[66] ... a young and enormously talented fellow named Donald Wight,
who graduated from Harvard with my grandson, has done some of the most
delightfully eloquent caricatures of my brother that have ever been
made. The originals of these are in the portfolio collection of Paula’s
second daughter. The strip of cartoons which I am pasting on this page
is by no less an artist than the celebrated Nea. The one at the end,
right, done in exactly six strokes, suggests in masterly fashion the
square, rather pugnacious qualities of my brother. The second, with
those quick, exaggerated quirks to the eyebrow and corners of the
mouth, suggests, in uncanny fashion, the winged, visionary look that
was characteristic of him in certain moods. The last, perhaps, is the
most wittily characteristic of all. The four-square solidity of a man
whose feet are to the ground and whose nose is sniffing stars.
[67] ... Henry Gothard says of him (David) that half of his
platform-power (my brother was not a fluent speaker) lay in that
almost eccentric pose of a squat, low, tight-sinewed man, self-flailed
to endurance. Blierot’s statue of him, which stands at the head of
Hudson Boulevard and Three Hundred and Thirty-sixth Street, suggests
that dogged quality. The painting by Rockwell Bosworth, which hangs
in the National Gallery at Washington, is still my favorite, however.
Incidentally, it was while he was posing for that portrait that he is
said to have dictated his Conciliation Message to Russia. I know that
to be erroneous. That document was composed six months later, in the
summer White House.
[68] The morning of the day of my dear mother’s death, on one of those
telepathic and not quite explainable impulses, I drove over to the
Igrotte house in the forenoon, although it was my usual custom to
arrive there about four in the afternoon in time to lift Mother, who
was so dreadfully crippled of inflammatory rheumatism that winter, from
her couch into her bed.
To my horror, I found her this day (it was actually the day of her
death, dear darling) trying, with her pain-crammed fingers, to knit a
blue neck-scarf for Steve’s eldest daughter, Pauline.
I shall never forget the stab of pain with which I beheld those
tortured fingers working their laborious way along the needles....
[69] ... the first member of our large family to go abroad, was my son
Steve, who flew to England, _via_ Newfoundland and Ireland, the year
he became president of the International Air Corporation. During his
lifetime, Father, for some curious reason, was never sympathetic to the
idea.
For a while, Phil and Rita were extremely anxious to send their second
daughter to school in Switzerland, but out of deference to Father’s
wishes, abandoned the idea.
[Illustration: Decorative Image]
_Chapter Forty-one_
The sleet came down and hopped off shoulders and blew and bounced along
the streets and then finally formed a coating of ice that shellacked
the windward side of buildings and trees and made walking a matter of
balancing.
High Street wore its coating promptly away into a mucilaginous ooze
of mud, but the tributary streets, except where housewives leaned
from the top steps of their porches and threw out handfuls of ashes,
or ice-cream salt, glittered in an armor of thin ice, and the naked
branches of the double rows of maples along Sycamore Street shone like
a regiment of fountains with their ornamental waters frozen in action.
Shrubbery in front yards sagged under ice. Horses pedaled for footing
and struck sparks. In front of the Five and Ten Cent Store, one was
down, with a driver sitting on his head, while they shoveled ashes
under his plunging hoofs. The pair of iron stags on the Court House
lawn had ice beards.
In winter, Henry Schuyler persisted in wearing a veteran coon-skin cap
with ear-flaps, probably the only one still extant in Centralia.
When he came down out of his office to emerge into the sleet, these
flaps were tied down over his ears in a little bow of black tape under
his chin. In his short reefer, coon-skin mittens, and goloshes that
he lashed closer to his thin legs with a winding of hemp, there was a
lanky Ichabod-look to him, as he strode surefootedly along the perilous
streets.
David was leaving on the one-forty-nine. Henry had left Senator Jim
Kearney, who wanted unprofessional advice on an extradition case he
was handling in Cincinnati, waiting with his feet up against the
base-runner, while he made the dash around to the station. As the
Senator put it, he had just dropped in. As a matter of fact, Henry
knew, and the Senator suspected that Henry knew, that he had made the
trip to Centralia for the express purpose of the interview with Henry.
The one-forty-nine was due in ten minutes.
Henry hurried.
David, and his father, and Mathilda in an outlandish-looking dolman
cape with ball fringe that gave her coachman’s shoulders, and Dora
Tarkington in her white wool cap, were standing around a stove in the
waiting-room, with their clothes steaming and smelling.
Tom Willets had raised the ticket-window grating and was leaning along
the outer sill to talk with the Old Gentleman.
Katie, old Trina’s niece, who before her marriage had done day-work
in the House on Sycamore Street, getting wind of Davey’s departure,
had driven in on her husband’s dirt-cart from Ideola with her
three-year-old twins, who kept up a constant trekking across the room
to the water-cooler, Katie constantly after them for keeping the spigot
open.
There were two other passengers for the one-forty-nine. A salesman
with his sample-case and a shawled woman with a live chicken in a chip
basket.
The sleet beat against the smoke-smeared windows in a monotonous tattoo.
“It’s a bad day for travel, son,” said Mathilda for the fourth time.
“Oh no, Mrs. Schuyler!” cried Dora. “I just love to travel on a rainy
day. There’s something so cozy about being right out in the middle of
the weather and not a bit of it able to get at you. Don’t you think so,
Dave?”
David thought so.
“Of course, I know what you mean, Mrs. Schuyler. There’s something
depressing about people going away in the rain. Sad-like.”
Dora’s voice was too high. It had a nervous pitch to it from talking to
David’s mother. She was not quite herself. They were a little fierce
together, these two, a rush of excitement out over them just from being
in each other’s presence. Mathilda, without quite knowing it, full of
unease, as if something were rubbing against the grain of her very
being.
Pretty Dora. David’s shy eyes these last moments were furtively for her.
Mathilda knew it by the tight feeling behind her eyes.
Dora, by that same token, knew that Mathilda knew. With all of her
astonishing capacity for rising to the demands of almost any sort of
moment, Dora, even with her throat so hot and dry and nervous-feeling,
knew that there must be just one right sort of kindness to make this
moment more endurable to Mathilda.
In a way, she almost accomplished that miracle. Except for the
overstrain in her manner, which David wanted passionately not to be
there.
It kept her too eager. Too high-voiced. Too voluble. And not more than
once did she let her glance be caught and pinioned by David, whose eyes
ached to be caught and pinioned.
“Don’t you think it fun to travel in the rain, Dave?”
“Dora isn’t really this way, Mother,” he wanted to shout. “She’s sweet
and neat and cozy. She isn’t really this way, Mother.”
“You do think it’s fun to travel in the rain, Dave?”
“You bet!”
He had a dry throat that kept breaking his sentences into gulps. There
was even one between the “you” and the “bet.”
How beautiful she was in that woolly cap that shone against the dirty
morning. And she had cut her hair. The curls that had romped through
a thousand of his fancies of her, were gone now from their yellowish
riot along her shoulders. And strangely, incredibly, the little bang
of yellow that escaped her cap, and the short, straight line of
yellow that lay along her cheeks, and the furry little peak where
it petered out in the back of her head, like a boy’s, were just as
goose-fleshingly lovely as the curls had been.
How beautiful she was. The secret thing between them that he had
whispered to his mother a thousand times with the secret lips of his
heart, was obscured for the moment by the enormous casualness of her
manner. Too casual. Too obviously casual, he thought. Even strangers
could be expected to meet eye-to-eye. The eyes that must serve him as
lamps now. Two shining lamps down in his heart.
Yet there they stood, scraping their feet along the fender of the
stove, dilly-dallying through the infinitesimally small talk of waiting
for a train.
“When Father took me to Springfield when Aunt Genevieve died, we ate in
a dining-car!”
Gabble. Gabble. Dora’s tongue was like the hum of his mother’s
sewing-machine. Gabble. Gabble. Dear gabble, gabble.
“Of course, with local trains, it’s different....”
It made all the commotion of his emotions somehow subservient to just
her nearness and dearness.
Once it seemed to him that something shining lay along her lashes as
she half raised them to him. Only half, but it swept the plunging
excitement higher and dryer into his throat.
“Only ten minutes, Dave,” said Mathilda, her words seeming to collapse
against the rim of her lips.
“Yes, Mother.”
How beautiful she was. Dora.
“You’ll remember, Davey, to make a package of your dirty wash
every-other-week and parcel-post it home.”
Dirty wash! At least she might have put it “soiled linen.” Mother!
“Rita’s got her hands full with her own family. Besides, son, it will
be almost like having you back. The clothes—you’ve worn—close—to you.
Don’t forget to change regular, son.”
“Mother.” What if he should cry. His throat ached so.
“I’ve put in two weights, Dave. The ones with the little red ’D’
embroidered on the drawers are the heavies, son.”
Drawers! How terrible. How Terrible. How TERRIBLE. In front of Dora.
Dora, whose sweet eyes were almost looking into his now. Dora, whose
sweet eyes were violets. Red “D” on the belt of his drawers. Ignominy
drenched him. It made red signals of his ears. It made a throttle of
his Adam’s-apple.
“Mother!”
“Dora knows, son,” said Mathilda, and fixed her ineffably tired eyes
upon the two of them, standing flaming in the murk of the clogged air
of that waiting-room which they enchanted for each other. “Dora knows
such things have to be thought about. No right-thinking girl, Davey,
is ever above thinking about those kind of things,” said Mathilda, and
began to cry miserably and in sniffles that screwed her face cruelly
because she tried to hold them back.
“Oh, Mother, Mother, Mother!” cried Davey to himself, as if his heart
were turning to sand and running away from him.
And yet he only stood and gulped the Adam’s-apple that would not stay
gulped.
“Dear Mrs. Schuyler,” cried Dora, and stepped over the impediment
of Dave’s cheap, light-yellow suitcase and neatly-wrapped shoe-box
of lunch, which he had consistently tried to keep kicked out of her
sight, “look what I’ve brought him, if he thinks you’re kind of fussy
about—about little things. I knitted it myself. All but the orange
stripe. Mary Chipman was sleeping with me one Saturday night, and she
knows the zigzag stitch—she did the stripe.”
“A muffler! For me—all but the stripe—gee, swell—fellow needs
muffler—all but the stripe—gee——”
“He—wouldn’t let me put the one I knitted for him in,” sobbed Mathilda,
the words tumbling off her lips like coals, and then making a forward
jump as if she would scrape them all back again.
“Why, you darling, of course he wouldn’t. No son in the world ever
would.”
“He—he—said—no——”
“Mother, I didn’t mean——”
“You did!” said Dora, who had an armful of Mathilda, and stamped her
foot. “You did! You were horrid! You did!”
“He didn’t!” cried Mathilda. “You see, it was a gray one. Of a bit of
wool left over from his father’s socks. He was always a child liked
color. It’s the orange in this one. He didn’t!”
“That’s exactly what I meant, dear—he did—I mean he didn’t—I—mean—of
course I mean he did.”