Chapter XII: Part 12

Later, Dora confided to me that suddenly, the pathos of the memory of that boy back there, battling for her so absurdly and so valiantly through soapsuds, simply rose and choked her, making it impossible for her to conclude an anecdote to which the Governor always listened with the relish of hearing it for the first time.

It is characteristic of him that he never again asked her to tell the story, or repeated it in her presence.

_Chapter Thirty_

There followed days and weeks, and then months, when the fervor for his father’s patch of farm became an obsession. The security of long days, sunk up to the aching arm-sockets in chores that had to do with a clogged water-pipe, milking at dawn, currying for Nemo, sheep-driving by starlight, manure that steamed as he pitched it, pip among the wyandottes, new tin rain-gutters along the house, corn-shucking, sheep-dipping, hay-pitching, well-digging, sheep-herding.

Then long, secure evenings of further escape from the reality of humiliation. Flat on his stomach, his aching feet bare, his candle burning softly through hours of boring concentration on the book in hand.

During that winter, aided by Henry’s shelves, the Centralia Public Library, the motley universes of land and sea and firmament jammed up that little slapsided room under the eaves. Prehistoric monsters out of Java larger than the Igrotte house itself, performed the miracle of squatting within its walls. China seas swung within that room, firmaments wide as Galileo’s, winds spiced in sandalwood.

Pages. Pages. Pages. _Wealth of Nations._ Spencer’s _First Principles_. _Les Miserables._ _History of the Aztecs._ _Karl Marx._ Sinclair’s _The Jungle_. _Uncle Tom’s Cabin._ _Famous Speeches of Famous Men._ The “All-Boy” series. _Romance of Pocahontas._ _King Arthur’s Round Table._ _Tales from Shakespeare._ _History of Colorado._ _Ivanhoe._ _Conquest of Peru._ _Tariff and Its Ramifications._ _Governors of Utah._ _The Growth of Illinois Transportation._ _Industrial Development of the Middle West._ _Territorial Period._ _Life of Anthony Wayne._ _Hiawatha._ _Vision of Sir Launfal._ _Sea Reptiles and Mammals of South America._ _Life of Cecil Rhodes._ Peary’s _The North Pole_. _How to Build Your Own Hydroplane._ _Gem Collection of After-Dinner Stories._ _The Five Years Antedating the Russian Revolution._ _Compleat Angler._ _Vanishing Rights of the State._ _Raffles._ _Shandy._ _Japanese-American Relations._ _Two Boys and a Raft._ _Adonais._ _Cellini’s Autobiography._ _War and Peace._

He was sealed up that winter, all right. Silently. Something fierce about his kind of silence.

Henry, who sometimes sat abstractedly in his office or room thinking about it, said nothing.

Mathilda went up to him sometimes, as he sat at table finishing his meal, as if she would place a hand on his shoulder and get said the question that seemed perpetually hovering along her lips. Or often, as he was climbing into his reefer for his dash out into the sleet-bitten days of that long, cold winter, she would kiss him timidly on the forehead and bleat of castor-oil.

Strangely, the Old Gentleman, not given to reticence, and communicative enough, dear knows, on any number of controversial subjects those long evenings indoors, lapsed into a silence not only toward, but concerning his youngest. Not an ill-natured silence. Except suddenly the subject seemed to have lost the power either to interest or irritate him. Strange wisdoms sometimes were his.

There was about the box-shaped little house during this winter that lashed it constantly with high winds and blew the dry snow in tall, uneven drifts about it, a curious kind of abeyance. As if, by unspoken assent, the moments, as they passed, must be sufficient unto themselves.

Sometimes, usually with a book open to a chapter that had stumped him, David crept down to Henry’s room, invariably sure to find him awake and reading; his feet wrapped in an old gray blanket against the creeping cold of the house, and his body hunched low in the chair beside his reading-lamp. Then, for more hours with David huddled alongside of Henry on the arm of the Morris chair, they pored, and sometimes read aloud, alternately.

Long, rich, slow evenings, without once a reference to anything except that which pertained to the world of ideas and homely chores into which David was so obviously and hermetically sealing himself.

If the family discussed among themselves this prolonged, this somewhat startling state of hiatus in the case of Davey, it was among themselves, and then usually not in the presence of Henry.

One day, Bek, striding into the Igrotte house in one of Winslow’s ulsters, collar turned up and her skirts tucked down into her knee-high boots, inquired from her mother David’s whereabouts, and then strode off into the barn where her young brother was fitting an improvised rope halter across the horns of a young steer.

“Where are you going, Dave?”

“Down to Herkhimer’s with this here steer. Father’s traded him in for two red sows.”

“Good! I’ll hike along. Old Herk’s got some money coming to him for putting those Howey red terriers to stud last spring. I’ve got two pretty sick ewes and a ram over at the farm, Dave. Mind coming back the long way and stopping to take a look at them? You’ve luck with them.”

“Sure, I’ll come.”

They started off through an afternoon the color of wet slate. Banks of low snow-clouds, full-looking as udders, blew along. Gusts of damp air, like wet cloths, flapped against the face. A chilled gray waste of an afternoon, farmhouses, that could gleam in sun, absolutely shrunk and huddled-looking, and the back road writhing along in two frozen wheel-ruts.

Suddenly Bek stopped, and with a lack of diplomacy that characterized her, tilted back David’s face with her large, mittened hand.

“What’s the matter, Dave? Bilious or in love?”

He jerked away sore and hurt.

“Quit!”

“I’d much rather it was your liver than your heart, Dave.”

“Fine way to talk.”

“Why?”

“There’s some things just aren’t talked about.”

“What? Livers?”

“No.”

“Hearts?”

“For goodness’ sake, Bek—honest—such talk makes me sick.”

“But, at least, if it’s the liver, you can talk about it in terms as definite as calomel. Is it, Dave?”

“Honestly, Bek, if that’s what you’ve come along for ...”

“I’m a great believer in preventive medicine. But if it’s heart, there’s not much to do about it but let it run its course, and kill or cure. My own experience, and my children’s, have taught me that.”

“Well, then—well, then—it’s a good thing to profit by experience.”

She touched his cheek lightly with her mittened hand. Poor old Dave!

The rushing sensation was immediately behind his tonsils again, and the appalling fear that, behind his high-power glasses, tears would spurt; and, that these might not, he broke into a laugh. A laugh that cut against the grain, because it was so absurd and young and pain-addled. It moved his sister to want to put out her hand and tuck him somewhere close inside Winslow’s ulster. But she did nothing of the sort. Instead, she swung a little ahead, level almost with the steer’s lightly roped horns, looking quite away from him across the stubble of corn-fields that were stiff with old runts, and rattled.

“Life isn’t so black as it can sometimes seem at seventeen, Dave. As a matter of fact, fellows like your brother Henry and Phil were pretty confirmed misanthropes before they were twenty. Are you at that stage Dave?”

“You’re always tabulating people, Bek. A fellow can’t pass an ordinary remark without you trying to fit him into one of your pigeonholes of life.”

“Adolescence pigeonholes rather easily, Davey.”

“I’m not talking about adolescence, I’m talking about life.”

“It’s adolescence makes you talk that way about life.”

“Well, any blamed fool can sing a song of sixpence about it. What’s it to sing about, anyways? The poets are your truly sensitive spirits. ‘Things are not what they seem, life is but an empty dream.’ Know that one? It’s by——”

“And you’re the boy who used to talk to me about the men who fly and the men who explore and the men who rule and the men who do! Why, you used to act as if everything mattered to you so terribly, that you couldn’t make up your mind which mattered most.”

“Then and—and now are two different matters.”

“How different?”

He turned on her a pair of scarred-looking boyish eyes that scowled and blinked behind their glasses.

“Don’t!” he said.

“Don’t what?”

“Quiz—please——”

They marched through the soupy gray in silence, except for the clopping hoofs of the steer and the low moan of wind rattling the corn-runts.

At the Herkhimer farm, a mean one, of squat building and outhouses, Gramaw Herkhimer, a furiously old walnut of a woman, in a perpetual gray head-shawl against neuralgia, came limping around to the barn at sight of Bek; and nothing short of coffee in her small and spotless kitchen, and chunks of corn-bread, just from the hot stove-top, would do. Dave, and one of the Herkhimer boys, a great loutish fellow of twenty, of the group who told sickening stories about country-bumpkin girls, must come in too, and take their coffee out of great, ironstone, thick-lipped cups, into which the corn-bread “dunked” deliciously.

A coal-range of magnificent draught roared in one corner, and a huge pan of Gramaw Herkhimer’s dough, rising to the yeast, overflowed its sides like a fat pig. A warm, sour-smelling little old kitchen, which Bek seemed to cram to the raftered ceiling with her enormous presence.

Her incredible capacity for detail with these people! No subject too small to snag her interest. Gramaw Herkhimer’s tatting. Old man Herkhimer’s chilblain. Chest-protectors for Herkhimer babies. There were three of them lying asleep alongside her ailing daughter in another room. Woolen wristlets. Geranium-cuttings. Drunken son-in-law. First-communion veil for little Maggie Herkhimer. Bacon-cracklings. Then nothing would do but a jar of apple-butter to be wrapped and sent home to Winslow. Back in the old days, High Ridge Farm had practically fed the Herkhimers. Maggie Herkhimer, gaunt and pale, and interminably tall in a mother-hubbard that hit her above breast, elbows, and ankles, came in, all rumpled from napping, to thank Bek for the loan of a small crutch for her second boy, who had broken a leg, in almost the identical position Stew had at that same age. They had gone to school together, Maggie Herkhimer and Bek. They both looked their age. The one rather magnificently. Maggie, as if the years had hamstrung her.

It was a warming, heartening, little interval. It made the walk back to Bek’s farm silent, this time, because facing the wind, it caught at the breath and shortened it, seem not so penetratingly damp and cold.

The two ewes and the ram, sunk in clean straw, went in the smaller of the two splendidly-equipped barns. Their nozzles came up softly; and just as Dave was putting aside the medicine-dropper, after having ministered to the shivering creatures with a curiously adhesive touch of hand that was never to desert him, this overwhelming thing happened:

Bek, who had gone directly up to the house, came into the barn, Winslow’s reefer removed now, and a white sweater hanging across her shoulders.

“Dave, I wish you would wait a minute.”

“Mother needs wood——”

“——and walk Dora Tarkington home as you go back. She’s spent the day here, helping Winslow paper the dining-room in that pretty grass-cloth they’re using now. Paula sent it. I wouldn’t let him touch the Howe walls, so between the two of them, they’ve made a set of panels that fit on. They say at school, Dora’s that tasty she ought to take up interior decoration. It’s long walk, and those snow-clouds make it seem dusk so early. Here she comes now, Davey. Walk her home.”

The figure of Dora, in a woolly white sweater and woolly white cap, and her short, pleated skirts flying, came down the walk.

“Why!” she said, and stopped short, the light popping out in her eyes and her cheeks, “I didn’t know—Dave was here.”

“Didn’t you?” said Bek drily. “Well, he is,” and walked off toward the house, and slam, bang, into it.[51]

FOOTNOTES:

[51] My brother and Dora have often accused me of conspiring to bring about a certain encounter which took place between them at the farm one blustery November afternoon, and out of which meeting one of the first really formative events of my brother’s life was to take shape.

Be that as it may, the simple facts stand duly authentic. Paula, home for her father’s birthday, happened to remark upon Dora’s reputation at Tallahassee High for taste and skill at decoration. Winslow jumped at my suggestion that we ask her over to spend a day and help us stencil the grass-cloth panels for the dining-room. Certainly anyone with a pair of eyes in his head could judge for himself that David was looking peaked, of a complaint easily diagnosed. That same day, calling over at Mother’s, I did, it is true, ask him to walk back home with me to tend some ailing stock. Also, the evidence is that there were two sick ewes and a ram at the farm that day, and Dave’s skill with them was common knowledge. Further than that, as they say in legal phraseology, I do not feel called upon to elucidate.

_Chapter Thirty-one_

Even at this stage Dave was a good two inches taller than Henry. It smote him, as he stood there, facing Dora, in an old office-coat of Henry’s, and trousers covered with the shine of long contact with Henry’s swivel chair, that he had never in his life worn a suit designed for his figure. That was why, in those rare moments when he had occasion to think about his appearance at all, he felt precisely as if he were dangling by the middle of the back of his coat from a nail. Short sleeves. Short trousers. Protruding knobs of ankles and wrists.

He confessed to Dora, countless of the reminiscent times in which they loved later to indulge, that it seemed to him for long moments after the loud crack of Bek closing the house-door, as if he had hung there in the clean, sweet-smelling barn, dangling from the middle of the back of his coat, like a cat when you hold it by the scruff of the neck.

“I’ll race you,” cried Dora suddenly, and on a flash of her unfailing ability to rise to the exigencies of the moment, sped, a flicker of white sweater and cap, down the path toward the open road.[52]

That dash along down the road released him, as it were, from that moment of hanging impaled in her presence. They caught up a quarter of a mile down, in flurry of quickened heartbeat, and impulsively she hooked her arm into his, without preliminaries.

“Davey,” she said, “why have you been so mean to me?” And, incredibly, there were bright and beautiful tears against her eyes, that dried even as he gazed, giving him a feeling of mirage. “You’re a meany, you are, David!” she said and a red pompon, on its string, dangled from her white and woolly cap.

The ground thus immediately cut from under his feet, down he went into the abyss she had opened for him.

“Gee, Dora,” he said, almost borrowing her tone, “I won’t be—mean—any more!” And then, overwhelmed by the realization of what her winding voice had done to him, stopped suddenly and burst out, red and redder of face, “You mean you’re the mean one!”

“Why, Davey Schuyler, I never was!”

“Weren’t, weren’t you?”

“You know I—weren’t.”

“Oh, all right. Won’t argue—with a lady.”

“Wouldn’t start something I couldn’t finish.”

“Start something I can’t finish! Honest, I don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, if—if a girl was as meany as you say I’m meany—funny you couldn’t tell her—how meany.”

“How meany? Huh, as if you didn’t know. Huh!”

(How beautiful she was, and he had just said “huh” to her.)

“Huh!” he said again.

“Well, if I felt that way about a girl, I wouldn’t walk home with her,” she said, and flopped like an adorable beautiful little minnow. A minnow on the end of some bait too delectable to even conjure. Bait would have to be ambrosia for Dora’s lips to nibble. Only one didn’t nibble ambrosia. The Greeks musta drunk it——

“Well, if I felt that way about a girl——”

“Oh, Dora,” he said, and reached out a long gawk of bare-wristed hand, “I—I guess I feel every way about you, I guess.”

“Well then—well then—well then, why the dickens don’t you say some of the good ways,” she cried, and stamped her foot, and let the clear bright tears pop out in her eyes again, and shook her head, and gritted her small white teeth.

“I never thought you’d listen, Dora. Honest!”

“Oh, you know well enough I’d listen, all right. You’ve always just kind of tried to make me feel little. I—I should worry!”

“Little?”

“Yes, little! My parties and all—your never coming and you in our barn every morning—you never looking anywheres near the house where I might be. That day—that day—soap—Kenneth—the way you walked off on me—something I couldn’t help. How do you think I felt that day—walking off on me—thataway——”

“Why—how do you think I felt?”

“As if I didn’t know, Davey,” she said and turned her eyes full upon him, as they stood face to face in the rutted road, a hard, windy, slate-colored twilight blustering about them. “I’ve cried and cried.”

“You’ve cried, Dora?”

“You know I have,” she said, and stamped her foot again, the bright, angry tears drying as soon as they formed. “You hate me—that’s what I believe.”

Hate Dora! Why, just as likely that he hate moon. Hate stars. Hate firmament encrusted in eternity. Hate Dora—why—why——. Where were his words, to tell her? And so there he stood helpless before her indictment. And yet again, strangely, so strangely, there was something sweet about the indictment. There was something about hating—that was fiercely akin to loving.

“I’ve always tried,” she said—“I’ve always tried——tried——”

“Tried what?”

The quivering would not let her get it said; and while he stood flaming with the same sense of exhilaration over her fumbling that the word “hate” had fired in him, he wanted to lie flat on his back before her, that she might walk over him with flaming heels. The trembling of her lips was cruelly pleasant to him, and yet he wanted to fling himself before her, because those lovely, trembling, pink ledges were trembling of his doings. Here was a hurt bird needing him. Here was a ewe with soft, sick eyes. Here were all the things in one that were tender and wounded.

“Well, well, tried what?”

“To—to—let you know I—how to let you know I—I wanted you not to—to hate me.”

He could have bitten and ground the next words back against his tongue when they came. But there they were, said!

“Kenneth Chipman!” he barked.

“Silly! You silly! You silly of sillies!” (How lovely she was, as she grew pinker and her teeth whiter.) “You silly!”

Silly—silly—silly—why, there was even the same ecstasy in being that. To her.

“Haven’t you eyes? Couldn’t you see?”

“See what? See what?”

“That was part of the trying. Everything was. I—don’t care now. I might as well tell. An idiot might as well tell on herself.”

(Idiot! Idiot! Blessed be idiots!)

“Why do you think I took all my lunches at Stevey’s and Claire’s? Huh? Huh? Huh?”

“Huh?”

“Didn’t I have my own cousins, Essie and Tad, going home to their house every day right out of my same class and my aunt feeling offended, and all, because I went to Claire’s and Stevey’s?”

Gump! Gump! He hadn’t thought of that.

“Don’t just stare. Say something. Didn’t I? Didn’t I? And why? Why?”

“Why?”

“Because I thought sometimes you might be around all your relations. Then Kenneth—I—I—let Kenneth walk with me noontimes—thinking—oh, I’m not ashamed now—now that I wouldn’t be friends with you for anything. Just not for anything. I let Kenneth walk with me noontimes, thinking—maybe you’d be there and see. Meany, Meany, you!” she cried, as the tears jetted and careened down to her lips. Then she broke from him and ran, down the rutted road, turning her ankle, lunging, and giving him run until he hurled himself around in front of the Tarkingtons’, and blocked her.

“Quit now, stopping me. Papa gets worried if I’m out after six.”

“Want to tell you something.”

“No!”

“Dora!”

“No!”

“Dora! I like you! Terrible!”

“Well then—why’ncha say so?”

“You—you got so big, Dora. You got so big and so—so pretty. Us having to move away. You got so pretty on me, Dora; and I stayed—just me. Not even a look-in at High School—me—didn’t dare. I wouldn’t any more dared come near you. I thought, you see—slick-looking college-fellow like—like Kenneth. Patent-leather-haired. Dora—I like you so. I just can’t seem to get my mind on anything. That’s my trouble, Dora. Liking you. I’m full of always wanting to do a million big things that will make you look at me; and then, for thinking about you, Dora, I can’t do a one of them. Crazy-like. Around in a circle. That’s what’s the trouble with me, Dora. I can’t seem to think my way out of anything for seeing you. Just can’t care about wanting anything unless it’s got you in. Dora!”

They kissed timidly, lightly, there in the dusk. Wonder was out over them. “If only I’da known all along.”

“If only I’da.”

“You’re so smart, Dave, and I’m just like everybody else.”

“Smart, nothing! I haven’t even finished County Grade.”

“Alma Dreyfous’s father says he walked a little way alongside of you on the road one morning, and you talked about airships and—and whatchamacallit—tariff, or whatever it is, and Woodrow Wilson, and where Ohio gets her water power from, like a Philadelphia lawyer; and Miss Weil, over at Tallahassee, told her class that the smartest boy in this county was a boy who’d never even finished county school, but put every single moment to cramming new ideas into his head.”

“That wasn’t me.”

“Was so, because Efram Juss asked right out if it was, and she said yes.”

“Shucks!”

“I like your being smart, Dave. So much smarter than me.”

“Dora—if you like me—any way—at all—that’s all I need.”

“I do, Dave—only—You won’t be mad?”

“No.”

“Sure? Davey—that _isn’t_ all you need. Papa thinks it’s awful, Davey—that—that you—You won’t get mad, if I say it?”

“No.”

“——thinks it’s awful that you’re only a——”

“Only a——?”

“You won’t get mad, Davey?”

“Only a farm-hand, is that it?”

“Yes.”

“Huh, don’t I know that? Sure. He’s right, all right. Only I’m not going to be a farm-hand any more. Now. Fellow’s got a reason to make something out of himself—all a fellow’s got to do now is make sure of what he wants to be, and then—be it!”

“Davey, what do you want to be?”

“You know what, Dora? Know what I think I’d like to be?”

“What, Davey?”

“First of all, before we talk, we’re engaged, aren’t we?”

She turned him the fresh flower of her face.

“Yes, David!”

“Well then, Dora, how’d you like me to be something big for you?”

“I would!”

“I was thinking last night, as I was driving along a flock of black-face sheep from the Howey stock—funny thing about that species—they’re hornless, yet they belong to the hollow-horn family.”

“But, Davey——”

“The interesting part is that you can’t—exactly place where this species passes over into the goat family——”

“But, Davey—that’s all right—about—about goats. But what about us?”

“That’s just it, Dora. How’d you like for me to be a big-gun in the study of sheep-culture?”

“Pouf!” she said, and made a pink trumpet of her mouth. “Sheep! You’re too smart for that!”

“Too smart! Huh! If I was smart enough to know everything there is to know about a great industry like wool—know what I’d be?”

“Wool. Woolen underwear. Sure enough. I never thought of that. I was just thinking of sheep. Only I hate woolen underwear next to my skin——”

“And you know what interests me a lot, too, Dora? I was talking it over with Henry the other night. Now, you take this here wool-industry, and then you take this here tariff-situation, and then you——”

“But, Davey—all that far-away, highfalutin’ talk—what’s the use? We’re engaged. When a fellow’s engaged, he can’t stand around talking about whole industries. He’s got to talk about a—job.”

“Engaged! Oh, Dora!”

“Papa says the trouble with young people nowadays is that they have to have so much more to start on than they used to.”

“Of course! A job. I’ll tell you what, Dora, has always interested me a lot. I read a book on silk the other day. Dora, let me tell you something about this here little fellow, the silkworm.”

“But, Davey—there you go again. Silkworms aren’t—practical.”

“Oh, I mean a job all right! Now, if I could get a job with some silk-firm. You see, now that the little old silkworm isn’t the whole silk-show any more, this here artificial-silk industry is the coming thing in the whole industry.”

“There you go again. Whole industry.”

“But I’m talking about a job, Dora. If I could get a job, say in Chicago, with one of the big silk-firms, or in Springfield, where my brother Phil lives. There’s a future to a job with a big mercantile house, Dora. Some day—maybe when I’m a big-gun in a silk-firm—I’ll have to go to China!—you and me—China!”

“Oh, Davey!” she said and screwed her round little nose tighter into a button, and jammed down her cap more snugly over her eyes. “China! That would be heaven! Only—that would take so long, Davey—from now.”

“How would Civil Service be, Dora? I could pass Regents’ exams easy as anything. I like jobs that tie up the Government.”

“Not a postman, Davey. I hate postmen. They’re always being waited for.”

“Naw. Wouldn’t be a postman. Know what, Dora? I’d like to be a consul some day. That gives a fellow a chance to see the world.”

“A fellow and—and—his wife, Dave. All consuls have wives. Or should have. Or got to have. Or just have.”

“Wife! Gee, Dora! Wi-fe!”

On the magic of the word, they flashed face to face, their fingers feeling hungrily through the wool of mittens.

“I’d like that, Davey. You and me. Cleone Beal’s father was consul once to a place called Uruguay.”

“That’s a republic in South America.”

“They lived in a town called Mon—Mon—something.”

“Montevideo. Oh, Dora, wouldn’t I love to live in Montevideo with you!”

“And me with you, Davey! I’d entertain—them all—at balls in Montevideo.”

“How would you like to go off exploring with me, Dora—and add new territory to the maps? Ever hear of Seward’s Folly? Well, there’s a fellow, ’course he didn’t exactly go off and find it, but that fellow had an idea all right. He went to the Government one day, and said, ‘Looka here, Government, here’s a country called Alaska—that some day is going to——’”

“Now, Davey—there you go again—some day! What about now, getting a job right now? Just thisaway—talking and dreaming and if-ing and and-ing, we’ll never—get anywhere!”

Tears, that he wanted to snatch off with angry, frenzied hands, gleamed along her cheeks.

“Why—why—Dora—my brother Phil can get me a job in a wholesale grocery concern in Springfield right away! Twelve dollars a week——”

“Oh, Davey, _now_ you’re talking!”

“You see, if I could send my father six out of that—we’re so poor, you see, Dora—but even with six left—my brother can’t afford to, but he’ll board me awfully cheap, anyway. Then, Dora, if I went to evening law-school—there’s something about law I like—suppose I was to do that?”

“How long?”

“I could do a four-years law-course in two. Nights. What do you bet? And then—a town like Springfield—Springfield’s a capital. I could practice law there some day.”

“Some day?”

“Law’s the thing, Dora. Look at a fellow like Kenneth. He could marry now, and he’s only been practicing a couple of years. I’m as smart as Kenneth—Dora.”

The answering tug of her arm, closer, tighter, warmer, made his long legs seem to gallop over the frozen ruts of the road.

“How many years, Davey, before you could be ready?”

“It would have to be four before I could be a practicing lawyer, earning enough to——”

“Four,” she said, her eyes flattening as if they were contemplating four eternities.

“Dora—what’s four years, when we’ll have a secret—just ours——”

“It’ll have to be secret, Dave. You see, Papa—he——”

“He thinks I’m a bum.”

“He—he says you’re not a go-getter.”

“I’ll go and get now, Dora.”

“Just as I get you—I begin to lose you.”

“Dora, the quicker I begin, the quicker——”

“I know. The quicker you’ll be ready.”

“Dora—isn’t it worth waiting for? Some day. You and me. A little old place of our own. One of those semi-bungalows. Springfield! Wholesale groceries—we could start together sooner—if we could count on getting our groceries wholesale. Maybe, if I get along in the wholesale grocery-business, I’ll stay there and get to be a big-gun in the mercantile world.”

“Oh, Davey—the sooner—the grander!”

The darkness was about them like a beatific cloak, except for two lights from the Tarkington place, which suddenly gleamed at them from the end of the elm-walk; and some one was sounding a family-whistle of three staccatos and a long, which Dora answered in fashion.

“That’s Papa.”

“We’re engaged, Dora.”

“Yes, Davey. Say it again.”

“We’re engaged, Dora.”

Parting, they kissed once more, in the light, startled, pecking away.

FOOTNOTES:

[52] I have never seen the like of Dora for her unfailing tact and ability to rise, or for that matter fall, to an occasion. Nor wonder they used to call her Madame Cherchez-la-Femme. Her memory for faces, for names, for circumstances, was of the most incalculable value to my brother, who had none of Roosevelt’s genius for that sort of thing. Time and time again, I have seen her win for herself and my brother, the deathless loyalty, for instance, of a lumberman from Nebraska, whom she could recall having met five years previously at the Sesquicentennial at Philadelphia, or recognize by name, the wife of someone they had probably shaken hands with from the platform of a moving train.

I was not present at the famous Franco-American banquet, where she averted what promised to be a fistic encounter between Ambassador Toussain and Leopold von Mark, by tilting a dish of raspberry ice into the lap of her canary-colored velvet gown, just as those two gentlemen were about to fly at each other’s throats.

_Chapter Thirty-two_

Every evening, after supper, Winslow started at carving his picture-frames out of an excellent grade of soft white pine that, for fifteen years, Bek had purchased from a lumber-dealer in Middleton. It was scarcely a purchase, but a trade in the literal sense. A two-gallon crock of Bek’s piccalilli could keep Winslow supplied in picture-frame lumber for a year.

There was something grateful about the litter of wood-carving and the slithering little noise of the sharp knife rushing down into the pine and the clean, dry smell that rose off.

Over her account-books, at the green-baize desk in the corner of the dining-room, wanting her farm back, scheming for her farm back, contriving for her farm back, or poring over farm journals, with that same eye to winning her farm back, or darning heels of socks and stockings over the ridge of a great wooden ball, as she dreamed of winning her farm back, Bek liked the consciousness of Winslow, pipe drooping low, and absorbed in turning a difficult corner in the wood, or scooping out an ailanthus leaf.

Leslie liked it, too. He would sit among the litter of the curly white chips, splashing among them and letting the shavings cling to his beardless chin.

There was something so dreadful to Bek in this last. Leslie simulating manhood. She wondered if Winslow ever noticed, and contrived not to let him.

Sometimes Winslow leaned over to bestow upon Leslie a particularly handsome shaving. With sufficient of these he could weave a garland for his mother, which he placed across her brow as she sat at work, giving her the look of a tipsy Cæsar.

Dozens of Winslow’s water-colors, prettily framed in the carved, gilded, and sometimes polychromed woods of his handiwork, adorned the walls of the house; and the attic-studio was hung in three rows of them, that touched edge on edge.

The copse of willows behind the barn, in every conceivable mood and perspective and light and shadow. The cow-pond, with Howey Holsteins standing knee-deep, in study after study of the same quiescence, same shadows draped painstakingly into their flanks and down into the water that opened about their knees. The distant rise of the hills that sloped toward the Igrotte house, with the magenta tinges woven into the purples, that no one in the family would dare admit never being able to discern. South Meadow in bright clover. The slant of red roof to old Jessup’s shanty, showing through the stripes of the plane-tree boles. Sheep, at evening, meandering homeward, with their heads low. There was always a human figure injected somewhat timidly into these. A lanky gawk of a herdsman, with little more than the scissors-like attitude of the legs to distinguish him from the tree-boles. Indeed, the casual observer was scarcely able to discern at all this lone foray of Winslow’s into the realm of human anatomy. To Winslow himself, this figure was Dave, to the eyelash.

The year that David was born, a water-color of Jessup’s red roof, seen through the tree-boles, had been sold from the window of Hessy’s art-store in Middleton, to a Sandusky bride and groom on their honeymoon. Eleven-seventy-five, framed. Ten per cent commission. On the strength of it, one or another of Winslow’s had hung in that window ever since. Every Christmas, Bek sent a two-gallon offering of apple-butter to the Hessys. And at Thanksgiving, a jar of mincemeat. But the Sandusky bride and groom remained Winslow’s sole patrons. Dozens of his efforts adorned walls of Whittier and Wayne Counties. Birthday, wedding, Christmas, and anniversary gifts from the Winslow Renchlers. And meanwhile, undaunted in output, Winslow’s power of production went on. There were rows of his pictures, in framed stacks, with newspaper in between, on the floor and shelves of practically every cupboard in the house.

Winslow still painted away the major portion of each day, the same technique, perspective, foreground, horizon, chiaroscuro, overtones, scale, proportion, continuing to absorb him for long, squint-eyed periods over the top of a horizontal pencil.

Paula, who now taught history and first-year botany in Cleveland; belonged to a little-theater movement, and was secretary and treasurer of a large teachers’ organization known as The Scribes, once winked at her mother across the top of a sheep-and-landscape her father was showing her, upon one of her Easter visits home. Such a scorching flame of anger and rebuke had leaped into Bek’s face, that Paula’s air of indulgence toward her father’s work had been promptly nipped in the bud.

For over a period of twenty-two years, Bek had not seen to the impregnability of Winslow’s art against any possible family-facetiousness, only to have Paula wink it down.

Even the Old Gentleman, torn between secretly despising the non-producer and admiring Winslow because he was Bek’s choice, continued, in the years that one or another of Winslow’s water-colors had been gathering dust in Hessy’s window, to refer to his “artist” son-in-law.

Yes, Bek saw to that. Fiercely. Her subtle classification of Winslow held. Centralia, the family, the county, nailed by Bek’s glittering eyes, came gradually to take Winslow at her valuation of him. A woman who marries an artist, she was fond of saying a little proudly, must learn to cope with nerves and temperament. Once you understand them, geniuses are the most lovable creatures in the world.

To listen to Bek, Winslow was that. A genius. Too indifferent to the world to reach out a hand to stay its heedless passing-by. A recluse. An inspired eccentric. Unappreciated by his contemporaries, but posterity to be his beneficiary.

Bek aided and abetted this psychology of her own building. Winslow’s bottle-green velveteen coats, soft collars, and flowing ties were not his preference. On the contrary, in the beginning he had demurred.

“These long ties are a nuisance, Bek! They flutter and get in a fellow’s mouth while he’s trying to paint.”

Bek knew better. They were not in the way of the special dispensation of public opinion that she sought for him, and missed but by an ell.

Even Paula, who belonged to the little-theater group in Cleveland that produced Synge, and who sent Christmas-gifts of _Jurgen_ to her friends, returned from those Easter holidays with a couple of her father’s framed landscapes in the top of her trunk.

One evening, in the large cretonned room in a “private house” that she shared with another school-teacher, she removed the chafing-dish from the cretonne-covered top of her trunk, unearthed them, and began showing them around as some “rather good bits of Dad’s.”

A young secretary of a philanthropic organization and a teacher of English in a High School regarded them with squints and slants, and secretly nudged each other.

Paula sensed rather than saw the nudges and with some of her mother’s stubborn kind of indomitability hung one on each side of her dressing-table, but with discretion, so that they were out of line of vision of her roommate, who knew a Monet from a Manet.

Sometimes, covertly watching Winslow over the top of her mending or reading, a sense of the security into which her vigilance had tucked him, smote Bek with some of the warm thrill of gratefulness she felt when regarding Leslie. The sweep of her passion for Winslow had probably never been more or less than just that. He was someone whom she had tucked into the cove of her heart, to protect there, justify, elevate to a plane that however make-believe it might have been, was not make-believe to Bek.

Then, too, there was the curious compatibility of their opposing temperaments. His fastidiousness. His recoil from the sweaty chores to which she bent her wide and willing shoulders. His inability to cope with the conflicts in which she reveled. His spiritual distaste for barter, where she moved quick and sure through stockyard, cattle-pen, and sty, keeping to the shrewd side of the bargain. In Winslow, was something preciously apart. Hers. To be kept in its cotton wadding; to be mounted as you mount a jewel against the proper background.

It was the mother twice over, who sat these evenings, wanting back her farm, while her husband whittled, and Leslie, her perpetual baby-son, grown now, sat among the shavings, fashioning garlands with which he fantastically bound all three of their brows.

The lean years of servitude to the Howeys had squared Bek’s face and grayed her hair. The lean years had scarcely touched those two there. Thank God! Nor Paula, who had flown the nest wisely and soon. Nor Steve. Again, thank God! Thank God! Safe in a nest of his own feathering.

How securely she had kept the world of mean detail from Winslow’s reckoning. His face, with the soft smile, would have been a jerked and nervous face had she not kept it tranquil. His long, facile hands that she loved for recoiling at the chores she could tackle. His soft, fastidious air of isolation from the barn-and-sty—worlds through which she sometimes stalked knee-deep.

Bek would no more have permitted Winslow to behold her breaking open the mouth of a horse in the cattle-marts, or bartering in the clinical phraseology of the cattle-pen over bull or stallion or sow.

A secret sense of spiritual refinement at being the wife of an artist had been awake in Bek from the first, when as the smart, eldest Schuyler girl, she had gone off to Middleton one morning, with Henriette Simpson for companion and witness, and barn-and-sty worlds married Winslow Renchler, son of a Presbyterian minister up Ideola way, who, at twenty-six, had never done anything more than clerk in a haberdashery by day and dabble away his evenings in a rigged-up studio over his father’s barn.

There had always been, to Bek, something a little Robert Louis Stevensonian about Winslow in appearance. The nervous kind of slenderness. The white, thin-skinned æsthete’s brow. The full, rather beautiful lips, behind a brown mustache. Winslow had first pointed out the likeness. After that, she read _Treasure Island_ and hung a print of Stevenson in the parlor.

There was so much one could do for Winslow.

Now with Paula, it had been so different. If there seemed to be between Bek and Paula a certain outward incompatibility, it was probably because of the too perfect similarity of the two. At bottom, there existed a passionate admiration of each for the other’s power of dominance. In spite of it, they clashed constantly. Paula made no evasion of the fact that life in the same house with her mother was impossible for her. Their wills met and tilted. Since she had been seventeen, and out of Centralia Normal School, they had lived at sufficient distance to keep those strong wills in respectful leash in the comparatively brief periods of Paula’s vacation-visits home.

There was so little one could do for Paula, who was so capable of doing for herself.

With Steve, it had been different. No one but Bek would ever know how much there had been to do for him.

For Winslow, sitting there in the lamplight, at his whittling, there had been so much to do. So much! And for Leslie.

Regarding her twenty-year-old son, with his delicate, listening, beardless face, and the look he had of knowing minute, woodland things, there was the old streak of pain across her heart, that could feel to her exactly as if it were bleeding. And then, combined with it, a secret sort of exultation that shamed her.

He needed her so.[53] She still undressed him at night, and sat on his bed-edge to tell him his choice of the legend of the Golden Fleece, the story of Esau, Peter Pan, and a folderol chant about Chanticleer which ended in a loud crowing that invariably sent Leslie off into long and repetitious mimicry. He played a flute, one that Winslow had improvised for him out of a reed, down where the cattails grew. He came crying to Bek when it became clogged, even though it was his father who had fashioned it. He cried to her when it rained, and looked to her to cause the sun to shine. She did, by a contrivance of electric light with a reflector behind, which she had rigged up in the attic, against the curious effect of depression and actually impaired digestion, which weather had upon him.

There was a tune, a concoction of her own that still sent him off on his afternoon nap, his hand in hers. She knew his sometimes bafflingly inarticulate names for favorite trees, and his bird-calls, and could sit patiently on the outside of the minute woodland life that could cause him to break into soft and private laughter.

How snug he was in that strange world where the tragedy of her life had tucked him. Sometimes, when her thighs flamed of fatigue, and the world of accounts and hoof-and-mouth disease and locust-scourge and drought, and the constant carping grief for her farm was too much with her, again and again the consolation of this thought smote and half-shamed her.

How secure Leslie was in the world back there in the hinterlands of maturity, in the land of fantasy from where he had never crossed the frontier into reality.

Leslie, whose eyelids were still hung with the shining scales of illusion. How safe he was from the realities that could beset and become grotesque, when she woke at night to find them sitting on her chest. Realities like her chronic dread of Winslow’s deep-seated lungy cough. The never quite realizable calamity that the farm was no longer hers. Her parents scrimping themselves into old age. Paula, whom she loved, so strangely remote in her associations and preferences. That blighted potato-crop. Life-insurance policy to be met. (Heaven knew how.) Phil’s apparent inability to regain his business feet. Strangely persistent adversity. His first years had shown such business promise. Rita was looking peaked, too. Was another baby coming? Of course, it would be fine if the doctors had been wrong—except for the strain—the financial millstone that seemed around the neck of the family. Sometimes Clara, off in St. Louis, on the modest certainty of Sam’s salary, seemed best off of all. But with her children growing up—what prospects, what future? All the panorama of these realities could seem so grotesque at night, or rather toward morning, when she awoke, as was her wont, of a heaviness at her chest. The squatting realities. David, a curiously thoughtful boy in his slow, observant way. What private panorama moved behind his square, calm imperturbability of face? If any? Was the lethargy into which David seemed locked just inertia that characterized the type of boy slow to get his bearings? Or was he the kind of boy, almost extinct now, who would stick to the farm? Or was here another Henry? Dreamer. Yearner. Spectator. Idealist. Genius? Failure? Or just David. Any boy. Good boy. Slow boy. Thoughtful, deep, rather intellectual boy.

The peaked expression that for the first time was coming through her father’s face! That sunken area about the mouth. Almost the way he was going to look in his coffin. Ugh!

But it was only in that curiously corpselike hour before dawn that such drearily hopeless thoughts could beset her. Sitting there over her accounts that evening, Bek was scheming and contriving. And now, after secret years of the slowly planned project, the sudden return of old Governor Howey from two years abroad, had ripened the plan into action.

“I’m going to walk over to the Howey farm, Winslow. And see the Governor,” she said, slapping a last account-book shut and pushing back from her desk.

“Better let the old man get his travel dust off, hadn’t you?” he replied, without glancing up from his whittling.

“He’s been home two days. Besides, I need to see him.”

“I suppose he’s holding you to an accounting for your loose management,” said Winslow with an elaborate gravity.

“Why should he?”

“Oh, I thought he might be inclined to fire you for a more competent overseer.”

“Stranger things have happened,” she said, getting his point and smiling back at him.

“Maybe, but not much,” said Winslow, whittling away on a staff of long, white-pine.

“The Governor has early supper same as always,” said Bek, winding a knitted scarf over her head. “I’ll get there just about as he’s finishing. It’s as good a time as any to buttonhole a man you’ve business with. Thursday’s corned-beef night at the Howeys, and if I do say it, I’ve never corned finer for them than the piece he’ll be cutting into this evening.”

It was a good two miles to the Howey place, over country it would never have occurred to her to fear. Country which she had stalked, after dark, times too countless to record. And yet she stood waiting, wanting Winslow to fear for her. Wanting to be worried over. Secretly resenting not being feared for, and yet everything, in her bearing, forbidding solicitude.

“Think I’ll need a lantern, Win? Looks like snow.”

“Nonsense! There may be a flurry of sleet, but it won’t amount to much. There’s a moon due in an hour.”

She walked over and kissed Leslie on his long, palish brow.

“Mother will be back in a little while, Leslie, to put you to bed.”

He held up a half-finished garland to crown her.

“Father says there’s a moon tonight, Leslie. I’ll tell you the fairies-and-elves story when I come back. Bank up the furnace, Win, but keep the third flue open. Never mind! I’ll go down and attend to it myself, on my way out.”

She left them puttering among the shavings and at whittling in the warmly lit dining-room.

In the basement, the coals made a rumbling noise as she dove in with her shovel and lugged and relugged more shovels of them to the greedy, red mouth of the furnace.

“Don’t bank her up too tight, Bek,” called Winslow through the dining-room register. “Shouldn’t be surprised if, after all, we do have a flurry of snow.”

“Yes? Then maybe I’d better not—go?”

There was no answer to her pause, because Winslow, who had been at the window to peer, was out in the pantry pouring himself cider into a pewter mug.

“Oh, Win——”

“Yes?”

“Think I’d better not venture? Don’t think I’m apt to be caught, do you?”

“Nonsense, you won’t mind a flurry, even if it comes.”

“No—I won’t mind—but if you’re going to worry about me——”

“Be sure and leave us plenty of heat, Bek.”

“Yes.”

Outside, a half-clear and listening kind of night met her, the same lowering beauty of snow-cloud edged in sunset that hung over David and Dora as they dallied together further along the same road. A moon, about to rise out of the cloud-mass, cast its brilliance ahead in a rim of silver.

There was a hog, with a rip along its flank from an encounter with a barbed-wire fence, to be glanced at as she passed down the cinder-path to the open road; and, for the life of her, Bek could not pass a barn door without a dragging-back of bolts for a precautionary look-in.

A chorus of whinnies met her, and the lowing sound of bulls. There was a new mare, with a vicious snapping-habit, standing muzzled in her stall. She loosened the strap slightly and rubbed a flank or two as she passed along.

It was full-dark, with the moon slid like a coin into a slot of cloud, as she fiercely struck her pace out on the road. A swinging pace as free as a man’s, and with her heart beating high from the excitement of her purpose, the cold air beat against her face and left it flaming.

FOOTNOTES:

[53] Leslie died yesterday. I suppose we were what you would call prepared for the end. Winslow closed his eyes. The President of the United States drew a sheet up over his face. He lies downstairs in a white coffin. At forty-eight Leslie’s coffin would have to be white. He never had any age to him. Only youth. I can’t realize that my boy who remained a child for me is gone. To think I must go on waking up every day and never again know what it is to be needed by him—my dear darling——

_Chapter Thirty-three_

For thirty years, the Howey family, with a wealth of social and intermarriage connections that extended beyond the state to the Eastern seaboard and Europe, had exchanged the niceties of Christmas puddings, cider and Thanksgiving, walnuts off the Howey trees, and minced meat out of Mathilda’s larders. And every fall, up to the year of her death, Kate Howey had sent Mathilda the first cuttings of dill from her kitchen garden. A custom which Shirley, the eldest Howey girl, Princess von Windigger now of Vienna, kept alive, along with others of her mother’s homely habits, cabling instructions to the caretaker of the old homestead.

Every Christmas, the Governor, who was indebted to Henry on a hundred counts (not least among them the hushing-up of an ugly land-deal involving Loring Howey the Governor’s second son) sent him, whether from Madrid, Washington, Paris, or Buenos Aires, where Loring now had headquarters, a box of fifty Habana cigars and a gray-silk muffler.

The remaining two Howey boys, Tom and Weston never failed to drop into the office above the hardware store on their infrequent visits “back home.”

There existed a rather formal _entente cordiale_ between the home-grown Schuylers and the globe-trotting Howeys.

A Schuyler was always sure of a gracious reception from a Howey. A Howey was known to cater to a vote long after the immediate need for it was past.

This relationship had never been tested beyond this insular one of the neighborhood. Bek Schuyler and Shirley Howey were within six months of the same age. But while Shirley had been educated in Switzerland, Bek had attended Centralia public schools. Henry had attended the state-endowed university, and Tom Howey, who was also a lawyer, Yale.

The Howeys respected the Schuylers. Although not one of them would admit it, except perhaps Emma, who was a family-joke on the subject, and to whom a Howey was a Cabot, every Schuyler secretly nourished a wistful kind of admiration for the Howeys; an admiration that dated back somewhere from childhood. The preponderant magnificence of gubernatorial prestige. The fine old Howey homestead. The debonair habits of wealth. The comings and the goings of the Howeys in motor-cars, years before the Ford and the tractor had inundated the countryside with the fecundity of locusts. Shirley Howey was the first woman in the county to ride a horse astride. Loring Howey laid out a nine-hole golf-course along the left flank of his father’s estate, years before the Whittier Country Club was even dreamed of. The Howeys dressed for dinner. With the exception of Henry, a Schuyler had never owned a dress-suit.

A Howey was perennially exciting to a Schuyler, exotic, mysteriously and a little splendidly, alien.