mathilda, that had been sore, was rich with an honest gratitude that
was fitting unto the day.
Thank God for Henrietta to round out the wise thoughtful years of this
strangely practical, absolutely improvident eldest child of hers.
Thank God for the vigor and the grandeur of Bel and the plodding energy
of Phil and good Clara of sweet Emma. Thank God for the radiance of
grand children and great-grandchildren. Thank God even for Leslie,
whom Bek had somehow managed to keep in the sweetness and the light of
childhood, until God had taken him back.
Thank God for the flesh of her flesh that crowded this Igrotte house
that day.
Thank God for the man with whom she shared all this living, vigorous
splendor. Thank God for the vigorous, living splendor of the Old
Gentleman himself, whose sense of duty was drawn along his mouth,
making it straight as a bolt, and whose sense of humor shimmered in his
eyes and made them like hospitable windows inviting the intruder to
ignore the bolt and climb the sill.
Thank God—even—for Davey—going away. Thank God, of course, for vesting
him with vigorous manhood, the pale, square face, the clear and seeing
and sometimes too brilliant eyes. But the Old Gentleman’s mouth of
restraint was Dave’s, too. Thank God for that. The time had come—Thank
God, of course, for this man-child about to flutter from the sparse,
old unfeathered nest. Thank God—of course—ah, yes—Thank God——
It seemed to Mathilda, glancing up over her mumbling lips three or four
times as he read the blessing at table, that Thanksgiving Day, that the
Old Gentleman’s voice might give out.
It must have seemed that way to Henry, too, who shoved him a glass of
water.