Chapter X: Part 10

Dave and I drove these forty in as far as Ivorydale one clear November night.

I can see him as plainly as if that night were before me now, astride his paste-board-looking filly (one that usually did sister work at the plow beside a heavier chestnut), loping through the milk-and-pearl fore-glow of a dawn about to break. Head back, the wind before the dawn lifted his bangs to reveal squareness of brow, and his shabby heels dug into the patient old horseflesh with the fervor of the vision he could not get said.

_Chapter Twenty-four_

To David’s generation of boys, the World War was little more than a remote, a magnificent circus, toward which perpetual parades were pouring the older fellows but which never, as a big tent, came within even brass-band distance of town.

All of the circumstances of life were to be altered by that war; and yet, to the generation who were children through the years of its duration, khaki, and gold-star mothers, and Huns, and Big Berthas, and hysteria belonged to the scheme of things, as waterfall belonged to Old Mill Road. Here was a generation born into a phraseology that was new only to the adult. Imperialism of Central Europe. World Safe for Democracy. Over there! Hoch der Kaiser. Russian Revolution. The Poppies Grow in Flanders Field. Conscription. Liberty Bonds. Argonne. Doughboy. Buddy. Transport. Treaty of Versailles. Patriotic cant of this and that propaganda-source, calculated to raise the nap of the flesh of a nation, even while the only palpable results were an impoverished and desolated world.

Many who marched down those languid streets of Centralia as Dave and Teddy ran after, were not to come back; but even that, to children who had seen it consistently happening, did not bring the catastrophic reality of war closer.

If a fellow came home with one leg—well, fellows were always coming home thataway. And still the circus of war remained strangely removed, except one day Pete came home, and a small and suddenly rather sickish-feeling boy, who was lugging a pail of sour clabber from Bek’s place to the Igrotte house, came face to face with him in the open road.

The lower half of Pete’s face had been blown away and replaced with sort of a nickel-plated jaw. And his eyes were still looking as if they had frozen there of what they saw.

“Davey, b’God! Hi, Kid!”

“Hi!”

For the first time war became a horror then, stalking with stiff eyes and rigid jaw through those lanes of peace.

David was sick that night, and feverish. “Upset stummick,” diagnosed Mathilda, and plied him with castor-oil.

Every Schuyler came home. Phil, who saw ambulance service. His eldest son, who drove a truck under bombarded skies for sixteen months. Clara’s boy, who lied about his age to qualify for enlistment and who saw service as far front as Amiens. Paula, who did canteen service in France. Stevey, who fought at Argonne, and whose eyes had seen the horror of the splashing of human entrails across fields.

The war, which had crashed with such terrific interruption into the more or less organized scheme in which David had spent the first few years of his life, came to its portentous conclusion, the world held the brief pose of a chastened, spiritualized humanity that had gone down in blood that it might be cleansed, and then relapsed.

In later years, there seemed to David to be a certain subtle demarkation in human beings. Those born before the Great War and who stood astride the chasm of it, as it were, with one foot in each world, and those born to the curious, old-eyed youth of a post-war world.

It was a fantastic phase of human experience to have lived through, even as a child.

Around Davey’s head, while he was a youngster, Russia cracked her shackles, France bled white, the Near East, the Far East scrambled and squirmed free of chains that carried the rust of centuries. His own country flung a faltering gesture. A man named Mussolini thrust his hand down into the throat of Italy, gagged and then rode her, magnificently. Czars and Kaisers galloped out of the human scene like Sancho Panza on mules. Forensic peasants came into world-power, their followers crawling like armies of worms out of darkness to live in the Kremlin. One fine day in Davey’s boyhood, Great Britain handed portfolio to its first labor-government.

Supper-table discussion between the Old Gentleman and Henry made the light along the lamp-wick buzz and flare in the gale of explosives. Tariff. Woodrow Wilson. Lloyd George. Reparations. Rasputin. Rheims. Stanley Baldwin. D’Annunzio. Irish Free State. Colonel House. Henry Ford. Prohibition. Joe Cannon. League of Nations. Mexico. Trotsky. Jim Reed. Muscle Shoals. Eugene Debs. Borah. Senator Moses. La Follette. Nicholas Murray Butler. Wells’ _Outline of History_. Fascisti.

Time and time again, off the rather weary sill of Henry’s lips, there dropped sparks that set the dry tinder of the Old Gentleman’s conservatisms leaping and flaming.

This was a curious tenacity to Henry. It bothered him to see the Old Gentleman darken and redden in apoplectic fashion. Sometimes it even terrified him. But for the life of him, he could not remain silent and let one after another of his father’s reactionisms die into the quiet of the evening meals.

“Well, sir, something, ought to be done about this here Red situation. The Boston police-strike, the steelworkers’ strike, the soft-coal miners’ strike and now this here railway-strike in England starting up. Race-riots out in Chicago. Bomb-plot trying to smash up Attorney-General Palmer’s home. Only way for a self-respecting government to handle anarchy is call out the troops. Shoot ’em down. That’s the way to cure these scalawag anarchists. Cowards at heart!”

“Father, every manifestation of social discontent is not necessarily a form of anarchy.”

“Like to know what else you call a lot of lazy fellows up-and-revolting against the finest government in the world.”

“Revolt is the soul of progress.”

“By Gad, not to my way of thinking. If you think a lot of lazy louts of fellows that think they can milk a living out of the Government instead of working for it are the soul of progress, then, by Gad, progress has got a rotten soul that I wouldn’t lift a little finger to help save. You and this here Emma Goldman they’re giving a free boat-ride to are the kind they drive out of this country and keep out! I.W.W. crowd—I-won’t-work-ers!”

“Father!”

“Puppa!”

“Well! I won’t have no anarchy talked in my house, where there’s a boy growing up to listen to it.”

“If it weren’t for that youngster, Father, and my desire for him to learn to look temperately at both sides of this troubled old world, I wouldn’t even argue the matter with a biased person like you.”

“I’ve worked hard all my life, earned an honest living, and I never had time to sit and criticize the government that——”

“Oh, Father, Father—won’t you try to think with your brain instead of with your prejudice? I hold no brief for anarchy, any more than you do. I’m merely trying to differentiate between——”

“You hold brief for shenanigans of I.W.W. fellows, who don’t mean no good by the country.”

“Don’t shout, Father!”

“Puppa!”

“I will shout! Anarchists! Anarchists—that’s what they are—by Gad, if I thought a son of mine was one, I—I——”

“I quit, Father! If you think I’m going to try and argue capital and labor with a man who sees red the moment a more equable living-scheme for humanity is broached, you’re mistaken. You see, Dave, what I was trying to say to your father is not that this strike or that riot is right or wrong. The point, David, I’m trying to make to your father is that without revolt against oppression, ignorance and illiteracy, there can be no human emancipation. Submission, throughout the history of the world, has begotten autocracy.”

“And what have such lazy-lout strikes begotten? I.W.W. anarchists. Anarchy——”

“You win, Father. I quit! God only knows how anyone can be so hidebound.”

“Hennery!”

“Excuse me, Mother.”

“You should have quit long ago, son. You know how excitable your Puppa is.”

“I know what Henry means. If the rich ones wasn’t so rich, and the poor ones wasn’t so poor, then there wouldn’t be so much to fight about, would there?”

“Exactly, Dave. But you can’t make your father be——”

“Can’t make—can’t make—I’ll break every bone in——”

“Puppa—Hennery—please.”

Turbulent evenings. Supper-table disharmonies that were to set into motion atoms in the boy’s brain that might never have stirred otherwise.

Off Henry’s sardonic lips were to glitter phrases of curious and significant prophecy. As if against the retina of his lusterless eye was imprinted the ultimate significance of empire toward which all these catastrophic events were scurrying a bewildered world.

World-unification. Annihilation of distance. Propinquity of races. Tolerance. Fraternity. Lonely phrases in a land that presently was to pursue its policies outside the League of Nations.

Presently, these phrases, dinned by Henry, came to be the only reality of war left against Dave’s brain.

The boys were home and settled now.

Even Pete’s mask was no longer terrible.

Here was Stevey as if he had never marched away to the rolling of drums, living in a semi-attached two-family house out on Tallahassee Street, within walking distance of the Giles Tool Works, where he had a desk job in the shipping department.

Something in the nature of one of those freak tornadoes that can seem to appear in a crazy spiral of fury out of the blue had happened to Steve. The craving for drink had been literally shot from him.

In all the hubbub of the prohibition which a returning army found awaiting it and with the nation lying prone upon its stomach and kicking its heels and squalling over a right that had been wrested from it, the mere sight of a bottle of Scotch on a shelf was enough to stiffen Steve, taut and squeamish with revulsion.

A kind of cure not without its rare precedent in medical annals.

The smell, or for that matter even the sight of spirituous liquor in any form, was to bring back to Steve the odor and smear of a human face in the act of becoming pulp.

One night, crouched down under a hill of wet mud, and guzzling from a flask with two companions in the trench, he had seen the face of his “buddy” literally torn off by shrapnel as he tilted the bottle Stevey had just handed him, to his lips.

The mess and the splatter were to remain irretrievably mixed in Steve’s mind with the taste of alcohol, the mere sight of it to recall the terrible sight of a friend’s face in the act of being blown to pulp.

Here was Steve, almost through no volition of his own, swept into the scheme of the little two-family house on Tallahassee Street, Claire, plumpish by now, awaiting him evenings, a normal youngster at her skirts, in a doorway that had his monogram embroidered in its lace curtain.

The Steve Schuylers at Number 1569½ Tallahassee Street, rent-payers, water-tax payers, seat- and presently pew-holders, had fallen into place. The Schuyler escutcheon had remained unviolated; and the Old Gentleman, as time went on, came more and more to cast prideful eye upon his first great-grandchild, Pauline, as she toddled out to meet him on his less and less frequent visits into Centralia.[39]

Another Schuyler rivet had tightened the impeccable family-machine. Respectability. Conservatism. Republicanism (consistently up to this time!). Law-abiders. Voters. God-fearers. Rotarians. Masons. Policy-holders.

Two years after his return from the World War, Stevey was carrying fifteen-hundred-dollars life-insurance, depositing one dime a day in a toy bank toward his daughter’s Vassar College education, lunching once a week at a Blue Plate Booster’s Club in the Renchler Block, voting the straight Republican ticket for Harding, and spending his Sunday mornings flat on his back under the Ford five-seater in the corrugated portable garage which he shared with the second tenant of the two-family dwelling.

In the shy coming-together of Stevey and Claire after the convulsion of their flying-apart, the bone, true to physiology, seemed to have cemented more firmly than before the break.

Years after, when the name of a Schuyler was up before the state for the highest honor bestowable upon one of its citizens, someone in opposing political ranks did attempt the moss-grown device of trying to probe out an irregularity in the social history of David Schuyler’s nephew Stephen. A far-fetched gesture at best, and one, even had it been successful, that was almost sure to have proved futile.

But to try to penetrate the Schuyler armor of social integrity was like trying to wound the flank of the Himalayas with a bow and arrow.

It was the year that Stevey, with what he considered the hindrance, rather than the advantage of an uncle the governor of his state, and a mother the first woman alderman of the town of Centralia, was elected second vice-president and treasurer of the Giles Tool Works.

Someone’s faint scent of something hurried connected with the marriage was too faint for even the political vandals to fasten upon. To be sure, Steve Schuyler and his wife were first-cousins. Scarcely a fact to unmake governors.

When Bek Schuyler heard of the feeble intrigue, she smiled. A skeleton, and not much of a one at that, and whose bones by now were soft with decay, could scarcely be expected to rattle for the political gentlemen.

* * * * *

So far as Dave was concerned, Claire’s little house on Tallahassee Street was to become the center around which an assorted set of his adolescent emotions were to dash themselves.

When Dora Tarkington was sixteen, and wore her curls in two round, flat mats against her ears, she attended what was then known as the South Tallahassee High School.

It was after a sharp attack of influenza, during one of the frequent epidemics that swept the country those first years after the War, that an arrangement was made for Dora to have her lunches hot at the Steve Schuylers’, instead of the cold snack she was obliged to carry with her the two miles from home.

Nowadays, when Steve returned from the Works for his midday meal, there was Dora, whom they had known since she could toddle, to swell the little family circle that drew up to table.

It pleased Claire to have special little daintinesses in her honor; and since Len Tarkington had bartered in vain for some kind of a financial arrangement to cover these lunches—Stevey withdrawing offended from the argument—every day Dora, who was incomparable at handiwork, arrived with some bit of surprise. A woolen chicken for Claire’s eldest little girl. A sheer pink underthing for Claire herself, or a plover-egg with a hand-painted face for the small boy who could crawl, and a tiny crocheted cap for the baby.[40]

Claire’s little house in Tallahassee Street had to it the agreeable untidiness of high, unevenly-drawn window-shades that admitted sunlight in glaring streams across the rooms, youngsters crawling through them and littering the floors with toys, building-blocks and noise-devices.

She was perpetual motion at stooping, snatching, admonishing, warning, a wisp of her pretty, taffy hair constantly blown across her flustered face; and in just such proportion as her activities seemed to increase, her pretty kind of plumpness crept up on her.

Sweet Claire. She had feathered her nest. At noon and at evening, Steve turned to it eagerly. Sometimes, at the corner, he consciously slowed his step, to seem, from some perversity in him that gave him periods of self-detestation, to enter the home she had made for him, a little less enthusiastically.

Like her mother’s before her, Claire’s ineffable sweetness was like a drug. It swam into the senses. It was into Stevey’s senses long before he knew it. It had him quelled, caught, stabilized. It made a Rotarian out of the rebel in him. It was sweet to submit to the little tropic he had married himself into. The tropic of warm, sun-drenched, or lamplight-drenched home, griddle-cake breakfasts, with the aroma of little-pig sausages; the cleanest, deepest of beds; the warm, sweet body of the woman who bore him warm, sweet children. Her intellectual languor was part of her sweetness, just as it was part of her danger. Along with the sweetness of those first years, there was just a little terror of them. Submission. Old rebellions dying. Cravings—old inchoate beauties—finally, just the sweetness.

The lace curtains in the front parlor of the house on Tallahassee Street came to have for Steve the living, breathing quality of Claire herself. She was so warmly behind them, at his coming. At his going. They stirred faintly of her breath. They were a badge of her.

Sometimes Claire, who was even then locally and affectionately known as a congenital match-maker, used to stand behind these lace curtains, tiptoe, to watch for the noonday approach of Dora, usually in the company of Kenneth Chipman, who was junior partner in his father’s law-office, just across the street from Tallahassee High.

Kenneth was a campus-looking young fellow, with the first thatch of patent-leather hair that had reached Centralia, and one of those figures shaped like the map of South America. Heavy, flaring shoulders, tapering off into slim, flat hips. He was a graduate of the State University, a winner of a state oratorical contest; pounded a wicked ukulele and already, his second year out of college, had his name on the ground-glass door of the offices of Chipman and Lare, Patent Attorneys.

His brother Lynn, killed at Amiens, had been the white hope of the two white-haired senior members of that office. After his death, the legend grew rapidly that Lynn had been the most brilliant young legal mind to ever take up practice in Centralia. Nevertheless, even with the precedent of this older brother, a capable enough young fellow, whom time and a warrior’s death were to canonize into genius, Kenneth, ukulele-pest that he could be of an evening, was regarded as one of the up-and-coming younger men of the town.

The third time Claire stood behind her lace curtains and beheld Kenneth raise his straw cady and walk briskly down the street with many a backward glance at Dora as she danced upstairs, and another lift of hat, and another, Claire remarked to her husband that night, as she was rubbing tonic into his hair before they retired:

“You know, Stevey, looks to me as if young Chipman is smitten on Dora.”

“Rub a little toward the center, dear. Getting right thin, there.”

“Today’s the third time he’s walked from Tallahassee High with her, noontime.”

“The way to massage the scalp, dear, is with a circular motion of the fingers. Don’t shove.”

“Henry says he’s a chip off the old block, and already handling some of his father’s cases, single-handed. Dora’s one darling girl.”

“’Fraid that’ll put Davey’s nose out of joint,” said Steve, hitching his collar open.

“What do you mean, Davey?”

“Well, haven’t they been smitten with each other ever since they were crawling?”

“Why, Stevey Renchler, what ever put that idea into your head? Those two children! I was saying to Aunt Bek the other day, bright as Davey is in some ways—you know sometimes—I—you know, Stevey, sometimes I—think, in other ways, Dave’s not so bright.”

“It’s his manner, Claire. He’s either the smartest or the dumbest kid on earth. Hanged if I can make out which.”

“The way he lies out there, day after day, herding his little old handful of sheep, stretched by the hour on the flat of his tummy, reading or mooning—I guess that’s what some folks call bright. He _is_ smart, of course, in a school way. Henriette says he’s ’way ahead of any boy his age that’s had schooling regular and all—but in general—for Davey’s age—oh, I don’t know—just kinda funny, loony-looking sort of kid to me. Him and Dora! Why, poor Davey, I’ll bet he hasn’t more than laid eyes on her since the family moved from the House on Sycamore Street.”

“Why, you know better than that, Claire. The days when—when we—how often did we use to see Dave and Dora playing around south of the Igrotte house together. Kids, of course, but that’s all I’m saying. He’s been sweet on her since he could toddle——”

“I wonder,” said Claire, and sat down thoughtfully, in the middle of the act of unfastening the tiny pearl buttons of her pretty little home-made house-dress. “Davey _is_ more her type—I guess.”

“The kid puzzles me,” said Steve and yanked hard at the rear button of his collar. “Can’t make up my mind about him.”

“Oh, I don’t mean I really think he’s queer, Steve. I didn’t mean that. It’s all of you nagging him, I think, that confuses him, as much as anything. After all, he’s only seventeen. Dave happened to come along in bad times. He’s never had the chance of mixing and schooling the rest of you had. First came the family-crash and then the War and all. After all, he’s only a youngster.”

“Old enough by now to know his own mind, you’d think.”

“Not a mind like Davey’s.”

“If you aren’t the greatest girl! Here you’ve been wondering why Dave didn’t get a move on and take a real job, and the minute I agree——”

“But I mean, Stevey, lots of times a boy growing up—alone-like in a big family—nobody much to talk to except Henry, who’s a pretty queer darling duck too—a boy like that gets to feeling around with his mind in every direction, and for all we know—some day—he may come out all right.”

“Something in that. Shame he’s had the least schooling of us all. In his way, Davey’s bright enough. Dave’s deep.”

“Maybe. Only it’s my observation that still water doesn’t necessarily run deep. Maybe it doesn’t run at all.”

“Things just didn’t break right for him, or for the family, about the time he came along.”

“’Course, he’s had Henry.”

“That’s something.”

“Something! Henry’s not appreciated in this town. A fellow like Henry can have a far finer influence over a fellow than all the schools put together. Look how thick they are. Always puttering together over books and ant-hills and maps. Let me tell you, Henry’s a liberal education in himself.”

“Yes, if he doesn’t go putting crazy ideas in the youngster’s head. You see how far his brains have gotten Henry, don’t you? Look at what his ideas on war got for him.”

“But there’s just one beauty about Dave. You can’t topple over that youngster. He’s that square on his feet.”

“That’s true enough. Remember that time, over at Bek’s, Henry was lecturing on the wrongness of making war possible, and up piped that youngster from a corner where he’d been lying on his stomach with his chin propped up in his palms, and says: ‘But, Henry, you can’t end war by not fighting in it when the war comes. It’s folks you’ve got to change beforehand, so there won’t be any war.’ Jove, I thought that about said it in a nutshell. That kid’s got the kind of mind believes in preventive medicines, so the world doesn’t get the measles. Not what to do about it when the measles have come.”

“That’s too deep for me.”

“Other evening, when I went out to the Igrotte house to help Grandfather and Dave lay those shingles, I was looking around for the kid, and finally I find him lying barefoot, in his overalls, up against a hay-rick, star-gazing. ‘Say, you’re getting pretty well along for this barefoot-boy-and-cheeks-of-tan stuff,’ I said to him, ‘How do you get that way?’ And what do you think he answered?”

“What?”

“‘You know, that fellow Malthus,’ he says. ‘Who?’ I asked. ‘Malthus.’ I thought at first he said Methuselah. Malthus, it seems, was a fellow who worked out that the population of the world doubles every twenty-five years!”

“My!”

“Well, Davey must have been lying there thinking about it.”

“Henry’s doings.”

“Because he said to me—‘Just suppose for argument, Malthus was over-stating, and the population only doubles every fifty or a hundred years. Where are we going to get food after a while? Eats and stuff. Where are we going to have room enough to grow enough grain and graze enough cattle, if the population crowds up the earth like that?’”

“Why, Stevey—working his brain on such stuff when we’ve plenty of pasture-land around here can be rented for a song. Of all things....”

“That’s the whole point, Claire. There’s a kid with a long head on him. That youngster, lying there, had thought out something for the future, where most of us only have the brains to see what’s right under our noses, and then only maybe.”

“You mean, Henry’s like that, and he’s making Dave like that?”

“No, sir. Henry had been reading to him about Malthus, all right, but darned if the youngster hadn’t worked the rest out for himself.”

“Well, he’s either right smart or right dumb.”

“A dummy doesn’t work things out for himself. He got me thinking, too. Just as the youngster said, if we can harness the air and electricity and water and sun to work for us, why can’t we get busy on the waste places of the world and make them produce for us. Hundreds of thousands of miles of desert and prairie and sand are waiting for man’s ingenuity to reclaim them—darn shame, Dave has seen leaner days than any of the rest of us. I think it’s put age on the Old Gentleman and Grandmother—just worrying about it.”[41]

“Well, you know the saying, Steve, you can’t keep a good man down,” said Claire, with her mother’s rather dreadful amiability, and mouthing her decrepit observation in the key of having discovered a truth.

“Well, I hope to heaven ‘good’ is the word. Certainly does seem a fellow his age ought to have a preference for something by now. I offered six months ago to chip in to pay the wage of a hired-man for the Old Gentleman, in case Dave might be wanting to scratch around for a job in town. The Old Gentleman himself keeps trying to oust him out of the nest.”

“You know, I think Isaiah Clark would be willing to give Dave a job in his Seed and Feed Store, seeing how Dave’s so interested in making things grow.”

“Oh, Lord, honey, you see the point about as readily as Grandfather’s old blind mare sees oats. Besides, Isaiah hasn’t had a boy in there since Joe Mintz was killed in the War. I’m not in strong at the shops enough to be asking any favors, but it looks to me as if I ought to be able to get Davey in at the Works. There’s a future there for a boy who’s willing to work up from the foundry. Look at Sime Giles!”

“So you think,” said Claire, still sitting in the huddle of her half-open dress, her pretty pink mouth a little open, “so—you—think—Davey’s sweet on Dora!”

“I don’t think!” said Steve, and went shushing off to the bathroom, in bed-slippers hand-scalloped by Claire, “I _know_!”

FOOTNOTES:

[39] ... that was the winter Stevey’s eldest child Pauline accompanied her father and me to Washington, and the young Marquis de Fressac fell so immediately in love with her. From the very first, her interest in politics was to run neck and neck with the social lures her beauty and personality created about her. It was characteristic of Pauline that she should choose both. Considering the part she played during her senatorship, and the influence she exerted both in France and in America as a social force, it is difficult to estimate in which field my granddaughter is succeeding most brilliantly. As my son-in-law de Fressac puts it in his delightfully French manner, “Eet ees een both.”

[40] ... growing up, as she did, in a generation of girls to whom handiwork was practically an obsolete art, loving gayety, filled with a social instinct and with a brilliant gift for popularity, Dora, in a curious way, was not quite of her time. She rode horseback and crocheted all the edgings for her underwear. She won the local golf-championship the year her piccalilli took first prize at the State Fair. Never in his married life did Dave wear a shirt or a tie that was not personally selected by her.

[41] ... looking back, I can see now, how early this idea was boring itself into Davey’s brain. In her monograph about him, the late Eda Eberhardt, Centralia’s librarian, relates how she was obliged to deprive him of reading-room privileges one week because of his habit of poring over maps and pencil-marking the deserts, mountains, and prairies.

He once related to me, word for word, the doctrine of Malthusianism, as it had been passed on to him by Henry, drawing his own critical deductions, and evidently thinking about the relativity of population and land.

He could never bear to see idle land. Even the stony little nooks and corners surrounding the Igrotte house gave up odds and ends of the most heterogeneous yield. Mushrooms under the back porch. A potato-patch he had somehow scratched into being, on a rocky little ledge of land behind the barns. Even out of the powdery, dry front yard he had eked beets and carrots.

Much of my own later success with crop-rotation I owe to his helpful co-operation in those days when his significant back-to-the-farm policies must just have been taking shape in his mind.

_Chapter Twenty-five_

The following afternoon, at the Igrotte house, where Claire had enticed an inert Stevey for a five-mile walk through the somnolence of a Sunday, Claire remarked to Dave, who came up on the back porch looking sweaty from having rubbed down a mare:

“Did you know Dora Tarkington has her lunches at our house now, Dave? She’s in her second year at Tallahassee High.”

“No,” said David, breathing very softly as if by that device he could restrain the fact that, at Claire’s remark, every pore in his body seemed to leap to attention.

“Yes. Ought to see her. Right young-ladyfied. Gets herself escorted to the very door by Kenneth Chipman, if you please, and is going to take the kindergarten course when she finishes Tallahassee.”

“Yeh,” said Davey. He was sitting on the railing of the back porch, Claire on the topmost step, hulling a pan of peas for Mathilda. They made little tin-dripping sounds, as they clattered from under her fingers. To Davey, sitting there, swinging one bare foot, and trying to watch them casually, his eyes felt as if they were smeared across his face.

Claire felt rather than saw them, and with the blurting lack of tact, worthy of sweet Emma’s sweet daughter, shot out an eager, friendly arm.

“You’re twice the fellow Kenneth is, Davey, if you pull yourself together and get yourself started.”

“Aw!”

“Dora’s smitten with Kenneth because he’s sort of what you would call an up-and-comer. Naturally, he’s so much older than you, but she’d throw him over like that, for you, if you’d give her half a chance, Dave, by sort of striking out and making your start in life.”

A rush of words, of remonstrances, of shame, clogged into Davey’s throat, so that he turned toward her a flaming face, which finally decided to save itself from tears by a flare of anger.

“What’s Dora Tarkington and Kenneth Chipman got to do with me?” he shot out. “I’d like to know that! I would! What’s anything about—anything got to do with me. Pumph! as if I care!”

“Oh, then, Dave, you do!”

“Pumph!” When David was just turned fifteen, his face was still almost the child’s face of square, unset-looking contour, and bangs that he was just beginning to train backward, but which still persisted in drooping square-cut over his brow. A lean, childish-looking face, with eyes that seemed all out of proportion, because the cheeks needed filling in. Straight, friendly, brown eyes, level as Bek’s, and square white teeth against tan. It was a young face, even for the lean, gangling, childish body. A body of the most astonishing sinuosity. Tough as fibre.[42]

At seventeen, his arms, knobby at the wrists, seemed endless, and his legs, knobby at the ankles, seemed longer than they were to appear in his full maturity.

The farm had put its print on David. Drawn him out long and lean and brown, so that store-clothes struck him mid-arm-and-leg. Even overalls hit him too high at the waist, and petered out considerably above his ankles.

Straddling the porch-rail, swinging bare heels into the side of the house, there was something wounded and cloudy about him and something of absurd adolescence.

“Pumph! Good gosh! Dora and Kenneth. ’Sthat to me! Good gosh, can’t a girl and a fellow walk from Tallahassee High to lunch? Good gosh! Good gosh!”

Poor Claire, on the thought that she was about as subtle as spinach, Steve could sometimes kiss the lobe of her ear, a little ashamed that it endeared her. So now:

“I just thought, Davey,” she said to the ring of the quick peas dancing down into the pan,—“I just kinda thought—you and Dora—growing up together—maybe you—maybe she—it’s nice to see girls and boys that grow up together sort of go on together—that is, if—of course, only, that is, only if——”

“Well, ’tain’t,” said Dave, and jumped down off the frail rail, and walked with a casual whistling toward the barn, and crawled as high into the hayloft as he could, burrowing in and in and in, like something wounded that wanted to lie hurt and alone.

FOOTNOTES:

[42] I cannot recall my brother ever having a sick-abed day, with the exception, of course, of the nervous headaches to which he was devastatingly subject, but which did not develop until along about his sixteenth or seventeenth year. He was extremely sensitive upon what he considered this physical shortcoming, and would endure somehow through a day of the most appalling duress and responsibility, with only the tight-drawn muscles around his mouth to indicate to those of us who knew him best, that one of the raging headaches was upon him.

_Chapter Twenty-six_

More and more frequently, now that Dave was seventeen, usually at supper-time in the small kitchen that Mathilda kept spotlessly clean and decorated in shelf paper of a scallop-design that she snipped out herself, the Old Gentleman came out flat-footed at him.

It held the little group of four around the table tense from the start of the meal. Mathilda, who kept breaking in with her futilities of pass-this-and-pass-that. Henry, whose gaunt, lantern face would darken and scowl, and Dave, whose toes would wind themselves around the rung of his chair.

In summer, the dusk crowded into the small stifling kitchen like a merciless hot smoke, and a clematis vine leaned in at the window and withered on its indoor side. In winter, the range was full of the small roar of flames chewing coal, but there was usually hoar-frost on the leaky windows.

Dave’s place at table faced the window. When the Old Gentleman began a fusillade, his tormented gaze would dig into the clematis vine or follow the wild and beautiful outlines of the frozen panes. The Old Gentleman, without any realization of it, could be relentless in his taunt. Could poke fun with a pitchfork.

“Well Mother, what do you think I heard over at Seven Mile, where I drove two heifers this afternoon? There’s a greater scarcity of farm-help today than there was during the war. Can’t get the men to stick to the land.”

“It’s a fact,” said Henry, obtuse for the moment. “Labor’s restive. Flattered by the attention it received during the war it is now watching the proletarian success in Russia. The Adamson Act fixed the basic eight-hour day, but failed to keep pace with the rising prices. Trouble with the back-to-the-land propaganda is this——”

“Well, as I told them over at Seven Mile today, I’ve got one hand on _my_ place don’t have to be coaxed back to the land, because he’s never left it. Can’t seem any way to get him to leave it.”

“Puppa—some hominy,” fluttered Mathilda to the Old Gentleman, who was quivering with silent laughter.

That was the signal for Dave, who was about to quiz Henry about the Adamson Law, to wind agonized toes around the rung of his chair. It was the signal too, for Henry’s face to darken at his own gullibility and for him to rise to Dave’s defense.

“Say, Father, that’s pretty raw.”

“Pretty raw? Well, facts are stubborn things, as stubborn as some growing and grown boys that won’t get a move on for not knowing what they want.”

“Davey, little more sorghum on your hominy?”

“I’ll take my chance, Father, on the mind that decides slowly, over and above the one that is quick and ready on the impulse to which it doesn’t stick.”

“Quick and ready? It’s the second summer now, Taggart made promise to me he’d take him on at the bank. Sawdust-sprinkling has made many a road to the cashier’s cage for the honest, industrious boy. I’d like a Schuyler in a bank.”

“I don’t like banking, Father. In a cage—all day—thataway.”

“You worry about keeping spittoons clean first, young man.”

“Puppa!”

“By golly, what _do_ you like? I am waiting to hear what you do like besides doing around here, on the place, chores that you could help me to hire a boy for, on wages you could make in a man-size job.”

“Puppa!”

“Now, Father, look here, be fair. It is true Dave’s old enough now to ——”

“I don’t need you, Henry, to dictate to me to be fair. I don’t see that you know how to be fair with yourself, much less instruct me how to be fair with my youngest. How fair have you been to yourself!”

“Puppa!”

“Hiding yourself under every bushel-basket you could find. Refusing honor after honor, like that fellow Cincinnati was named after. Only that fellow finally left his plow. I don’t want another Cincinnati fellow in the family.”

Anathema to the Old Gentleman were Henry’s shoulders heaving in the silent kind of laughter that he expressed in every fashion except the vocal. Red dyed his face. His body quivered. Up under the eaves of his brow, his eyes watered and drew themselves up tightly, like bird-claws, and tears oozed at the corners.

“I wish it could seem so funny to me!”

“I’m sorry, Father.”

“Henry, don’t aggravate your father.”

“He don’t aggravate me any more, Mother. That’s all past. I’ve long ago reconciled myself to the disappointment of seeing the son that could bring big honor, satisfied with being a country lawyer. It’s bitter to have to see it, but, by golly, I don’t sit back and see it happen over again! Dave, content to be just a hand on a one-horse farm!”

The bare toes clamped to the rung again. The Old Gentleman was right. Of course. A fellow didn’t stick around a farm no bigger than the Igrotte place, if he was worth his hire at doing anything better. The Old Gentleman was right. But the torturous indecisions! The torturous, torturous indecisions....

“You see, Father, a fellow like me in a bank-job—wouldn’t—make a go of it.”

“What about that job with Seth Pritchy on his dairy farm?”

“But, Father, the trouble with that....”

“The trouble with that,” suddenly shouted the old man, his irascibility rising and spluttering, “is _you_!”....

“I know, Father, but I don’t want——”

“Then what in Heaven’s name do you want? All right, Pritchy’s out. The bank’s out. Clerking’s out. Dairying’s out. Farming’s out. Now, young man, you tell me, by Gad, what you’ve got on your mind. That’s what I’ve got a right to know. Moon-herding at seventeen. Belly-reading. Star-gazing. Well—now what?”

“Father—when you yell that way—fellow gets confused.”

“Fellow gets confused,” mimicked the Old Gentleman. “Fellow gets confused. By golly, what do you think your old Pap is getting, sitting by and having to see a young fellow stagnate for want of the gumption to know what it is in life he’s cut out for. Day-dreaming. Night-gazing. Star-hunting. And the world going marching on! Fellow gets confused.... Like to know what you think I get!”

“Yes, Father, you get the boy confused, and you get me confused too. Pretty darned confused. The wonder to me is that the whole Schuyler outfit isn’t down in medical annals as Exhibit A of nervous dyspeptics, from a lifetime of meals eaten to your howling temperament.”

“Puppa—you haven’t touched your dish of rice. Pass your father the cinnamon, Davey.”

“I’m only asking him to tell me what he’s got on his mind that is better than anything we have to offer him! A father is entitled to that right. A bright boy, his age, can’t turn down everything that will help to get him off a shanty-farm without having something better on his mind than he lets on. What have you and him been cooking up together all these years, if it don’t give him enough gumption to come in out of the rain?”

“Give the boy time, Father, to find himself.”

“To find himself, Puppa. Henry, you sprinkle a bit of cinnamon on your father’s rice for him. He just won’t eat his rice plain. Puppa is the greatest one not to eat his rice plain.”

“To find himself! By his age, you were already in your second year law-school.”

“Yes, Father, but I had advantages that—we haven’t been quite able to give Dave.”

On that, it was as if you had jabbed a pin into the balloon of the Old Gentleman’s rambunctiousness. He lopped over along his spine. His chin fell to his chest, his hands sought the table-edge, and the red ran from his face, leaving it the blanched smoothness of an almond.

“Don’t hold it against me that he was born into the years of my reverses.”

“Puppa....”

“Nonsense, Father, you know precisely what I mean.”

“I know what I mean. He hasn’t even had a grammar-school education. A man like me, who has wanted for every one of his children what he could never have for himself, and who has been able to give it to every one except his last ——”

“If there is anything to be said on that subject, Father, I’m the one it might be said to. Not you. I’ve had out a lawyer’s shingle ever since Davey was born. I’ve been the one who should have managed to make his education and his advantages possible. You’ve the right to expect that from us—but, somehow, the blamed war—the general slump—the sum total of war, even for those who fatten off it, is loss. You lose if you win.”

“Henry’s been a good education to Davey,” quavered Mathilda. “All education don’t lie in the schoolhouse, Puppa.”

“If only you wouldn’t keep picking on me, Father,” piped up David. “I’m earning my keep, thisaway. I’m helping you, and I’ll help you more.”

“Earning your keep!” shouted the Old Gentleman again. “Earning your keep! Is that all you’re fit for? Like any hobo-hand who rides in on a box-car.”

“Dave’s of a peculiar and cautious temperament, Father. I’ve noticed that about him. Slow to act, but decisive, once his mind is made up. Give him time.”

“Time! Time! Time for what, that’s all I want to know. I’ve got a right to know. A man like me who banks on his children down to the last of them, making them citizens a community can be proud of! What’s in the back of this young one’s head? My other boys got out. Got themselves started—what’s in the back of this one’s head?”

“For Lord’s sake, Father, quit ragging the boy!”

“Don’t keep asking me that, Father!” cried Dave, goaded until he sprang to his feet with his face so drawn that before he even opened his mouth his mother was crying for him. “Don’t keep asking me that. Nothing’s in the back of my head. Nothing except—everything. I guess I’m not cut out for much, but if you’ll let me alone—if you’ll only let me alone. _You let me alone_,” shouted Dave suddenly, in the same key of his father’s raucousness, and then by an effort that pulled his mouth all out of shape and made his mother sob more with hurting for him, got his voice back again into a curious, hard level that slid up at the end into a ridiculous change-of-voice squeak. “Don’t hound me, Father! A fellow needs time....”

“He does that, Puppa. Davey was never a quick child. He’s not so strong as he looks, Puppa. He’s not looked so well lately.”

“Oh, Mother, for goodness’ sakes, Mother. I’m well.”

“A boy that’s too proud to wear his asafœtida-bag—can catch sickness.”

“Don’t hound him, Father,” said Henry, his brow heavy with scowl.

“Don’t, Father!” cried Dave, and, leaping up, suddenly ran toward the doorway, as if evading the pursuit of more words. “Don’t hound me. You see, with a fellow like me—with a fellow like me,” he kept saying through the tight dam of his tonsils, “I’ve just got to have time to—to—I’ve just got to have time. Don’t I, Henry? Don’t I, Hen-ry?” And then, to his unspeakable agony, began to cry. In sniffles. And wipe at his face with the grimy back of a hand.

There was something particularly feeble about the Old Gentleman, as he shuffled in the quick contrition that was sure to follow one of his outbursts, over toward his son, the pyrotechnics of his emotions dying down into broken and pitiable utterances.

“I’m a bad father, Dave. I can’t do anything for my children, and then I turn around and blame them.”

“Cripes,” said David, “what’s all the row about? I got to go for those two heifers.”

“Mind you close that south gate,” shouted the Old Gentleman after him. “Don’t you leave that south gate open, this time of night, again, or by golly, I’ll——”

“Puppa!” quavered Mathilda, standing in the open window with a stack of dishes in her hand. “Look! Isn’t that a rainbow out over Middleton way?”

It was. Three-quarters of an arch that stopped suddenly in the middle of the pasture, as if broken off.

“By Jove, it is, Mother!”

The delicate thing hung with the curve of a descending skyrocket over the evening countryside, sun-pierced rain-clouds breaking into great chunks and sending down spokes of light.

Into the light-sprayed arch ran the loping figure of Dave, headed for pasture.

“By golly,” said the Old Gentleman, blowing at his pipe and rousing the old, cold smell, “that’s fine! What’s it a sign of, Mother?”

“Run under a rainbow that comes up over your left shoulder, and you’ll get a pot of gold at its far end and never suffer a bunion all your days.”

“There goes Davey through! No bunions for him!”

“I’m glad. Bunions is mighty painful things,” said Mathilda, and limped on her own over to deposit dishes in the sink.[43]

FOOTNOTES:

[43] Time and time again, I’ve heard my Mother tell the story of Davey running through the rainbow, that prophetic evening that Father took the boy to task for his habit of the slow decision. A trait that ultimately was to become his surest asset, this ability of his to think slowly and surely toward a conclusion, and then act with leaping swiftness. I have it from my brother first-hand that although he signed the Air Lane bill, then known as Schuyler’s Cyclone Act, at the conclusion of his last term in Congress, actually he had given the matter six years of detailed premeditation.

_Chapter Twenty-seven_

All that evening, long after the heifers were in, and the last bolt drawn, and Mathilda’s last cup washed, and the dishpan set gleaming against the drain-board, Henry sat in his room, as if waiting. The sound of his parents moving about their adjoining room at the business of going to bed, died down, and then the drone of their fitful remarks to each other, falling light as rain upon the silence, before they dropped off to sleep.

Every so often, Henry’s pipe, on its way to his mouth, paused, as if to listen. Or suddenly, he slid forward on the old leather Morris chair to cock an ear. The student-lamp had a slow hiss to it that no amount of puttering with the wick would correct. To listen for a creak on the stairway, you had to strain a bit through that soft commotion.

After a while Henry fitted back his copy of _The Martyrdom of Man_ into its familiar place on his bookshelf, lowered the wick until its flame slipped into its slot, and then dragged his heavy Morris chair over toward the open window.

An April night, with the cool, filtered taste to it of spring water, lay over the moonless scene. A dark night, but not black enough to erase silhouettes. A soft, lovely, motionless night, dotted with myriads of small stars, and through it, like an arpeggio scale, the minute, silver, hurrying sounds of a runnel of spring water animated by recent rains.

After a while, the sole light on the landscape, one that burned in the remote window of a shanty-dweller named Joe Batch, passed out into the darkness, and then Henry did what, for him, was an unprecedented thing.[44]

He tiptoed out into the hall, and with his slippers hanging off at the heels, wound up the ladder that led up into Dave’s room.

The candle in that attic of slants and shadows was guttering low in its green bottle; and, fully dressed on his pallet, with his cheek down against the page of an open volume of _Henry Esmond_, and his eyes wide awake but staring off, lay David.

He sprang up at the appearance of his brother’s head above the ladder, shamefaced for no reason he could have formulated. Teddy leaped, too, from his doze, bellying across the floor in a recognizing frenzy of wagging tail.

“It’s hot up here,” said Henry. “Whew!” and walked over to the undersized window and threw up the sash. The gust of it blew out the candle into a darkness for which they both seemed grateful.

“I guess I’d ’a’ been coming down to you soon, Henry,” said the boy and moved along, so that they both might sit on the side of the cot.

It was only the second or third time Henry had ever been in that room. They sat silently, Henry stooping away from the rough boards of the slant ceiling.

“Down, Teddy!”

“What’s what, Dave?” said Henry, and caught up one knee between his hands and began to rock.

“Why—that’s just what I dunno,” said Dave, and gulped so, that in the smooth, dark silence, it was almost a click.

“Feeling well?”

“Sure.”

“Any more those headaches?”

“Just kinda. Some days.”

“Often?”

“N-no.”

“Bad?”

“N-no.”

“Today?”

“Nope.”

“Eye-doctor.”

“Aw!”

“What Father meant this evening, Dave, only he’s got a rotten way of saying it, is——”

“I know.”

“I figure, Dave, that in your case, you’re just a little slow off the trigger. Am I right?”

“You see, Henry—I can’t say it to Father—but what’s the use a fellow choosing something to do, just because he’s got to be doing something?”

“Something in that.”

“Now, you just take the way the bees work it out in that book you gave me about them by that French fellow.”

“Maeterlinck.”

“And the ants in that other fellow’s book.”

“Wheeler.”

“You don’t catch one single one of those chaps down in the bee-world and the ant-world doing something just to be doing. No, sir. You don’t catch a worker in bee-town putting his bee-shoulder to the wheel, unless he knows that wheel’s going to turn something. A fellow’s got to have his eye on building up something—even if it’s only a honeycomb. Say, Henry, you know what? This month’s _Farm Journal’s_ got a story in about bee-raising—maybe if I was to try my hand at that——”

“Yesterday, it was ovibos-raising, wasn’t it?”

“Yeh! That fellow Stefansson you gave me to read. _Northward Course of Empire._ That’s what I mean, Henry! Just the name of that book says what I mean. What’s the use sitting in a cage in somebody’s bank, or keeping count of somebody’s Holsteins, or raising a little old patch of alfalfa, when there—when there’s whole empires lying about us, waiting for men; and new worlds that the airship is going to link onto us, so that the North Pole isn’t even North any more. You know what, Henry? That land up there isn’t dead. Hundreds and thousands of miles of it. Fellows have lived off that land up there for years, without having any provisions with them. That means there’s whole new worlds lying around us. Don’t it? Funny everybody don’t get excited about it——”

“Well?”

“Well—well—like it says in one of the biologies, man’s pro-duc-tiv-ity of the soil has got to keep pace with his fertility of the soil. See? Know what I mean? I’ve worked it out. It’s thisaway.”

“This way.”

“Thisaway.”

“This way.”

“This way. Well, take when a country like ours gets too many people in it—well, the northward course of empire means that country up there can be used for growing more meat and more wheat to feed the over-population—see what I mean?—what’s the use fiddling around in a clerk’s cage, when—when there’s empires lying around asleep and waiting to be worked up.”