[63] ... for a wiry kind of power of endurance, I have never known
Mother’s equal. The least-robust member of all her husky family, it
seemed to us as if, at sixty, her capacity for hard work had reached
its peak. Remonstrate as we would, Mother began her day somewhere
between four and five of the sleetiest, bitterest mornings. It was the
only subject upon which I ever knew Father to be ugly with her. It
angered and dismayed and humiliated him, as it did us all, for that
matter.
Perhaps if Mother had taken better care of herself, she might have
lived to even a riper old age. And yet, who knows but what the very
rigors to which she subjected herself, were not the secret of her
endurance. Thank God again and again that she at least lived to see the
first of the great days for us that were to be followed by one epochal
event after another.
[64] Coming into the home of my parents as she (Henriette) did, on
the eve of Dave’s departure for Springfield, was nothing short of a
blessing for Mother. From the first, Henriette fitted herself helpfully
and synthetically into the life of the Igrotte farm. Mother was by
no means easy to live around that winter. While you might never have
guessed it from any outward demonstration, indeed, I doubt if she
guessed it herself, my mother’s dependence upon Dave, what with all
of us in homes of our own with interests of our own, was perhaps the
motivating force of her whole existence. It was Henriette, I feel so
sure, who saved her that winter from the throes of a nervous breakdown.
I remember Father coming over one blustery winter evening, when he
should never have ventured out, and begging me with ill-concealed tears
in his bewildered old eyes to try and coax Mother to consent to a visit
from Doctor Dan. As a matter of fact, all of us knew, Dave most of
all, whose letters came to her regularly as clockwork, that what ailed
Mother was heartache for Dave, who had never been absent from her side
more than an overnight, in all his life.
[65] ... nor was Dave an exception. Mother reacted toward Dora, even
back in her childhood, precisely as she had reacted to all of her
“in-laws,” Sam, Rita, and Winslow. A dear, darling kind of jealousy of
these pirate persons who came to carry off her children. There came
a time, of course, when Mother would laughingly relate all this to
Dora. Her jealousy of the little girl in pigtails, even back in the
days when she had watched the squirmy form of her son, his blue-denim
trousers-seats usually patched, wriggling through the hedge. Her
prophetic awareness of these two, long before the boy and the girl had
yet come into their rapture! I always say of Mother, she knew about
Winslow and me before I had ever even clapped eyes on him. Oh, my dear
Mother, sometimes, when I think back, it seems I must tear away this
veil that divides you in your hereafter from me, and make up to you in
sweetness what I fear me I may have failed in during your life....
[Illustration: Decorative Image]
_Chapter Forty_
The impending event of conclave shone in the Old Gentleman’s eyes all
through the hours of serving, of eating, of the rushing of the women
hither and thither of the tilting of the pitchers of cider, the ladling
of the gravy and the vegetable-dishes, of the high, querulous voices of
the children, grand and great-grand; through Mathilda’s fluty voice,
importuning her young, her very young, and her middle-aged to partake
more freely, or not too freely, of the bounty she quivered and fussed
and rushed to place before them. Platters, held high to avoid spill and
collision, clicked with narrowness of escape. Rose the rich, hot smells
of winter foods that had simmered in their juices. The spice of cider.
The flicker of blue flame across the dome of suet-pudding. The popping
of the toy balloons that Winslow had ordered Bek to order by catalogue.
And through all this charivari of the Schuylers, the Old Gentleman, his
grandchildren from time to time crawling over his legs and matting up
his beard, looked out upon the scene and waited. Waited while he joked
with his daughters, rebuked, dandled, teased the youngsters, put out a
sly foot to trip his Bek, as she slid her large frame into the narrows
gauge between tables to remove plates.
“Father, that’s just terrible to do a crude thing like that! Bek might
have fallen. Besides, I don’t think it’s a bit funny to do before the
children either,” remonstrated sweet Emma in her treble.
“Aunt Emma is mad at great-grandpa,” said the Old Gentleman, mushing
his lips against the soft, yellow hair of Steve’s eldest little girl.
“Puppa,” quavered Mathilda faintly, “a little dignity before the
children, please!”
“Dignity comes cheap. Cigar-store Indians have it.”
“Well, we won’t argue it, Father,” said Bek, “only please don’t trip
up your stout, middle-aged daughters as they try to serve you candied
yams. It just isn’t done.”
He leaned back in his chair to regard her, his sly old face
foreshortened and his eyes creased into a sucking swirl of wrinkles.
“My daughter’s been a good son to me.”
Almost without precedent for her, she leaned over and pecked a kiss on
the wrinkled old mat of a face.
“Not one of us is good enough, Father! Hadn’t you better clear out the
youngsters? They’re getting restless.”
It was then that the Old Gentleman brought down his fist as if it were
a gavel.
“Clear out the children and close those folding-doors. Dave, sit over
here.”
Conclave was on. Not a Schuyler but knew the call. A Schuyler about to
be born. About to be praised. About to be rebuked. About to be reminded
that the stern ideals of the House were the stern ideals of the Mosaic
Law. Commandments. To be written on the tablet of the heart. A humble
house, but one that already had plunged root deeply and proudly into
three generations of the soil. The same soil that had first fostered
the Old Gentleman with the straight bolt of duty for a mouth, and
the pallid Mathilda, whose eyes were no less steadfast than the
straightness of that mouth.
Bek bundled off the last of the grandchildren.
Finally, the doors closed, the shades drawn, the ugly little Igrotte
dining-room cleared of the extra table and jammed with the Schuyler
faces, every member of the family knew, without the first word having
been spoken: that this wasn’t really Henriette’s and Henry’s day at all.
This was David’s conclave.
He sat on the arm of Henry’s chair, a lank fellow of square, white
face that flickered behind his spectacles with a nervous batting
of his eyes; and, above the soft blue collar of the adult shirts
he was beginning to inherit from the well-worn stock of Henry, his
Adam’s-apple rode like a buoy.
By now, there was a marked Schuyler-cast to his face. The something
in the bone-structure of it that made it four-cornered. Cheek-bones
strictly vertical above jawbones. Brow that was set across with the
perfectly horizontal adjustment of a key pediment.
The Old Gentleman and most of his offspring—with the exception of
Steve’s little boy, who was Mathilda all over again, and Emma, who was
like a big, flowering Viking out of nowhere—had that rectangular type
of face.
A great-grandfather, named Hans Milton Schuyler, who had been his own
plow-ox on a Swiss farm sixty-eight years before, had been known as
far as Engeborg and as wide as Saalsberg, as “Breitgesicht,” which in
Swiss means “square-face.” It was just about now that David, ceasing
to gangle his way upward into greater height, was to begin to settle
tightly into the squat hewn and thewed look of face and figure that
was to make him even more susceptible to cartoon and caricature than
Roosevelt.[66]
He might easily have been the son of Henry, as he sat there on the
arm of his chair, dangling a long, loose leg and batting his nervous
eyelids under the circling buckshot of Schuyler eyes that were slowly
swinging into tribal circle.
Conclave was on, and it was characteristic of the Old Gentleman not to
bandy words.
“Dave, come here!”
His mother flung up a protesting flutter of hand against her throat, as
if a pain had smote her.
The boy strode immediately beside his father, the dignity of his swift,
sure obedience blurred a bit by the batting eyelids and that violent
thing, his Adam’s-apple, beating relentlessly against his collar.
“Phil,” said the Old Gentleman, taking his youngest’s hand and swinging
his quizzical old head round to where sat his rotund second son,
“Dave’s made up his mind to go to Springfield.”
“That’s all right with us, Father. Isn’t it, Rita?”
“Indeed it is, Father Schuyler.”
Rita, who always wore large, pink pearls in her ears and against her
soft and fat white neck, had an invariable gesture of seeming to
protect the beads against the tugs of her youngest child. She was a
soft, voluble little person, prematurely gone fat, given to a certain
amount of self-pity but outstandingly generous in her sympathies
toward others. The too-ready tear, the too-ready laugh, hung on the
brink of Rita’s eye and lip. All her life, small partridge of a person
that she was, she was destined to be interrupted in the middle of a
sentence. They came so volubly. In such quick succession. So sure-fire
commonplace. Even her children had a way of chopping her off along
about the middle of the predicate.
“As I always say to Phil, we haven’t got much but, what we have got is
...”
“I think Dave has made a pretty good decision, Father. Maybe you
wouldn’t judge so from my present performance, but what I said to him a
year ago, holds today. Springfield hasn’t licked me yet by a long shot.
It’s a live town for a live fellow.”
“St. Louis is a good town,” interposed Clara into this concatenation of
family-events. “If Sam had only had the gumption when he was a younger
man! Why, most of the men in the big wholesale-shoe crowd on Washington
Avenue started in as city-salesmen!”
Years of bitterness on this subject had worn down Clara’s voice to a
whine when she broached it. St. Louis, which she chose to denounce upon
every occasion as a city which had throttled her dreams and initiated
her into the scrimped existence of the wife of a city-salesman, had
long since shed its first years of strangeness to her. Now, after
eighteen years, it was secretly near and dear to her. But she still
nagged persistently to Sam, that life there, so remote from her home
and parents, was a meager and thankless affair.
As a matter of fact, at the close of the first few days of her annual
visits home, an actual nostalgia for the scenes and friends of the
city of her constant denunciations began to set in. Her eldest
daughter was already a prize pupil in the third grade of the St. Louis
public schools and Sam practically a pillar, by now, of the Second
Presbyterian Church. They shared the upper floor of a “St. Louis flat”
with a family who owned a Buick sedan and was generous with it. Clara
herself belonged to a sewing, a bridge, and a window-garden club, and
was beginning to enjoy contacts with the wives of men who were in
business for themselves.
Clara’s Mecca. Business for themselves! Sometimes to Sam, who was a
steady, plodding man of modest desires, that phrase could close like a
tomb around his contentment. “Business for himself.” That phrase was a
din in his ears.
“I’m a great believer that the boy who starts out in life with his eye
on getting himself into business for himself as soon as possible, is
the one who will escape the rut.”
Clara’s relationship to David was something as baffling to her as it
was abstruse. Eight years after her marriage to Sam and her subsequent
removal to St. Louis, David had been born.
He was a perpetual shock to her on her return visits. For the life of
her, she could not associate him with her girlhood background.
Her own children were full of curious questions about him that she
could not quite answer. It smote her one middle-of-the-night that he
would be great uncle to her first grandchild, and she wakened the
snoring Sam at her side to put the fantastical idea before him.
It is doubtful, if in all, Clara and Dave had ever exchanged an hour’s
talk, and that never sustained beyond the casual. And yet here he was,
this remote brother of hers, who might have been son, needing something
she felt it part of her tribal responsibility to be able to give him,
and feeling somehow, a smoldering anger against the absent Sam.
“If only Sam were in business for himself, instead of a man on a small
salary, Dave could come to us and learn the wholesale shoe-trade. Sam
says St. Louis is the coming shoe-center of the—whole world!”
“Know what I was thinking the other night, Henry? S’pose you double
the grazing-area of this country by raising reindeer in Alaska. Well,
double the grazing area and see how it affects the leather-industry——”
“Well, I don’t know anything about that, but I do know that if Sam had
been the man to push himself——”
“Your point is well taken, boy,” said Henry, and the large, slow smile
began to shoot in wrinkles from his eye-corners—“well taken, but out of
order, I should say.”
With a sensitiveness to the slightest rebuke or poke of fun from Henry
that was never to leave him, the sides of David’s head seemed to
lighten suddenly with the flash of two pink ears, and a flooding flush
of embarrassment ran down into the soft, blue, attached collar of a
shirt that had already served Henry and served him well.
“It just kinda came to me, all of a sudden, is all I meant.”
“That’s exactly Dave’s difficulty,” said Bek, her eyes, that always
flowed beneficence for him, full of a mock despair. “I’m sure that
right now he’s standing there trying to decide at the last minute
whether he’s starting out to be an astronomer, a taxidermist, or a——”
“God forbid!”
“A policeman, a Senator, a veterinary, a bank teller, a sheep-herder,
an explorer, a wholesale shoe-merchant, a doctor, a lawyer, a merchant,
a chief, or a——”
“Many the good veterinarian that has been sacrificed to the United
States Senate.”
“Hennery!”
“Well, we don’t need any veterinarians in the family.”
“Better in the family, Bek, than in the Senate!”
“Nonsense, a veterinarian in the Senate is worth two in the family.”
“What’s all this talk about a vegetarian in the family?”
“A veterinarian, Father!”
“What’s the difference, they are both for letting the animal live,
aren’t they?”
Paula, who outside of her teaching had started a batik,
painted-shoe-trees, character-doll, telephone-doll, hot-muffin, jasmine
teas, book-ends, art-smock, and candied-praline shop in Cleveland,
in partnership with a teacher in night school (who had advanced the
initial two hundred dollars), leaned over to her brother Steve.
“Isn’t the darling priceless? I could get him big time in vaudeville.”
“Or Sing Sing,” laughed Steve and laid a friendly and conservative
wallop across his grandfather’s shoulders.
“At my age,” said the Old Gentleman, “I don’t expect big time any more.
In Sing Sing, or out of it.”
“Puppa!”
“Guess, Mother, why my life is like a tail.”
“Puppa!”
“Because it’s all behind me. Sometimes I think it’s ahead of Davey, but
like a tail, too, and one that he’s trying to put salt on.”
“Father—don’t tease!”
“But, Father—my mind’s made up for sure—this time!”
“That’s a fact, Father, all joking aside. Dave’s been over this thing
with me same as he has with you. That’s the hurry idea of putting it
up to Phil and Rita now. Dave’s missed three weeks of the evening
law-session down Springfield now, as I understand. Dave’s come through
about this present plan on his own voluntary decision. Isn’t that about
it, Dave?” said Henry, fixing on him the eye of an ally.
“That’s it, Father,” said Dave, on a gulp, and looking around at
the fortress of friendly faces, began to bat his eyes. “Not much to
herding—is there—for a fellow like me——”
“There’s not much to herding except to a fellow that was born to be a
herder.”
“Be surprised, though, Father—fellow learns a lot about how ants and
sheep and butterflies and chipmunks and field-mice and skunks manage
their world.”
“Skunks,” said Phil, “that’s a mighty helpful part of a fellow’s
education!”
“Mebbe, if it helps you recognize a human skunk when you meet one. The
world’s full of them without the smell.”
“Puppa!”
“Yea, and watching butterflies—they’ll get you pretty far, Kid, in the
world you happen to be born into. Try concentrating on cream-separators
or garbage-incinerators. They’ll get you further.”
“Oh, Phil,” cried Rita, with a ripple across a face that was seldom
marred by petulance. “What’s funny in that? Can’t you let the boy
alone?”
“I knew a fellow once, up St. Louis way,” said the Old Gentleman,
“made a fortune out of some sort of a dredging-machine. Got the idea
from lying on his back in the park zoo Sunday afternoons, watching the
rhinoceros dig himself out of some Missouri mud they’d spilt in his
tank.”
“Dave’s got more information,” said Henry, “up there in that kinda
blockhead of his, than you’d think, offhand, Phil.”
“Don’t I know it? Can’t anybody around here stand a little kidding?”
“Cut it out, Henry. I don’t need anybody tooting my horn.”
“You see, Phil, the boy’s idea in going to Springfield is a sound one.”
“Sure it is. I’ve been after him to come to us for a year. Springfield
is a live town, and a boy in a wholesale grocery-firm can work his way
either in or out of it.”
“Exactly, and as Dave has figured it out, what with your offer to roof
him, it’s as good a place as any, and maybe a little better, to—get his
start in.”
“Better, I’ll say!”
“Exactly. To get himself a law-education evenings and at the same time
scrape together his meal-ticket on a daytime job. That about it, Dave?”
“Yes,” said David, and stood up suddenly with a click of his muddy
heels, in the attitude that was to be so characteristic of him on
rostrum and lecture-platform. A rather defiant, inelegant throwback
of figure, elbows hugging his sides, head tilted, and his legs in the
attitude of a trained runner about to swing into motion.[67]
“You see, Father, I’m no good at inventing or engineering or exploring
or any of those things that some fellows have done to move the world
along. But Henry and I know that as sure as we’re standing here, the
time is coming when aeroplanes are going dipping around the world
just as plentiful as trains. No man-control at all, but operated
by wireless. Well, that’s the way I feel about a job. I’m no good
at inventing the wireless, but if I could get a job where I’m the
wireless-apparatus itself ... that’s where I’d come in.”
“Times are better for a young fellow now than they were when I first
went to Springfield,” said Phil, with sagging, disappointed lines
springing about his mouth. “It’s the age of nerve and it’s the young
have the most of it. Take the building-trade in my town. I took my
plunge just ten years too soon.”
“I think I’d like the building-business, Phil! You know what? Henry, I
was thinking. Take the lay-out of towns today. The whole system has got
to change in the next twenty years. People ten miles out won’t be in
the suburbs any more. They’ll be ten minutes by plane from....”
“The building-business, eh? Well, how would you like to go
into the automobile, Oriental-rug, the ladies’-wear, the
coffin-manufacturing, the vacuum-cleaner, the banking, the baking, or
the breeding-of-tadpoles business? Or would you compromise on taking a
twelve-dollar-a-week job licking stamps for a fellow named Ox White,
whose got a _mail_-order business, selling radios?”
“I’d like that fine, Phil! Funny thing, but I was thinking to myself
last night in bed, know something that will save a lot of time and
money for the Government? Get before them, so they see what you’re
talking about, the idea of the further development of the C.O.D.
mail-delivery and it’s going to revolutionize——”
“Save it, or try it out on Ox. He’s a great one for ideas and cigar
coupons!”
“Phil!” called Rita, and looked with her sweet eyes at Dave, as if she
could cry for him.
“Oh, let me alone, can’t you, Rita? The kid’s got to get practical
sooner or later, doesn’t he?”
“Oh, I know what I’m up against, all right.”
“I wonder!” said Bek. “I wonder!”
“He’s never had advantages like my other children,” suddenly bleated
Mathilda, coming up behind the chair of her youngest. She was like a
wraith of hunger, of yearning, and of torment of self-indictment. “He’s
had just scraps all his life.”
“Nonsense, Mother!” said Henry, frowning. “What the rest of us had in
advantages, he’s made up for in his way, and don’t you forget it! The
boy’s all there—a little nutty on the speed-age, it’s true, without
ever asking himself where all this speed is going to take us!”
“But, Henry, you’re the one who sees it as much as I do. More!”
“What if I do? Whither, is what I’m asking—now that we’ve got it, what
are we going to do with it?”
“Davey!” There was his mother’s hand on his shoulder again. It was
light as a leaf. It was lighter. It was as veined and as palsied as if
a wind were trembling it. It made him want to cry. The lightness, the
timidity and the fact that even with its frailty, its callous places
hooked onto the nap of his coat. How doggedly and persistently, ever
since he had known those small, claw-like hands, they had poured out
twice the strength of which they seemed capable.
Her children like to tell of her, a little wistfully and a little
humorously, how she had once lugged a kicking calf who had poked his
luckless head into a hornet’s nest, moaning and plunging, the two miles
from the ravine where she found it, back to the Igrotte house, where
she deposited it in the barn and fainted.
The odor of lye and soft soap hung chillily about Mathilda. Every
day that Davey had ever known her, the gray wisp of her figure had
lumbered through the dawns, bent at some chore too heavy for her.
The bluish smoke of frying foods enveloped this sudden heart-hurting
procession of his memories of her, as her hand lay like a flake upon
his shoulder. She was forever at doing things that curved her thin back
into a hook. Winding a windlass to raise a bucket of water. Stooping
to draw her pans of well-risen bread out of the oven. Sweeping out a
hen-roost, her head wrapped in the blue bandanna kerchief that hung
behind the kitchen door, waiting for her.
The bandages she had wound! Not only around Davey, but around the
quinsy sore throats, the cut fingers, the twisted ankles of farm-hand,
neighbor, man, woman, and child. The liniment she had rubbed! The
ducklings, the bulls, the rams, the ewes, the kittens, the colts, the
calves, the chickens, she had ministered to, moving through the soft or
freezing dawns, as the case might be, barn and barnyard flickering to
the swinging of her lantern.
Once, when Dave was eight and had a diphtheritic sore throat, and
hoof-and-mouth disease was among the cattle, and a cow with calf was
giving dangerous and premature birth, she had fluctuated, the night
through, between helping the Old Gentleman in the barn, returning
to the house every so often to strip off her clothing for garments
that had not been exposed to the cattle; then to the swabbing of
David’s throat and back into the gray slip of a cotton dress with the
blood-spots on it; out once more into a blackness that seemed to cut
her in two as it struck her on the walk from the kitchen across the
chicken-yard to the low, red building that was filled with the sobbing
of a cow in labor.
There was no attitude of a human being in toil or fatigue that
all through his life was not to suggest to David, his mother. A
figure lugging a pail of water across a field as his train sped by.
A sway-back woman with her arms filled. A head lolling on tired
shoulders. A pair of knotted hands that, in repose, were stiff and
ill-at-ease looking.
How frequently she went about her service, drawing on the secret spring
of her strength, her large, milky eyes tired, yet full of the strange
exultation of self-torture.
The way she pressed food upon her menfolk, almost with the fanatical
zeal of one whose own hungers could be vicariously assuaged by the
sight of their indulgence.
For years the Old Gentleman had wailed, “Mother, stop watching me eat!
Come eat with me!”
When her children, including Dave, had grown in years and weight to an
age where she could scarcely bear up under the burden of lugging them
in arms, she had continued to carry them, glorying with perhaps the
inner exultation of sacrifice, in the burdens that her Lord had seen
fit to bestow.
She was like a stone at the heart of her family, Mathilda was. Every
one of her children, and the Old Gentleman as well, was sooner or later
to come to know the bitter sweetness of heartache for Mathilda.[68]
Her relentless industry. Her fanaticism for service. Her mute power of
reproach. Not reproach against those she served, but because under her
very feet, as it were, her world, that she labored so to conserve, ran
away from under her like sands.
Her hands were not only horny, but empty. She had gathered a harvest by
their productivity, and the reproductivity of her body, only in order
that she might lose it.
The granaries of her house and her heart were continually emptying
themselves faster than they were restored. And now David, who had come
into her autumn and was leaving her in the dead of her winter.
It was not merely as if the hand on Dave’s shoulder pressed against the
nap of his coat and the nap of his flesh, it was more as if it melted
and ran along through his veins, into their stream and pumping through
his heart, made it ache.
Bek knew precisely what David was feeling then. That same pain racked
her most when she woke up during the low-ebb hours of the night, with a
troubled awareness of that small, shriveled figure of her mother lying
two miles away in the Igrotte house.
Henry knew the ache that went with contemplation of his mother. It made
him sometimes brusque with her.
Clara too, to whom events back home, as she viewed them from St. Louis,
were somehow as through the wrong end of the opera-glasses, and Phil,
who took the background of family too much for granted to notice,
did regard his mother, once in a rare while, with something of an
indefinable pain for the manner in which the years had gnarled her.
Mathilda somehow had grown old in the way of a fruit tree that had
borne long and richly.
Emma sometimes frankly cried to Bek, asking passionately and
rebelliously what Mother ever got out of it, she’d like to know.
Why—why—nonsense, Mother got plenty out of it.
The Old Gentleman, who loved her, and who was slightly afraid of her
terrible meekness and the hint of hurt disapproval that it shrouded,
thought too, when he thought about it at all, which was seldom, that
Mathilda had got plenty out of it. Love and fear of her Protestant God.
A good wifehood. A superb motherhood. A family consistently striking
deeper and deeper root into a soil that had fostered it.
The Old Gentleman could strut of this sense of his Americanism.
Probably once a year he got his yellowing citizenship-papers out of a
drawer in his desk he kept locked, and with his steel-rimmed spectacles
low on his nose, reread them. It pleased him to think that his children
had never one of them set foot out of America. Americans all.[69]
Henry was the only possible exception. But as the old Ex-Governor
had once put it, he was perhaps the best American of them all. That
he dared, benignly, to challenge the cardinal virtue of patriotism,
one-hundred-per-centism, Protestantism, Rotarianism was Henry’s way.
Not to be taken seriously.
Mathilda herself never challenged. She was only hurt, deep down into
the very sinews of her being, with the pain that she carried about
with her into her barnyards. To her churning. To her perpetual task of
laying patches against men’s clothing, and opening the squeaking beaks
of poultry to the medicine-dropper.
It was as vague, this pain, as her sense of the surface of her body.
She could not have analyzed it. But it was what her young son, standing
there in the abashed throes of family-analysis, seemed to feel melting
in the shape of her hand through his coat, into his blood, and washing
painfully around his heart.
“It’s not easy for a boy with no advantages these days. Our Dave hasn’t
had them....”
“Mother,” he cried, and turned passionately toward the hovering gray
of her figure—“quit saying that, can’t you? I’ll get on all right. I’m
going to get me a good job in a good town.”
“Attaboy, Dave,” cried Phil, “the boy that starts right in that town
today, can clean it up and run it—I came ten years too soon.”
“Sure I am, Mother.”
“Attaboy,” cried Phil, and whacked him on the back so that his
spectacles jumped.
“Quit!”
Mathilda regarded her youngest with eyes that seemed to crawl out
toward him with their love and gratitude.
“I’ve got you ready, son. Six as new shirts as a boy ever left home
with. Flannels and middle-weights. There’s a patch had to be laid on
the blue serge, Dave, but it’s an excellent suit for every-day—with
overalls, for sweeping out office of a morning. You can travel in it,
son. The patch won’t show up, son, if you’re right careful about your
stoops.”
“Mother,” cried Dave and sprang back from the stroke of her thin hand,
“not that old serge to travel in! What if Dor—what if somebody’s down
at the train to see me off. Wouldn’t I be a pretty sight—backing away?
Gee, a fellow’s got to look right, traveling, Mother.”
“You can have my middle-weight gray pants,” said Henry, rising as if
to conclude the occasion. “You’re right. A fellow on his way to the
conquest of Springfield is entitled to a pair he is not ashamed to turn
his back on his home-town in.”
“Hen-nery!” fluttered Mathilda, “be refined!”