Chapter XIII: Part 13

Claire cut out _Spur_ and _Vanity Fair_ photographs of Shirley von Windigger, and every other imaginable snapshot of her she could lay hands on, and tried, with her own pale and fluffy hair, to imitate her sleek-groomed coiffures, and from one photograph of her, with her two little girls, charming in their Kate Greenaway dresses, proceeded to dress her own little girls in like manner.

A Schuyler just naturally revered a Howey.

Another favorite family-joke was to get Phil, who was Loring’s age, started at defending the rather notoriously black sheep of the Howey family. They had been boys together during the period of a scrum baseball-team and swimming-hole days, before Loring was shipped off to Grout’s Academy in Pennsylvania. Phil could be bitter with loyalty to Loring.

The Ex-Governor, who at eighty-seven still had the aggressive bison-like lunge of head that had crashed him through two of the most tumultuous terms in the history of the state’s legislation, was seated, the night Bek arrived on her mission, in his small study of red leather and mahogany, that was dominated by an oil-panel of himself, painted by Sargent, the year of his election to second term.

It was little more than an anteroom, and smelled of camphor and slip-covers. Except his bedroom, it was in fact, the only room there had been time to unwrap for him on the heels of his wire, announcing his coming.

The old Ex-Governor who had dined alone off a small table drawn up before the fireplace, greeted her with his inquisitive, appraising eyes, in a face more shrunken than she recalled it, but their alertness and their shrewdness undimmed by the years which had got at his body so and gnarled it.

“By Gad, Bek, you haven’t changed a hair in the last ten years,” he said, and lied gallantly and with the politician’s reflex for the diplomatic word at any price.

Bek had gained thirty pounds in that period. And knew it.

“Nor you, Governor,” she lied back. “Where do you get your own special kind of immunity from the years?”

“Don’t!” he said, with the shadow of almost his only fear flickering across the uneven surface of his face. “I’m a goner, Bek! Angina pectoris. Fatal as hell. Two years at the outside will see my finish.”

“Nonsense!”

“How’s your father?”

“Father holds his own, considering.”

“Ever get a penny out of that hound Milliken?”

“He died two years ago, intestate, so far as we were able to find out.”

“And his son?”

“One of the heaviest tax-payers in Toronto.”

“One of the orneriest scoundrels ever came out of his state.”

“They’ve made it hard sledding for us, Governor.”

“Hit the whole gang of you, eh?”

“Yes, we seem to be like that. As my brother Phil puts it, united we stood and united we fell.”

“Phil’s the third one, isn’t he? How’s he doing?”

“Well, Phil’s the kind of fellow, Governor, good head on him, but somehow always standing just on the verge of something big that never quite comes off. As a matter of fact, he hasn’t done much more than make a living since—since our—crash. But I understand he’s got some right good prospects now on some sort of an airship deal a group of Springfield business men are trying to negotiate with the Government.”

“Wish it to him. And Henry? Still trapesing along, wasting himself on a one-horse town? There’s a fellow could have brought himself and his state glory, if he’d had guts. I was never so fixed, you know that, Bek, what with conditions I had to contend with in office, that I could throw as much in his way as I’d liked to, but he knew, from me a-telling him, I’d have backed him for anything within reason.”

“Henry Schuyler, Governor, is a big tragedy to everybody in this state except himself. And, possibly—me. No man is a failure, Governor, if he has eyes that er—a—as we say it in elocution—see the glory of the coming of the dawn. Henry wouldn’t turn a hand to earn for himself some of that glory—but he sees it, all right.”

“Well, all that’s pretty fine for the hymn-books, but where’s it got him? One-horse lawyer to every two-by-four case in the county. All right for a man to sponsor the under dog, so long as he doesn’t weaken his power for helping by remaining one of the under-dogs himself.”

“Lot in what you say, Governor. Here’s Henry, who’s probably handed out back-stair wisdom in every important case in this state in the last twenty years, barely eking out a living for himself and for the fund we somehow manage to keep going among us children for the old folks, without their knowing just exactly what it is keeps them going.”

“Old Gentleman won’t stand for any out-and-out hell from his children, eh? I’ll wager that. Great character there. Stuff that the salt and the magnesia of the earth are made of. Old fellows like him are what the language manipulators, down Washington, are always referring to as the bulwarks of society.”

“If ever a man stood for just that, I guess it is Father. Pretty much of a crude proposition on the outside, but at heart, he’s the most uncompromising idealist I know. Father’s been a rich man and a poor man in his day but the one quality in him that hasn’t swerved with his fortunes is his integrity. He hasn’t got much of any thing to show for it in a worldly way, but Father’s far from a failure in my eyes. He’s lived what he believes.”

“Well,” said the Governor, with his eyes suddenly seeming to shrivel into two scars, “maybe he hasn’t got much of anything to show for the years, and maybe he has. At least he hasn’t got a brace of sons that have taken his life’s blood. You don’t need me to tell you Bek, the pretty penny my two boys have cost me since the day they were born, to say nothing of—of—keeping one of them out of penitentiary.”

Bek didn’t. Her knowing it so well, and his referring to it at this time, made what she had come to ask the harder.

“I understand Governor, indeed I do. No, Father’s not had what you’d call a particularly brilliant brood of us, but—well—our boys have spared father much of what you’ve been through.”

“Spared. Your father has a fine bunch of men to show. How’s the after-thought the Old Gentleman sprung on us some years back? That boy ought to be along in his teens now.”

“Davey’s—let me see—going on eighteen——”

“You don’t tell me! Lord, don’t a fellow ever get old enough to get over surprise at the way time sneaks up on him. I remember meeting the Old Gentleman down at the bank, day or two after the boy was born—‘Hi, Schuyler,’ I said to him, ‘hear you been doin’ some tardy propagatin’ of this here vale of tears. Don’t you know there’s a birth-control bill up in this state?’ ‘Birth-control,’ barks the Old Gentleman, ‘birth-control poppycock! All that’s the matter with propagation is the quality. More and better propagation is my slogan.’ There’s a card for you, if ever there was one. ‘More and better propagation,’ he says to me. ‘Well, sir, I hope that last kid is more and better propagatin’.’”

“Davey—well, Dave’s a peculiar child, Governor. Coming along as he did, so long after the rest of us—growing up alone, you might say—Mother, bless her heart, treating him more like a grandchild than one of her own, most of his uncles and nieces twice his age, war coming along right in the middle of his childhood, Father’s reverses, well—somehow, never has seemed to me Dave’s had a ghost of a chance.”

“You mean he isn’t ...”

“Oh, he’s got the levelest head of any child you ever saw. Good bit of a dreamer, too. Dave’s the kind of a child you can’t tell much about while he’s growing up, and, all of a sudden, he turns out to be—a something or just—just a kind of nothing. Know what I mean Governor?”

“You mean, if he’s a dog, he’s a dog, or if he’s leopard, the spots haven’t come through yet?”

“Sort of. I just mean Dave’s what you might call still-water in a way, but I’ve the feeling about him that he not only runs deep, but that he runs wide. A regular little Mississippi.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Well, I guess you might say, not much of anything That is—I think what I have just been telling you is why Dave isn’t doing more than he is in a—a regular sort of way, I mean. Dave’s had no schooling to speak of but Henry’s influence, I always say, is more than a college certificate. Dave’s got curiosity, Governor. ‘Intellectual curiosity,’ Henry labels it. Nothing satisfies that boy short of learning everything there is to know about everything.”

“What did you say he’s doing now?”

“Oh, well—truth of it is—Dave’s just around the farm yet. No job in the regular sense. The Igrotte place isn’t much more than kitchen garden, but—well it’s just as I say, Governor, Davey hasn’t had the deal the rest of us children had. He just growed, like Topsy. Father’s needing him most of the time for herding and chores. Course he’s had Henry. Even without what you might call proper schooling, that’s an influence not one boy in a thousand comes under.”

“Great deal in what you say.”

“Except that Henry’s not what you’d call, in this age we live in, much of a live-wire. It’s made Davey kinda what you’d call a stagnant little fellow. Hope to goodness it don’t mean he’s going through life thataway. It’s the wrong age to be born into, if you’re slow-going. But unless I miss my bet, Dave’s the kind that spends his time growing cone-shaped, and then watch your cyclone. Not that I mean—well, I guess about all I can out-and-out say to your question, Governor, is that, at present, Dave’s tinkering around the farm.”

“Humph!”

“Just the same, his information for a boy is surprising. He can tell you the distance of a star or recite the Fourteen Points, or, all of a sudden, tell you something out of Greek literature. He’s got one of those curious combinations of conservatism and imagination, if you get what I mean.”

“Humph! Guess you’re about the pick of the crowd, Bek.”

She sat before him, with the scarf fallen back from her large, capable face, her hair with the gray in it straggling a little from under the plait of it on top of her head, and her square hands clamping down tightly on each knee.

“Coming to that. Fact is, at this moment, I’m the failure of the family, Governor,” she said, forcing his gaze to meet hers, squarely, “and you know why.”

“I’ve never talked over our business arrangements with you, Bek, knowing that’s all fixed between you and my overseer, but you know that I know, from what he tells me, that you’ve done as well with High Ridge as anybody could—considering two droughts, hoof-and-mouth disease, and bad crop-conditions the last five years—all things considered——”

How shrewd he was. As if he had not scanned to the penny the detailed fidelities of her annual reports. He knew to precisely what extent the High Ridge was a going-concern, and to what extent its expert first-hand control had enabled it to yield richly on his investment Sly old rogue. He knew, and his old eyes slid under her square gaze for the moment, but she captured them fast again with her own.

“All things considered. You mean High Ridge hasn’t paid?”

“Not exactly that——”

“I can show you, Governor, a five-per-cent yield even on your war years.”

“Five per cent to a man who makes his money earn almost twice that, isn’t such a hell of a good investment my dear Bek, if you’ll pardon my ‘hell’.”

“As a matter of fact, Governor, the average of the last four years had been considerably over that, if you figure——”

“In total, perhaps, but the alfalfa fiasco——”

“You know how I advised against that.”

“Whatever the situation was—and mind you, in any other hands than yours, there is no doubt but what the case would have been much worse—the total results from the farm haven’t yet averaged a particularly good return for my money.”

He lied down her own knowledge of her own figure without as much as the batting of an old crocodile eyelid, and lying, knew that she knew he lied.

“You’ve averaged over six per cent on your money,” she repeated, standing her ground with a cold and even voice.

“Wrong, there. Can show you the figures. What with the cost of upkeep. Now if we could cut down on the expense of operation——”

So that was what made the old Governor so cagey. Fear that she had come to demand an increase.

“Governor, you feeling as you do, listen to this. Here’s a proposition. I’ll buy the place back.”

“Eh?”

“I’ll pay you seven per cent on your money.”

With the lightning perception that his great age had not dimmed, he saw his trap almost before she had the words out, and with the same lightning perception, saw its cunning mesh.

What a woman! Damn fine shrewd old girl. Should have been a man. Worth the whole bunch put together. And as the situation flowed over him, he began to laugh until his bent old figure rippled along his blue brocade dressing-gown.

“So! So!”

“With that three-acre triangle just below Algahr’s, and not counting the artesian well in the drilling, and the two tractors on order, and the electric milkers, I’ll pay you—forty thousand dollars. Exactly twenty-five per cent more than the last mortgages I held from you on practically the same property. The matter of the slightly above the usual six per cent will be a private matter between you and me. Six-year term of mortgage, subject to extension for same period.”

“By Gad, I——”

“It’s my land, Governor. That farm’s my child. My very roots are down in that soil. That’s why, since I’ve lost the land, it has been as if an arm or a leg of mine were buried somewhere, and keeps hurting even though it is no longer part of me.”

A curious, half-fanatical flame crept along Bek’s face.

“Sell me back my farm, Governor,” she said, and thrust her burning countenance closer and closer to his vision. “You’ve so much land. To you, land is just so much income. So many bushels of wheat. So many heads of cattle. So many mowing-machines to make it yield. But land, to me—that land, of that farm, to me—it’s a bosom breathing, Governor!”

“Come, come, now, Bek. Not like you to talk business on a woman-basis. That’s woman-bosh. If this farm that you know from A to Z is worth that much to you why isn’t it worth that much to me?”

“I’m glad you asked that Governor, because I can tell you why. It’s because, with all the conscientiousness in the world, I can’t make it worth that much to you. Why? Because I’ve lost the creative thing in me that made me mother to that farm. I’m just its wet-nurse now. God knows, I’ve given you just about one hundred and one cents on the dollar, Governor. No glory to me but just on the principle that I’d go the limit for a child of mine, even though I’d given it out to another family for adoption. But just the same, Governor, I’ve lost the fire in me that made me the creator of that farm. I can’t fight for her while she’s not all mine. It’s not in me. I’m hired. Sell me back my farm, Governor?”

“You are prepared to buy a forty-thousand-dollar farm?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

She looked at him, aware that her face must be pulled to reveal a terrible state of eagerness which she did not want revealed to him.

“Right big business, Bek. Forty-thousand-dollar deal! What’s your proposition?”

“I’ve given it to you.”

“In detail?”

“I’ll pay you out, Governor, barring the first year for breathing-space, on any—any conditions as to time and amount you think—fair.”

“How much down?”

She captured his gaze again, squarely to the center of his eyeballs.

“Come now, Governor.”

“Fair question.”

“Nothing—down.”

He drew on a beautifully colored but draughty old meerschaum pipe, with two ivory antelopes with locked horns on its hump, and laughed softly, so that the brocade rippled again.

“You’re the best business man in this room, Bek.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised, Governor.”

That tickled him more, so that he laughed out into a high thin, very old man’s cackle.

“But it takes even a smarter man than you to get curd-and-whey out of water.”

“You’ve nothing to lose, Governor, by taking a chance on my legerdemain.”

“Why haven’t I?” he barked.

“Why, if I don’t meet my obligations—the mortgage is in your hands—as before——”

“So you propose to meet those obligations on a zero foundation?”

“The moment I become even theoretic owner of my farm once more, my foundation ceases to be zero.”

“How do you mean?”

“I’m a Samson shorn of my locks now, Governor. I’m tied hand and foot. I’m a hired-hand.”

“Who tied you?”

“You, Governor. Not in so many words; but with somebody else’s property, one goes safety-first. I’ve had half a dozen schemes in the last five years I’d have put into practice, if I’d been risking on my own. On one of my schemes alone, I’d be in a small fortune now. I’d have gone in for sheep-raising on a new scale hereabouts. I’ve an experimental-dairy idea that’s been brewing for years. I see money in alfalfa. Not under the conditions you made me plant three years ago, but according to my own theories. Remember, I wired you and you vetoed? I’ve an idea up my sleeve that’ll turn those acres of corn-fields into quick-turn-over money. Experimental, perhaps, but a person will experiment with his own, when he won’t take a chance for another.”

“Something in that.”

“As long as I’m working for you, Governor, I’ll give you the best there is in me. But the very best isn’t there. I’m a dead thing. My vision and my imagination and my courage are in my shoes. Sell me back my land, Governor. Take a sporting-chance on me and I won’t fail you.”

“I won’t live to see whether you do or not,” he said, drily, his eyes going dull, as if they were mirrors and someone had breathed on them.

“Sell me back my land, Governor. It’s part of my state. It’s part of my country. It’s part of me.”

“Don’t know but what I will,” drawled the Ex-Governor and sat back in his leather chair and pulled hard on his pipe with the two ivory antelopes. “Rotten bad business tactics, but, by Gad—don’t know but what I will, Bek.”

_Chapter Thirty-four_

It was at this precise moment that Dave, after Dora had dashed from him into the long row of elms, reached the little eminence of land, on his way home, from where he could see, on one side, the remote, low-lying roofs of High Ridge, and, on the other, the roof of the Igrotte place.

The moon had come out of its snow-bank, wafer-thin, and throwing a light the color of steel over the countryside. Fields billowed around him, as if under his very feet, he could feel the movement of their flow. Valley whose magnesia of the soil was the soil of his own make-up. He had that sense of oneness with the ground, as if the roots of him, like the roots of a tree, flowed down through layers of the curiously alive earth into sub-strata——

Years of his dreams, dreamed from the flat of his back, had risen off that soil. Folded close to the deep, the loamy, the fructifying dirt, what countless times he had dropped his book on its face, to float off to worlds of pirate and raft, shark and Tartar. North Pole. Airship. Submarine. Dick Needham. Later, Ivanhoe. de Galis. Tom Brown. Cecil Rhodes. Galileo. Captain Kidd. Peary. Teddy! Marconi. Orville Wright. Othello.

Everyone of them had sat on the slope of his hill that slid down on one side toward Bek’s and on the other side toward the Igrotte house.

Why, buried somewhere on the left slope of hillside was a copy of Darwin’s _Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication_. He had played at Captain Kidd burying his treasure on damp spring afternoons. That was his treasure. For months, it had lain moldering there, waiting for him to find time to go searching the spot, over which tufts of grass had grown meanwhile, erasing trace of the ritual.

Dreams had been dreamed here, and now culminating within him, in what seemed actual spurts of energy, came the first concrete impulse to be up-and-doing he had ever known.

Here was his soil flowing into a future that seemed suddenly to draw aside one of its many thicknesses of curtain for him. The future that was to be flecked with the rise and dip of aeroplanes. The future when this soil must run fertile and yielding as far as Stefansson had been able to visualize in the _Northward Course of Empire_. The future that suddenly was something to arm cap-a-pie for. That he must rush to meet. The future that suddenly, amidst the vision, the dipping of the planes, the onward rush of empire, had its nucleus under his feet and stretched out to new horizons. Suddenly that future became alive. A future of men whose ideals must rise above the soaring of the planes, or who would be crashed to earth by them.

A future that was suddenly luminous, because it contained him and Dora under the rooftree of a semi-detached home of their own making, in a town called Springfield.

How suddenly and gloriously alive this future, starting under his feet and radiating outward, chiefly toward Springfield! Clerkship. Husbandship. Dora!

Something else, too. The something else that was part of that future. Uncorrelated. The fields all about him were soaked with his dreams; with his inchoate impulses. To launch new ships. Dreadnoughts, with nothing to dread, were the only kind of ships that ultimately must mark man’s ability to rise above his mechanical age.

One thought a great deal about that. Henry said, what good is the telephone, the telegraph, the aeroplane, the motor-car, if man use these magnificences of his own inventive brain against himself....

Henry said. Henry said ... Henry said ... somehow swam out of the vast ether of moving molecules—Henry said! Impulse to warn men lest the power of brain prove to be a boomerang. Impulse to jerk the world into compactness by quick navigation of air. To make men less strange to one another, less afraid of one another, by annihilating distance. Supremacy of the air must mean just that—not the power of poison-gas. Henry said——

To tread new altitudes that back, through the ages, only eagles had dared. To seek new pastures. A world to be tamed by its mechanical magnificence, not made savage by it. A world to leap to the stars on the quick mechanical steeds of its achievement, not to hurl bombs from them—not to rush to intellectual, spiritual, idealistic destruction on them. Henry said—Henry said——

The impulse to straddle the world as if it were Pegasus gone mad and check-rein it—Henry’s words—Henry’s words were kindling in one. To ride toward the stars, instead of into destruction, on a steed with mechanical entrails and seven-thousand-league hoofs.

And above all, to come back to Dora four years hence, with money in the pockets of a blue serge suit that was nattier than Kenneth Chipman’s, and carry her back to a Springfield that had a shingle over his office door, a client on his books, and a first month’s rent planked down on a two-family house! Dora!

Against the horizon, from the direction of the Howey place, her silhouette unmistakable, climbed the figure of his sister Bek, at enormous stride, even for her. A stride that seemed to spin the road, a little contemptuously back from under her strong feet. A stride that somehow, as he stood on his eminence of small hilltop, with a rising wind flapping his shabby, baggy trousers, filled him with a curious and comforting sense of inheritance.

Some of that power that made his sister magnificent and his father like a stanch old phaeton that would carry its burden even when the spring groaned; that made his brother full of a wisdom that seemed to begin far behind things and leap so far ahead of them—some of that power must be his!

There were new ships to launch—somewhere—air ships! Dream-ships come true. Power!

Why, he had seen his mother, who was full of years and had fainting-spells, deny her chilblains and walk miles on feet that must have been fiery and icy furnaces under her. He had seen her, who sickened at blood finish sticking a knife into a pig, when a farm-hand cut himself. Even his nephew Stephen, whom he had seen kick in the side of a dog, had a valor that had pulled him through.

Some of that power, flowing like a mill-stream through his family, must be in him. Big wheels to turn. Why not? Half of a two-family house in Springfield—someday—who knows—there was a future to law—corporation law—if Kenneth Chipman could—well—if Kenneth Chipman could——

His dreams must be struck into life, as one would strike a match into flame.

As Dora had struck the match of him into flame!

_Chapter Thirty-five_

Lopsidedly, the rust-colored, pot-bellied stove in Henry’s office had whirred through its twenty winters. Second-hand originally, in setting it up the fourth leg had come off, so that from the beginning, it had stood propped on two wooden blocks. Its hoarse, hurried whisper was indissolubly associated with that flimsy-walled room in one of the few frame buildings that remained on High Street.

It was probably the only coal-stove left in a High Street office. It had a gaseous, soft-coal breath that hovered over the place even when August crowded its humidity into the little room. Its soot lay along the mountain-ridges of the relief-map of North America that occupied one entire wall, like the grime in the wrinkles of an old gypsy’s face.

There was never a time within Davey’s recollection, when the Socrates on the bookcase had not grime in the curlicues of his hair or along the deep sills of his eye-sockets, or when the top of Henry’s yellow oak table, that served as desk, was not gritty to the touch. Usually Henry sat in a swivel-chair, with one bony knee crooked against the table-edge, and foot dangling free of the floor. Except when a client was present. Then it was his idiosyncrasy to seat the client in the swivel-chair, where the hard light from the window fell upon his face, and himself occupy the casual straight chair alongside.

It was a motley, ill-ordered table-top. For as long as Davey could remember, a horseshoe had dangled from a nail at one end, and to which nail the countless zigzag rents in Henry’s seersucker coat bore witness.

Briefs piled in stacks had slid down along themselves. A magnificent plaster-of-Paris Holstein-Friesian bull, of the vintage of a Nineteen-Hundred-and-One State Fair browsed in the center of a litter of ink and mucilage pots. Above the table was a flecked picture of Abraham Lincoln, that had once been given away, on his birthday with a Sunday edition of the _Kansas City Star_. An excerpt from his Gettysburg speech was pasted alongside:

... that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that
cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we
here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that
government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not
perish from the earth.

It might be said of Henry that he dallied for hours in his swivel to the rhythm of that segment of the speech. Not consciously. The text of it was almost part of his very texture. In that speech was Henry fluttering for flight. In that speech his cry, his plea, his dread, his hope, his passionate yet passive caring about men and their emancipations. Tilted in his swivel for hours, he could regard the bit of print, without actually seeing it, but soaked in its rhythm, which was the rhythm to which he swung his knee and tilted in his chair and passed his days. Alone. As much as they would let him be. Flies had specked it, and a celluloid campaign-button, from the first Howey campaign of 1896, was dug into one corner.

There were road-maps and wavy stacks of books, half-a-man high, staggering from the floor above the table-top; an engineer’s map of the plan of a proposed spur-railroad off the main line from Centralia to Springfield; a blue-print of a thirty-mile stretch of a new state highway; a plan of a negro-shanty, where a murder had been committed in the name of chicken-thievery. A black-and-white print of President Wilson. Charts for a proposed clearing of a swamp known as Nigger Hollow. A hand-made map of the States of Ohio and Indiana, with red-headed pins outlining sources of water-power. A photograph of Phil Schuyler’s one-time pretentious home in Springfield, with Phil and Rita and the children seated on the porch rail.

A country-bumpkin of an office. Probably the only one of its kind left in a small city that now boasted its Chamber of Commerce, two ten-story, fire-proof skyscrapers, a Federal bank, the largest tool-works west of Massachusetts, two five-and-ten-cents stores, a daily Blue Plate Business Men’s lunch served in the Rotarian Rooms, two radio-shops screaming out onto the sidewalks, omnibus-service to Seven Mile, Cottage Corner, Tallahassee Dam, and Middleton, and a bill pending for the inclusion of Seven Mile within the city limits, thereby adding one-fifth to the population.

And, curiously enough, in that antiquated office over the hardware-store, from his tilted swivel up there, where for hours on end he could make chapel of his ten fingers, and gaze with mild, amused, sardonic eyes upon the flow of High Street, it was Henry Schuyler who had his long, lean finger in all of these pies of progress.

A finger that never bothered to draw out a plum.

There was something inscrutable in this smile with which Henry surveyed the scene from his window. The hurrying clang of bright new street-cars. He had been instrumental in wrenching a franchise from political interests. The new concrete viaduct jerking Seven Mile greedily closer to the flank of Centralia. The machinery of the appropriation for that considerable piece of engineering had passed through his hands. The World War Soldiers’ Memorial Park that had threatened to take the form of a block of marble, until he had intervened. The distant shine of the Tallahassee Aeroplane Field and hangars, which he had influenced old Hiram Tallahassee to endow in his will.

The town, bustling, banging, rattling in its small way with the things that mattered to it. Its increasing and growing canning- and foundry-industries, attracted by bonuses that Henry helped appropriate; its modern pressed-brick schoolhouses, with sunlight-factory exteriors and every modern device for the presentation of not-so-modern curricula. Its paved highways for easier and swifter mileage, its cinema-houses for surcease from the too crushing reality of days filled with the quest for more capital, more speed, more lust for water-power, horse-power, candle-power, man-power. All this spread itself before the mild, sad eyes of Henry Schuyler, like a satirical play in which he had unwittingly collaborated.

“These first twenty-five years of this century are undoubtedly the greatest in bulk of achievement in the history of the world,” he used to say. “Of course, it is true that invention makes history. For lack of a telescope, Aristotle’s astronomy is a tissue of childish romance. For lack of a microscope, his biology wanders endlessly astray. It was her low power in industrial and technical achievement that kept Greece below the general standard set by her unparalleled intellectual achievement. And yet, here we are in the age that excels along those lines, skimming under seas and over mountains, and annihilating distance with the jerking of a lever. What bothers me a little bit, though, is, whither? Is the aeroplane going to do as much for humanity as Socrates did, who sat on a coping in his home town most of his life, and thought out loud to folks who had the time to listen to him? Where are we rushing? Strikes me we’re all dressed-up and no place to go.”

Henry was not dressed-up. His office was pretty much his coping, in which he sat, in seersucker, intoning to his world, which he seemed to regard as infinitely younger than he. Inviting definition from all with whom he came in contact, but usually ending by giving it himself.[54]

In the swivel, before his brother’s littered table, the light from High Street hard against his squaring young face, and Henry seated by in the casual attitude of visitor, David faced his brother, the morning following his encounter with Dora in the wind-swept twilight. They might have been father and son, but in the largely impersonal way that Henry somehow seemed paternal to the world he lived in.

There were small, rigid places at the edges of David’s mouth, occasioned by a sort of misery at what he was doing. He was asking of his brother a loan; and knowing, as he did, his financial status, the moment was pretty obnoxious to him. Furthermore, sitting there stammering out his request, his eyes fixed unhappily upon a sheet of paper sprawling on the table before him, suddenly, as he stammered along, the blur of typewritten letters shaped themselves into words, and the words into meaning.

It was a letter from a firm of solicitors in Middleton, holding to account Henry Stephen Schuyler for the sum of four hundred and fifty dollars, for which he had gone bond for a young farmer named Edwin Penwhistle, who had defaulted payment by disappearing from the state two days before said moneys fell due.

It made the hard, jade-white areas along the side of David’s nose quiver and flatten as he limped along with his recital. The snagged places on Henry’s shabby seersucker coat too, kept hooking onto his hot and tortured gaze. Not that under conditions of the most fantastic: financial well-being could he imagine his brother in an unsnagged seersucker, but just the same, those little repetitious triangles kept jerking up his words, making him stammer and stumble, and finally end up by just sitting in the middle of a sentence and regarding Henry with stinging, miserable eyes.

“—hate like the dickens ... come to fellow like you for a loan—but it’s the poor help the poor—money don’t seem to mean much to the poor.”

“Something a little wise in that, boy. The poor remain poor, as a rule, because they spend easily. They’ve never known the gloating of watching a bank-account grow.”

“It’s asking a lot, Henry. Two hundred. You see, though, that could tide me over the winter-tuition. I can’t very well ride Phil, the way he’s got to hustle to make their ends meet—his kids and all. Looks like you’re the only one, Henry, a fellow can sort of turn to. You couldn’t see your way clear, could you, Henry, to let me have that coupla hundred? If I’m going to do the law nights, I’m already three weeks late for the beginning of the term.”

“What determined you, boy, so all of a sudden?”

“That’s why I caught the milk-truck in, so we could talk in town. Private.”

“Quite right. But last time we tried to get anywhere, talking this matter over, Dave, you were all heated up about the Wheeler book and had decided to devote your life to zoölogy, and then _Arabia Deserta_ and Stefansson got you het up about reclaiming the waste places of the earth, and it looked like engineering or Cecil Rhodes empire-stuff; then, if I remember rightly, Wilson’s perplexities got you thinking about international law, and then forestry seemed a good bet, and then, ’long toward the last, wasn’t it ovibos-breeding, Antarctic exploration, ornithology, banking, lumber-jacking, astronomy, shipbuilding?”

“Of course, if you’re going to rub that in....”

“Now, old fellow, don’t go getting sore. I think the idea of taking that job Phil can swing for you in Springfield with a grocery-firm, where you can dig into the law nights, is bully.”

“Then why the dickens didencha say so?” said David, his dry lips lifted back off his dry teeth and his eyes seeming to push up close to the lenses of his spectacles.

“Well, I just do kinda say it now. It’s a darn good decision. A job by day, and a law course to keep you out of mischief nights.”

“Law’s something a fellow can fasten his teeth into, Henry.”

“Knowledge of the laws men live under, Dave, even if you never do much more with it than—well, I guess you’d have to do more with it than I have, or strike a mark below zero—me being the zero—but what I started to say, boy, knowledge of the laws men make for themselves to live under is one way of getting at the knowledge of the kind of fellows human beings are to have made them just that way.”

“That’s it, Henry. Even if I wasn’t ever to actually go out and practice law—like you——”

“God forbid!”

“Sometimes, Henry—know what?”

“No, what?”

“Well, just a little turn of the wheel, and, all of a sudden, a fellow’s got his bearings. Know what I mean?”

“Think I do. All of a sudden, well, just all of a sudden, something hit you. That about it?”

“Exactly. Nothing so much in a grocery-job, but it’s wholesale, and, anyways, Father’s always said he didn’t care so much whether he had all silk purses in the family, just so he didn’t have any sow’s ears.”[55]

“I’d like mighty much to see you surprise the Old Gentleman with a hundred-per-cent silk purse.”

“He’s a silk purse himself.”

“No, the Old Gentleman is more like the honestest woolen sock in the world.”

“A sock that Mother knitted.”

Out of their laughter, a shadow fell across Henry’s face, as if a shade had been lowered.

“Tenacious old folks, ours, Dave. Such old-fashioned and relentless ideals as toil and integrity and loyalty are pretty much out-of-date. Father yells and hollers about it all, but he’s the tree and root and the sap of the soil all right. It’s fine to be an acorn off that kind of oak. That’s what you are at your age, Dave. An acorn crammed with future.”

“Remember what you said to me once, Henry, when you were reading Aristotle to me? Inventions make history, but is history worth the making? That wasn’t nice, Henry.”

“Of course it wasn’t, and of course history’s worth the making. The hominy must have been scorched that morning for breakfast. What I probably meant was something like—well, to make history really worth the making, the age of invention should have preceded the age of thought.”

“That’s what I say, Hen. What could those Greek fellows be expected to know about some of the most ordinary facts of the world they lived in, when they had no way of getting around it? No wonder old Aristotle was way off on his astronomy. Didn’t even have a pocket telescope like mine. Know what, Henry?”

“No, what?”

“Well, sir—looka this country. If Greece could do what she did without inventions, what do you think we ought to be able to do, having them? Looka the aeroplane. Didn’t we invent it? A pair of fellows right here in the Middle West? And here’s France and all those countries getting more use out of it than we are. What’s distance or cold or heat to us, or any of the things that have kept other nations down? Yes, siree, if I was practicing law in a live town like Springfield, living say in a little attached house with a front yard to squirt evenings with the garden hose, and plenty of time to think things out—oh, say—oh, say—well—just ’oh, say,’ is all I got to say.”

“Yeh!” said Henry, fumbling among the litter of his table and reaching across the body of the boy toward the far end. “Hand me that check-book, Dave——”

It was a scrubby affair through which Henry’s wetted forefinger rustled.

“How’s a hundred and forty-three dollars and fifty-six cents on account, boy?” he said, after some figuring on a margin, “That’s fifty-six dollars and forty-four cents shy of the two hundred, but——”

“You mean, Henry—that’s all you’ve got?”

“I mean nothing of the sort. There’s always more coming in somehow. Fellow up here in Tole County blew in last week and paid me seventy-five dollars for a fee he’s owed me nine years back——”

“But——”

“Take it or leave it,” said his brother, scrawling on the check and jerking it testily out of the book.

There was always in Henry’s manner toward his money-affairs, and in his response to any and everybody’s inroads upon the notorious generosity, a manner apt to be embarrassing to even the most hardened collector off his bounty.

He treated money with the tip of a somewhat contemptuous finger.[56]

The canny, the meretricious, the sycophants, and the needy, who at one time or another passed in almost constant stream about that white-pine table, sensed it even when Henry himself was most unconscious of the trait.

His scorn for money. It made even the hardened recipient of his largesse shrink a little as he left his presence. It made Dave, to whom money had suddenly and for the first time loomed with importance, feel sticky-fingered at the savage generosity which made his brother, as if angrily forestalling more ado, thrust the check into his hand.

“Henry, you’re just about the best friend a fellow ever had.”

“I’m just about the best boob a fellow ever had. Keep me in front of you, boy, for your ‘Don’t’ slogan. Look at me, and pretty nearly everything you see me doing, don’t do. And above all, don’t laugh at the age you live in. Laugh with it. That’s not my idea so much as the laughing philosopher’s, Democritus. Whatever you do, don’t, like gloomy Heraclitus, shed tears about it. Shed your illusions if you must, and then fight like hell to recapture them in terms of reality. Don’t keep your tongue in your cheek. Just poke it in occasionally. The pupils of Socrates, you remember, were divided into cynics and Cyrenaics. Don’t let the stale apathy of cynicism get you, ever. It takes a clever man to turn cynic, and a wise man to be clever enough not to.”

“Is that one of those eppy-grams, Henry?”

“No, only a rather dull truth. A wise man lets his mind ferment, Dave, but never turn to vinegar. You’ve got a level head on your shoulders. Keep it there. Don’t let it get caught in the rut between your shoulders. The sixth human sense, Dave, is a sense of humor. Care passionately about everything, Dave, using your sixth sense all the while, and see to it that almost everything is worth caring about. Then curb your passions.”

“I can care all right, Henry—_now_!”

“Don’t march ahead of the band-wagon. They’ll stone you, boy, if you do. Ride with it, but keep your eyes ahead. If you see Light, guide them toward it, only in the name of Heaven, don’t let them know they are not seeing it for themselves.”

“You know what you should have been, Henry?”

“Yes, I know what I should have been, Dave. I’m one of those fellows who, by making a few wise cracks to the not-so-wise, gets the reputation of still water running deep. As a matter of fact, still water doesn’t run at all. Yes, know what I should have been? I should have been Diogenes with a radium-lantern. I should have been Socrates with the wing of an aeroplane for his coping. I should have been that fellow Teufelsdröck. Who was Teufelsdröck? Quick!”

“Oh, I know! He’s the old chap in _Sartor Resartus_ who——”

“Good! Well, I should have been him, spending my days in the tower of a two-hundred-and-ninety-eight-story Woolworth skyscraper, playing marbles with the stars. Or maybe, by Jove, I should have been a third-rate country-lawyer trying to sprinkle salt on the tail of the comet I inhabit, and preaching to a small brother, to be able when he reaches my age, to sum up his life in terms of ‘I am,’ instead of like me, ‘I might have been.’”

“Well, allrighty, you mighta been—allrighty—you mighta been——”

“I mighta been, allrighty——” said Henry, looking out upon the tide of High Street, his eyes seeming suddenly to be the wise, tired, prophetic eyes of what he “mighta been.”

* * * * *

There entered, unannounced, as everyone entered that office unannounced, the hurried, perspiring figure of Steve Renchler. In spite of the fact that he had come in out of the thin-aired bluster of November, there were moist little places out under his eyes and along his upper lip; and although he wore a sweater-waistcoat (a handsome slip-over, of a variety which Claire could knit so skillfully that a Springfield department-store purchased her output), his coat was jerked back, and his derby hat was along the back of his head, pushed there by a mopping handkerchief.

There was little resemblance left to the dark, tortured boy and dreamer. It was a fed face. The face of a man of strong, healthy appetites, and strong, healthy gratifications. If the mere smell of alcohol could turn Steve pale and gone-at-the-knees, the delights of the table had done their measure, and apparently were not without compensations. Steve’s clothing bore the horizontal creases of a man whose legs bend heavily. There were dimples out along the backs of his hands, set in little cushions of fat. The tailor, in taking his measurements, had to throw the tape-line around his waist.

Right in the town of Centralia, hundreds of replicas of this derby-hatted Steve were meeting their life-insurance endowment-policies, being fairly true to their wives, reading their _Saturday Evening Posts_, _Literary Digests_ and comic-supplements, mowing their front lawns, paying their installments on loud-speakers, eating their Blue Plate luncheons, dodging jury-service, reconciling themselves to bob-haired wives, driving their family sedans, having their children’s tonsils out, purchasing Frigidaire ice-boxes in fourteen monthly payments, attending the cinema-houses, tuning-in before turning-in, struggling to relieve financial strain, staving off blood-pressure, subscribing to fifty bricks, at a dollar a brick, in the new municipal hospital, scheming to turn in this year’s four-cylinder model for next year’s six, dreaming of college education for the children, struggling for Country Club membership, “now that the children are growing up,” hoping for that raise, dreaming of the trip to the Canadian Rockies, spoiling their children, hating, indulging, loving, or spoiling their wives, achieving nervous indigestion, joining the boosters’ club, stifling another old dream, climbing after new dreams, voting the full Republican ticket, flying an “excuse my dust” pennant from off the old sedan, teaching son to salute the flag, doctoring income-tax.

The stamp of his times was on Steve. His was the rather flabby figure of a man with a body still fairly adapted to the lugging of water and the killing of game but who finds himself instead, turning spigots, and picking up the telephone-receiver when he would eat red meat. He read two newspapers a day. A local morning-sheet controlled by Republican interests and a Chicago day-old pink evening-sheet controlled by capital and designed to meet the mammalian needs of who runs as he reads the-syndicated-universities of Frank Crane and Parkes Cadman, Eddie Guest, Beatrice Fairfax, Bud Fisher, Glenn Frank, comic strip, and baseball brevities, and such of the financial, industrial, governmental, international, and political fluctuations as were deemed digestible for a barley-watered public. The newspapers were as doped for public consumption as many of the foodstuffs and drink-substitutes that found their way down the naïve palate of Centralia. A press that was free to mix, dilute, pervert truth to meet the demand of politics and policies, hurled its vitiated and vitrioled facts in twirled newspapers against the front doors of Centralia as the carrier passed down the streets in a two-wheeled cart, from which he was crack sure-shot.

Steve read his morning-paper propped up against the sugar-bowl as he dipped up his nationalized cereal, and then left it at home for Claire, who read the death, marriage, advice to-the-lovelorn, and Lost and Found Departments.

Claire, however, also read Mencken and Sherwood Anderson and Cabell at her Saturday Morning Literary Club, considered them terribly interesting, and “Mencken a scream. I just love his way of writing. He sees right through everybody—and don’t hesitate to say so.”

There was an uncut volume of _Prejudices, First Series_ on the center table of Steve’s reception-hall, and an unthumbed edition of _Winesburg, Ohio_, inscribed “To Claire Schuyler in recognition of her loyal presidency of the Saturday Morningers,” and in a neat row, between bronze-elephant book-ends, such miscellany as Burns’s _Collected Poems_, _The Winning of Barbara Worth_, _Girl of the Limberlost_, _Ingersoll’s Collected Sermons_, _Stella Dallas_, _Guide to Bridge Whist_, _Motion Picture Classic_, _Watch Your Calories_, _Adult Book of Knowledge_, _Child’s History of England_, Kathleen Norris’s _Mother_, Ben King’s _Verse_, _A Thought a Day_, Owen Meredith, _Ethan Frome_, Papini’s _Life of Christ_, _Innocents Abroad_, _The Iron Woman_, _Garden of Allah_, _Mary Page_, by Leroy Scott, _One Hundred Famous Quotations_, and _Friendship and Flower Book_.

When Stevey waited for his barber or dentist, or took a train to Springfield, the _Literary Digest_ served him one news-concoction after another, as quickly as an Automat....

News-reels flashed to him, from his favorite motion-picture theater, such items of the day as were considered good for his American well-being. Such as the Soviet scenes that could instruct him only in the dangerous and unsuccessful aspects of the gigantic world-experiment. Political slogans put forth by this and that “interest.” Propaganda. Publicity. Advertising.

If the thousands of half-doped Steves abroad over the land ever paused to think about Russia at all, it was in terms that had been doled out to them in careful rations from a careful Press, of a terror-ridden country lying prostrate under the savage and kicking heel of crazed and delirious labor.

At the same time, the headline-story of some creedist in Vermont being thrown into jail for protesting against jury duty, scarcely indented itself with any of its monstrous and satiric import into the anesthetized brains of the Steves.

Birth-control, book-censorship, Eugene Debs in jail, Tea Pot Dome scandal, lynchings, child-labor, Lawrenceville Kansas, or any of the acid awarenesses of things current that had cut the lines of pain and cynicism around Henry’s mouth, flashed across the less-sensitized, half-doped Steveys who mutely accepting their God, their food, their censored motion-pictures, books, and politics in the tabloid form rationed out to them in the interests of the greatest good for the greatest number, were mute indeed.

The Steveys were the doers, not the thinkers. They bought their tinned propaganda, theirs not to reason why. They read the Tea Pot Dome scandal as news, and not an outrageous infringement upon their own rights. They let their propaganda-logged eyes skim Eugene Debs headlines, and said “Serves him right.” “Tarring and feathering is too good for those anarchist fellows.”

They squealed a little when the shoe pinched their own particular foot, or when a case of local or municipal graft touched their particular pocket-nerves. But otherwise, except for nervous indigestion, the infernal high cost of living, the appalling and expensive precocity of children, the wife’s mounting demands of budget, the daily grind of office and high blood-pressure and self-playing piano, the bad street-car service and the unendurable tax-burden, the growing difficulties of labor-unrest, the high cost of production and college education, of butter and life insurance, coal, children’s shoes, tires, tonsil operations and dining-room rugs, life was a charivari, merry enough in its way, of radios, electric signs, aeroplane-races, baseball series, Armistice Days, lodge meetings, and making ends meet.

Steve Renchler had been caught up by the rhythm of the machine. He ate his morning cereal and slightly-watered milk with the newspaper-spokesman of that machine propped up against the sugar-bowl, and suffered no more than the normal indigestion due to overeating. Cereal and watered milk, news that the Ku Klux had tarred and feathered a negro, a college professor dismissed for free speech, Mexican unrest, Rockefeller’s dime-gesture, private ownership of railroads, were as normal to the digestion of the Steveys as seal meat and frozen fish to an Eskimo.

The stomach and the brain can be trained to overcome any initial aversions to certain foods and learn to assimilate them.