Chapter XIV: Part 14

Steve had assimilated. At thirty, he had practically passed the danger of thinking, hurting, or rebelling against any social, aesthetic or spiritual shortcomings of environment, except where personal struggle for existence, and sweet butter and life insurance, coal, children’s shoes, tires, and dining-room rugs had kept the mind competitively keen as a blade. Due to the exigencies of the age in which he lived, the chief of his sensory organs which he had developed was the eye. The motion-picture, the rotogravure, the observation-car, the motor-car, had developed a visual age. Stevey thought mostly with his eyes.

What he beheld first-hand, with the evidence of his own eyes, stimulated him. The Tallahassee Aeroplane Field and Government experimental shops, practically adjoined the Tool Works where Steve was by now department-manager.

In the beginning, it had been necessary to use disciplinary methods with the foundry employees, and even with the office-workers, to keep them from flocking to the windows every time a flight or even the most casual hop-off took place.

The curiously exultant roar of a mounting machine had long since become a matter of course, scarcely causing the lifting of a head. Except to Steve. The excitement of that living, throbbing note of release, as steel and timber took flight, never ceased to thrill him. In spite of the need to be exemplary to his men, it was practically impossible for him to remain away from the window when the song of flight began to hum its way above the din of foundry.

Frequently, instead of lolling his lunch period at home with Claire and the children, or stretched on the flat of his back beneath his five-passenger sedan, he spent it among the men on the field. Government inspectors. Mechanics. Pilots. Once, unbeknown to Claire, he had made a short flight. He was even versed in the phraseology of a new, strangely buoyant, etheric world. Air-pockets. High-pressure areas. Angle-of-drift.

With something of the old inchoate yearnings which had stirred the dark and nervous boy, this present goose-stepping Stevey, snatched back to normalcy by what was probably an inherited capacity for it that was stronger than even his weakness was weak, must have felt something of those remote old stirrings. But felt them safely.

The air, particularly after his first flight, interested Stevey principally from the vantage of his two feet on the ground.

Here was a new world of navigation, of commercial possibility that soared beyond credulity. New undreamed-of lanes of transportation, unchartered. By Jove, the day those two Ohio fellows flew at Kittyhawk, had unroofed the world! There were fortunes in those new lanes up there as yet scarcely trammeled by competition.

Here was a means of communicability as yet unchartered to any appreciable extent by “interests.”

Steve meant to be a ground-floor man, so to speak, in the new etheric zones of air commerce.

Men’s creative brains had wrought the miracle of the flying-machine. The brains of practical men must launch it.

Air commerce. Air franchise.

Steve’s dreams as a family-man began to weave about this idea. His ambition for position. A large and beautiful home for Claire. Heavy insurances. A new battleship-gray limousine with balloon tires. A thousand-dollar radio and loud-speaker. That see-America-first rail-trip, celebrated in a folder that he and Claire liked to pore over. Niagara Falls. Yellowstone Park. Seattle. Banff.

Suddenly, to Stevey, who paid forty-two dollars a month house rent; doctor, music, dancing, school fees for the children, clothing for two adults and three youngsters; laundry, gas, gasoline, fuel, lodge, fire, automobile, and life insurance, special tutelage for his child Henry, who stammered, and miscellany _ad infinitum_, on a salary of forty dollars a week, had come a chance which brought him pell-mell, and with a speed that caused the caves of perspiration beneath his eyes, to that haven of the needy and the desirous, his uncle Henry’s office.

“Uncle Henry, must see you. Right away. Alone. Sorry, Dave—get out—there’s a good kid. This is the only time I can get away from the office.”

In a slow-mannered sort of indulgence, Henry regarded his nephew without uncurling his posture.

“Hold your horses, Steve. Me and Dave are having a talk here that about amounts to what you fellows would call a ‘conference.’ Everything in the world excepting time and a bad egg will keep on a day like this.”

“I’ve only about forty minutes, Uncle. I wouldn’t butt in this way, if it wasn’t important.”

His uncle rose, his great length of body unwinding in slow good-humor.

“Of course, if it’s something special.”

“It is, Uncle. As special as anything that has ever happened to me.”

“I see. Well then, Dave, shall we give way to your nephew a bit? Guess we’ve about said it all for the present, anyway. We’ll let the universe rest as is.”

Dave rose and began rolling his cap. A conference was something inviolate. And here was Stevey crashing selfishly, inconsiderately, domineeringly, through the very warp and woof of an hour of interview with his brother, so privately his own.[57]

“Well, one thing,” said Dave defiantly, folding his check and slipping it into his trousers pocket with the long down-gesture of a man now of pocket-affairs, “if I’ve got to shove my way in this world, I’m going to shove it with my head, and not my shoulders.”

Stevey, far too hurried to be amused, cast a perspiring look at the rangy figure of his young uncle.

“Snap out of it, Dave, and don’t be a fool.”

“Dave’s in nobody’s way. Out with what’s on your mind, Steve.”

Steve slapped down his hat and, straddling a stool, jerked it to him until he was up face to face with the lean lantern from which Henry’s eyes looked so humorously.

“I’ve got the chance of a lifetime, Uncle. And I need two hundred dollars to grab it.”

It was Steve’s pronouncement of himself as a crisp go-getter man of affairs. Bandier of no words. American business man tactics. Straight from the shoulder. Right to the point. Efficiency.

It was Dave who half leaped forward, not Henry, who sat with his slow, contemplative thumb and forefinger, stroking his slow, contemplative jaw, and his other hand, with pipe that always smelled, held equally lax, as he tapped it against the table.

“That’s not such a large order, Steve, provided the fellow you’re striking for the loan has the two hundred.”

“Well, you have it for every Tom, Dick and Harry, Uncle!”

“You may be right, Steve,” drawled Henry, “but fact remains, I haven’t got it—now.”

“He hasn’t,” yapped Dave. “Henry’s no mint.”

“Keep out of this, Dave! It’s the first time, Uncle, I’ve ever come to you for the loan of a penny! I’ve worried along on my own pretty steadily. You’ll have to grant me that. But there’s nobody I can turn to, between heaven and earth but you now, Henry.”

“That’s what we all say. That’s why he’s the hounded one of the whole fam——”

“Shut up, Dave. I only need a couple of hundred dollars, Henry. My whole future depends on those few paltry dollars. If I’m ever going to be anything more than a two-by-four cog in the wheel of a man-eating iron-foundry, you’ve got to advance me the few dollars to pull myself and my wife and kids out of the rut that’ll close us in, sure as fate, if I wait much longer. I’m borrowed to the hilt, as it is, on my insurance-policies. My Buick isn’t even paid for. Let me have that couple of hundred, Uncle. You can. You must. I’ll give you my note on any terms you say.”

“That’s not fair, Steve. Henry’s not got it.”

“For cripes sake, keep out of this, I say, Dave. It may do you some good to listen to some of the things I’ve got to say. They may help you to get a move on.”

“Steve! That’s no way to talk to the boy.”

“Opportunity is knocking at my door, Uncle. Oh, I’m not whining, but if you stop to look at my life for a minute, it—it hasn’t been all beer and skittles, Uncle. I—I’ve had a fight every inch of the way through two or three kinds of hells that—for what I’ve got—out of it——”

“I appreciate that, Steve,” said his uncle.

“You should, Uncle, because—you—helped.”[58]

“I do understand, Steve, more, perhaps, than you realize.”

“Well then, Uncle—you know better than anybody—the everything of what I’ve been through. I’ve worked my way along pretty steadily these last years, grant me that.”

“Indeed I do. I’ve man-size respect for the struggle you’ve made and won, Steve.”

“Well then, prove it. Opportunity bobbed up for me today. Out of a clear sky. Opportunity’s knocking at my door. For two hundred dollars I can open it.”

“I tell you he hasn’t got it. Is it always going to be like this for him? First me. Then you. Tom and Dick and Harry? I’ve just borrowed his last penny off him. If you don’t believe it—here—looka this check—then looka his stubs. What are we around him, anyway? A lot of bleeders? Henry hasn’t got it!”

“Not so fast, Dave.”

“He’s got to have it. It’s my whole life, Henry, getting my hands on this money today. There’s a half a dozen can grab this chance away from me if I don’t.”

The narrowed look had come into Henry’s face. A tired look. An old look.

“Mighty ’fraid Dave’s right, Steve. Fact is, I haven’t got it.”

“All you have to do is look at his stubs, Steve! If it was for anything else except getting me out of the way and started toward something, I wouldn’t take it, either.”

“Borrow me that money, Henry. For God’s sake, get it for me.”

“Why, boy, I can’t borrow the price of a bus ticket from here to Middleton. Everybody in this town is onto my way of borrowing from Peter, so Paul can borrow it off me.”

With a quick fist flashing down over David’s wrists, Steve jerked his young uncle toward him, so that his spectacles jerked off one ear-lobe and hung dangling across his face.

“Dave, let me have that money.”

“Steve!”

“He’s only a kid, Uncle. Whatever he’s going to do with it now, he can do later. I’ll make it up to him. This is my chance, Dave. You’re eighteen. I’m nearly twice that and where am I? Tied to a snide job in a snide town. Opportunities like this don’t come twice to a man like me in a town like this. You see, Dave, I’ve got a family and kids. I’ve got a mother—your own flesh and blood sister, who deserves, if ever anybody on God’s earth did, to have me make good. All right, call it sniveling if you will, but let me have that money, Dave.”

“Steve—shame!”

“Why, Uncle? A man with sense will go any length to throw a sop to opportunity, if she’s pausing outside his door. I wouldn’t ask Dave if I wasn’t so sure. It’s a turning-point in my life. It’s now or never.”

“What about Dave’s life, Steve?”

“He’s a kid.”

“Yes, but Dave’s been what you might call grist between the mills of poverty and war, pretty much since he was born. He came along just in time for his father’s bad financial times to set in, and then what did he do but run into a world-war during the years he was growing up.”

“He’s got life before him.”

“That’s where it will remain for him, Steve, unless he begins to encroach upon it.”

“My life’s as important to me, as yours is to you, Steve.”

“I know that, Dave. But what you’ve got to realize is this. You’re a bright kid in your way. Maybe a slow way, but you’ve got something to you that I won’t have, if I live to be a hundred. May not get you anywhere—much—unless you get a hustle on you. But you’ve the makings, Dave, of quite an unusual kind of fellow. Don’t know just what kind—but—but life’s full of opportunities for you. Scientific farming. Or maybe big business. I’m just a regular, every-day fellow, Dave, with a nose for the opportunity when it comes along. And I tell you this is opportunity.”

“Might I ask,” said Henry, tapping his dry teeth with a pencil, and regarding his nephew with a frown over-hanging his eyes, “the nature of this er—a—mysterious opportunity?”

“Indeed you may! That’s my best selling-card, the nature of the project. You’ll be the first to see the thing, Uncle. The idea sells itself to a fellow with vision....”

“Well?”

“The birth of the air-age is taking place right under our eyes. I want to capitalize that fact. I want to ride in on it. Me and a fellow at Tallahassee Field, Eugene Bymore, a crack pilot and a fellow that knows the air-game, A to Z, can buy up a plane out of that Smoothfield wreck you read about the other day for a song. This is all inside stuff that comes to Bymore, who’s the Government aeronautic engineer. Took a fancy to me. Anxious to meet you, Uncle Hen. Knows about the family and all. This plane can be bought, Uncle, for the price almost of so much junk. Nothing much the matter with it that a fellow like Bymore, who knows the plane through and through, can’t handle in a jiffy. Me and this fellow—funny, Uncle, the way he took a fancy to me—we’ve got an idea for starting a parcel-delivery service between here and Chicago. Over a known lane that Bymore’s flown himself for off and on of two years in mail-planes. Idea looks so big to me, there’s just no stopping it. Somebody’s going to hit on it sooner or later, certain as fate, and it might as well be us. It’s coming, just as sure as there’s express trains this minute running between here and there. Only, it’s coming in a bigger fashion than anything we’ve ever dreamt of.”

“You’re right there, boy, but many a good man and good plane have gone down to prove what you’re saying.”

“The way we’ve worked it out, on the principle of what Bymore calls the aerodynamic safety in transport-aviation, there’ll be minimum chance of a good man or a good plane going down.”

“It’s gambling with tomorrow, Steve, but tomorrow’s coming, sure as hell.”

“I knew you’d be the one to see the can before the can’ts. That’s what makes you the darnedest fellow, Uncle.”

“You mean, Steve,” said Dave, with his spectacles thrust forward along his nose, and his head thrust forward on his shoulders, “you mean you’re starting in the aeroplane-delivery business?”

“Exactly. Parcel-delivery by air, just like the Centralia Parcel Delivery by wagon. When the Chicago Motor Company needs a bale of special screw eyes from the Giles Tool Works, double-quick jiffy, we supply the double-quick jiffy. When Cincinnati needs half a gram of radium for an emergency operation, and that half a gram happens to be on a shelf in Chicago at nine A.M., Cincinnati is going to have that tube beside the operating-table forenoon that same day. Let us deliver your ivory, apes, and peacocks by air! Express by air and save ten hours delivery-time between Centralia and Chicago. Nothing in time or space can stop us, Uncle.”

“It’s big, Steve. By God, nothing should stop you!”

“I won’t stop you,” cried Dave, and slapped down the check on the table. “Yes, sir. Looka. Looka what the Zeppelins are doing now! Why couldn’t it be the same from Hamburg to New York and New York to Bombay? You can have this here check, Steve—reckon that’s all right with you, Henry?”

“You reckon right, boy, only how are _you_ going to tunnel out, boy? Dave was going to Springfield, Steve, on that money to commit the well-known turning-point-of-his-career act.”

“You won’t be sorry, Dave. You and Henry can regard yourselves as partners in on this enterprise—stock-holders or anything you say——”[59]

“Gee, Stevey, you fellows get the world small enough, and there’s not going to be any more distance!”

“Righto, Kid! I’ll be in a position to pay you both back, tenfold, some day—mark my word——”

“Cut out distance—kinda get the whole world to draw up its chairs in a closer circle and get acquainted, and you cut out a lot of misunderstanding between fellows and countries, get countries to feeling friendlier, and——”

“Righto, again, Kid! This here initial money doesn’t mean capital—it just means if we can get enough fellows interested in the cost of laying an air-line between——”

“What’s that you were saying Dave—about drawing up chairs closer——”

“What I was trying to say, Henry, was—cut out the strangeness between men, so’s they understand each other better by sitting in closer, and there aren’t going to be so many wars, and—and—now my idea is this——”

“Yes, Dave!”

“Say, the kid’s right bright! It’s as Bymore says, Uncle, if we can go to a bunch of fellows and say, look here, we have the——”

“You were saying, Dave?”

“Nothing, Henry, except——”

“This check means more to me than you’ll ever know, Dave. It’s going to put a crimp in your plans, but——”

“Crimp, nothing, I’m going anyhow.”[60]

FOOTNOTES:

[54] To the great embarrassment of his elders, David, as a boy, was a great one to insist upon definition, urging detailed explanation of any subject which caught his attention. There is little doubt but what my brother Henry, who had one of the finest capacities for intellectual curiosity I have ever known, was largely responsible for this trait. Later, of course, he (David) came to be known as The Inquiring Mr. Question Mark, and in the memorabilia of the Museum of Baltimore is the original of the much-reproduced Glake cartoon, which is a most amusing likeness of my brother, entirely drawn in small question-marks.

It is said of him, and I think rightly, that it was his insistence upon definition that saved America from being party to the Allied International Peace fiasco at Moscow.

[55] I shall never forget that rather murky November evening, when I was out in what I always called Winslow’s garden, wrapping a hydrangea-bush in straw, when, lo and behold, who should turn the corner of the porch, but Henry. A most unusual thing for him to show up at the farm.

“Bek,” he said to me, without an ado or introduction, “Dave’s made up his mind to go to Springfield and take that job polishing spittoons and the handles of the big front-door for a wholesale grocery-firm.”

It wasn’t anything to take on over, and yet I can never forget the curious feeling that shot through me. Like dropping suddenly in one of those thirty-story elevators I never can get used to.

“What on earth,” I cried, “made him decide that? Couldn’t he do that good here in Centralia?”

“That’s just the fine part of it, Bek. The kid wants to go to Springfield because there’s what they call an Extension Law Course he can attend evenings. Beat that?”

Maybe you could have beaten it, but to Henry and me, standing there grinning, in the cold, gray twilight, it didn’t seem beatable. It lifted Dave’s going, for us, out of the dreariness we associated with his job as grocer’s handy-boy.

“Know what I think, Bek?” Henry went on to me. “He’s sweet on some girl. Wonder could it still be the Tarkington girl?”

“I wonder,” I said, smiling a smile that, as it stretched across my face, made me feel as if I looked exactly like an old gray tabby we had, called Sly.

[56] I have often wondered, in a practical family such as ours, reared as we were to know the value of a nickel, where my brothers Henry and Dave inherited their disregard for money. It is probable that each, in his own way, was responsible for vast fortune after vast fortune that was to fall into the hands of other men. While it is true that our family-fortunes were destined to rise on the wings of a winged invention, not one penny of that fortune was due to the business acumen of these two men. Where their imagination and vision soared, it took men like Phil and my Steve to capitalize the ideas from such minds as Henry’s and Dave’s as they fell to the ground like feathers from an eagle in flight.

[57] ... speaking of red tape, and his abhorrence of it, long after his (Dave’s) official position would have given him precedence in any important man’s anteroom, he never permitted himself to be ushered into the private office ahead of those waiting their turn. If there was no appointment, he insisted upon taking his place. I am in possession of an amusing incident that had to do with this characteristic quality of his consideration for others.

Once, while he was Police Commissioner of Springfield, and calling on the then Governor of the State (Canfield), he sat next to a garrulous old farmer in the anteroom, who, also waiting his turn, struck up a conversation with my brother. In the course of it, the old fellow, whom my brother had never seen before, began to describe to him the Police Commissioner, whom he professed to know intimately.

“Quietest fellow you ever seen. Square Dave, the boys call him. Kinda solid, square-looking fellow. Says a thing. Does that thing. Biggest fighter for what he thinks right you ever seen and never lifts his voice or his hand or his little finger so far’s anybody around him can see. When them Russians and Pole factory-workers began copying them Soviets two years ago, I was standing within a stone’s-throw of him. But believe me, I was behind a pillar. Yes sir, I coulda put out my hand and touched him. Well sir, I wanna say to you—I wanna say to you that he stood on the little old balcony outside the Civic Building window, square, plain-appearing fellow, full-blast where a bullet or even a fist could have done for him. Did he budge? Not a budge. Some pretty little lady, his wife, I reckon, poking her head outa the window in back of his, was shivering all right, but never letting out a cheep.

“‘Attention,’ he snaps out suddenly, when the brick hit his cheek that smashed his glasses. Not scared-like. ‘Attention—’ he says to the militia quiet-like, as if he was telling them to drink a cup of tea. ‘It’s between principle and the people now. Principle must save the people. Jerk them to their senses with three shots, and I’ll hold them there. Attention—Fire!’ Just like that! And darned if that’s just what he did do. On three shots, mind you. Three shots, mind you, and them shots in the air.”

And all through this, my brother, who had never seen the fellow before, listened gravely to this piecemeal picture of himself, mostly inaccurate, and evidently garbled from newspaper accounts of the opening explosion of the bloodless Springfield riots.

[58] I have always had the feeling, although neither my brother nor Stevey ever referred to it, that Henry had more to do with the salvation of my boy than any of us were ever to know.

[59] I suppose it may be said that The International Aircraft Corporation virtually had its birth-pangs in my brother Henry’s office whither Stevey had hurried that epoch-making day I have just described. Destined, as it was, not only to affect our family-history, but to become one of the great factors of its time in world-progress, how little the three of them, maneuvering among themselves over the raising of that tiny initial capital, could have foreseen the immensity of circumstances that were to unfold out of that hour. For years, my son Steve and Eugene Bymore vigorously contended that Henry and David were entitled to large parcels of stock in the company, a concession which both of my brothers consistently refused.

[60] Much has been made of the fact that David earned his first year’s law-book money in Springfield by operating a sawing-machine for a lumber company during his noon-hours and Saturday afternoons. In fact, Elsworth Tappen in his monograph, goes so far as to say that he earned enough money, what after paying his board, his lodging, and sending money home, to pay for his law-books and accessories by sawing wood. One way, I suppose, of interpreting the act of operating a sawing-machine.

But, in any event, the American public loves to think of David as literally sawing the wood.

_Chapter Thirty-six_

It was toward the evening of this day of cross-currents in the affairs of Schuylers, that Henry, shaking down his pot-bellied stove, climbing out of his seersucker into the gray herring-bone one with the shiny shoulder-blades, and wrapping a gray wool string of a scarf about his throat against the chill of the long ride home on the dairy-truck, was interrupted by a final visitor, old Dr. Dan Kiskadden, who brought him tidings that made the long, tired brackets around Henry’s mouth cut grimly deeper.

For forty-five years, the Kiskadden brothers, like their father before them, had practiced medicine in Centralia. Two months before, Eli, the younger, had fallen over dead while he was writing a prescription for a patient in the office he shared at one end of the old red-brick double dwelling which the Eli and Dan families had occupied since the two brothers had married the two Dinwiddie sisters at a double wedding that had gone to make Centralia folk-lore.

“Doctor Dan,” as five counties knew him, had a high comb of thin, black hair, which lay on top of his otherwise bald head in a fat finger-curl. On his pipe-like legs, that were too slender and short for the paunch of his torso, he did sort of a running-walk, his neck darting in and out after the fashion of a rooster pecking gravel. His voice, completed the analogy. It rose and fell in hollow clucks, with the dartings of the neck. A squeaky little voice, emanating shrilly from the bantam little body.

Sometimes Henry and Doctor Dan passed each other as often as three and four times a day along High or Sycamore Streets, occasionally drifting to a standstill for an exchange of local gossip that had to do with business or politics.

The doctor was usually carrying on dietetic experiments with guinea-pigs and rats in a laboratory he had rigged up, by courtesy of the school board, in a small room adjoining the zoölogy laboratory of Tallahassee High School. Sometimes, on Sunday mornings, Henry walked or got a lift into town, to pore over the doctor’s charts with him in the deserted, chalk-smelling school-building.

When Henry was seventeen, Doctor Dan had fought through a close case of double pneumonia with him. A warm, curiously impersonal friendship had persisted, although it was only the second or third time Doctor Dan had ever appeared in his office.

In an age of specialization in medicine, there was something as antiquated about the general practitioner as a horse-car. In the little cubby-hole behind his office Doctor Dan still pulverized with his own mortar and pestle, and measured out physic in an ungraduated glass. Sometimes, for weeks, his prescription-pad lay untouched.

Their experiments in the fields of biometrics and dietetics had from time to time brought one or the other of the Kiskadden brothers, usually Eli, before frequent conventions and in important contributions to scientific journals. An instrument for determining nerve-heat in connection with caloritropic observation, called the Kiskadden fork, is in common use.

But in the main, it was the older generation in Centralia still called in Doctor Dan. The younger sought out more modern outer-office, with white trained-nurse attendants and card-index systems. Those who could afford it journeyed as far as Springfield, Chicago or Rochester for diagnosis.

Doctor Dan still opened his own office door to the ring of a patient. He neglected to send bills, except occasionally a mussy one made out by his wife, when the ex-chequer loomed bare. He answered night bells. He seldom operated for a pain in the side. He had a range of instruments along the shelves of a glass case, but usually he preferred to probe about in that sore throat with the handle of an old silver spoon he kept lying about his desk. As a rule, but not invariably, he washed his hands, between patients. His little grandson Denny’s kiddie-car had a habit of cluttering up his office, and it was not unheard of for Doctor Dan to commit the ethical breach of ministering to a sick dog or cat. It was town lore that he had once answered a midnight call for Harriet, Forbes’s three-legged cat, Timp. Doctor Dan kept no card-index filing-system and he never inquired deeply into a patient’s history. Usually he knew it beforehand, or did his best to figure it out for himself.

He, and particularly his late brother, considered the wave of vegetarianism sweeping the country as pernicious, in its way, as the immoderate use of red meat. Rigorously ethical in his practice, he none the less openly advocated birth-control, and was one of the first physicians in good standing, in his state, to become actively affiliated with the movement, and still keep that standing.

Every once in a while, he packed his bag and went off to Rochester to watch the Mayos operate.

He entered Henry’s office with curt preliminaries.

“See you a minute, Henry?”

“Sit down. Glad to see you, Doc.”

“Henriette Simpson came to my office today after school. Have you seen her since?”

“No.” A kind of pallor flickered along under the leathery toughness of Henry’s skin. In streaks, as if it could not all get through. “Nothing wrong, is there, Doc? She was well as usual when I saw her Saturday.”

“Wrong as wrong. Thought I ought to talk to somebody. Not asking too much, is it, Henry, but I guess you’re about the first in line. Not a relative to her name, so far as I know.”

“Right.”

“She’s a pretty sick woman.”

“Seemed all right. Don’t remember ever hearing her complain.”

“Astonishing constitution. Nasty cardiac condition there. Chronic endocarditis. Enormously enlarged heart. Fluoroscope reveals half the chest-area covered. Valvular leakage. One of those cases where she can go any minute, or outlive us all. Seen it happen. Look at old lady Beattie, up Middleton way. They were writing her burial certificate twenty years ago, and she’s outlived her grandchildren.”

“You—didn’t tell Henriette of this?”

“No.”

“Right. Right.”

“That’s why I’m here. Told her there was nothing much to worry about, and I’d drop in to look her over again in a day or so. Nothing to worry about! There’s damn plenty to worry about.”

“What’s to be done?”

“How’s she fixed?”

“She’s still paying off on that little old house over on Ludlow Street her father left mortgaged to the hilt. It sucks up her salary like blotting-paper.”

“She’s got to quit teaching. Every inch of strain on that little body of hers is to the bad. May outlive us all if she’s handled right. What you say about her affairs don’t gee-up any too good with the situation, but there it is.”

“I see ...”

“What ever became of that old friend of the family, ’Liza Simpson, used to live with them so many years?”

“’Liza’s out in Arizona, Doc, taking care of her brother’s children. Henriette sends what little she can spare, out there.”

“Nice woman, Henriette is,” said Doctor Dan, and sat with his bandy-legs dangling, and his eyes, from which all fluids seemed long since to have been drained, as twisted-looking as water being sucked through a drain-hole.

“Leave it to me, Dr. Dan. I’ll take the matter in hand.”

“Thought you would. You understand the situation. Care, leisure, ease, and she can live to be a hundred. Maybe. Maybe not. School-teaching’s out of the question.”

“I’d rather you didn’t tell her anything until after I drop by there this evening. And when you see her in the morning, just let her know enough to see to it that she realizes the care she must take of herself. I’ll find a way to break the news to her about the teaching part myself. Telling her the truth would about kill her. Most independent temperament in the world.”

“Sorry, Henry. Know what a friend—of yours, and of your family’s, she’s been.”

“We’ll take a hand, Doc. Don’t worry.”

“S’long, Henry.”

“S’long, Doc.”

_Chapter Thirty-seven_

For five or six years, at intervals that had grown from semi-occasional to occasional, tiny black flashes of vertigo had been laying hold of Henriette. The first appreciable instance was once at a blackboard, as she was diagraming the genealogy of the Tudor family for a class of twenty-six girls and boys. Just for a moment, like one of her prankish boys yanking the plait of the little girl ahead of him, something had yanked one of Henriette’s breaths. It was something at first too quick, and too slight, to feel quite sure it had happened. For all the world like the little girl of the yanked braid turning her startled head.

Then it happened once or twice in church, or at Saturday-morning teachers’ meeting; and one Saturday, while lunching with Henry at the Blue Bird, she had been obliged to put down her coffee-cup and grip the table-edge to hold herself steady, smiling all the while, but unconscious of one word he was saying.

It was disquieting, but scarcely so disquieting as embarrassing. Her lean, fibrous body had never, in all the years she had inhabited it, so much as called attention to the frailties of its flesh. It was one of Henriette’s rare boasts that she had never in all her life spent a day in bed, or had so much as a headache.

There was something lean and ascetic and brown and tough about Henriette’s body at forty-nine. The fibrous body of a woman whose flesh had never dared to shimmer of those ecstasies that lay sleeping beneath its surface.

And just as there was something shameful to Henriette about the girls she passed on High Street, most of whom she knew by name and taught in school, who permitted their dresses to sag off one bare shoulder and their young breasts to tremble in outline behind their flimsy blouses, so there was something shameful in these vertiginous signalings of a body she had so rigorously held in subordination.

The one being for whom desire could awaken in that prim flesh, had by the very decorum of all his years of friendship with her, held it so in abeyance, that at forty-nine, the sight of Henriette to herself, undressed before her mirror, would have been shock and anathema to her.

Nice Henriette. The chilled niceness of a little tomb.

Vertigo and that irrepressible rise of the nap of her flesh that the sight and too often the mere thought of Henry could inspire, were equally to be dismissed and despised.

For five years, Henriette, ashamed of the frailty, contemptuous of it, unwilling to admit that the attacks were anything more than “nerves,” had fought the panic of these moments of black suffocation and ignored their recurrences.

Then one evening, seated at her little table in the tiny living-room of her frame house on Ludlow Street, correcting examination papers on fractions, proper and improper, she fainted suddenly down into them.

There was no ignoring it this time, because it so happened that when Henriette sat down to the table and picked up the first sheet of foolscap, with “Martin Giles, Grade four E, Class B, Arithmetic,” written across the top in the monotonous, vertical chirography of stubby fingers, the small, gilt shepherdess-clock on the mantel was striking seven, in the bleating little fashion it had. When Henriette struggled back out of the overwhelming kind of tight blackness that had flowed over and seemed to drown her, the index finger to her right hand still lay against Martin’s rather dreary conclusion and 3½ x 6¼ = 18½, and the shepherdess-clock on the mantel was now pointing to twenty-two minutes to eight.

The next day, after school, she paid her visit to Doctor Dan. The cruel grilling before the fluoroscope had been a harrowing experience. The baring of her breasts to the stethoscope. The close, personal questions that made her lips quiver and recede back against dry teeth, as she tried to answer them. The proddings and the punchings that only the enormously impersonal procedure of Doctor Dan, whose eyes were frighteningly attentive, but whose lips kept smiling, made endurable.

It had been a little awful, too, that moment before he called her back into his office, after she had climbed back into her waist and hooked the high-necked dickey close about her throat.

Not exactly awful with fear. Suppose, after all, there should turn out to be something seriously wrong with her. Well, suppose. Henriette had her God. A precious Presbyterian one. There were Simpsons, notably her parents, who had been dear to her, gone on to a peace more vast than anything finite she could hope to find. There were compensations, even if Doctor Dan’s closely scrutinizing eyes should make findings. Most of the time Henriette believed in her soul’s immortality. It behooved her that this be one of those times. There was something about the loneliness of stalking back into that office, to hear about the possible death of a life that had not been lived, that made Henriette need terribly to believe in her soul’s immortality.

But after all, she had stalked back in, and Doctor Dan had only tilted in his swivel and made a church of his ten fingers and talked of run-down condition—too close application—general overhauling—and here she was at home again in her own chromesque sitting-room that you entered by two short steps straight from the small bricked yard, feeling a little sheepish after the frightening kind of aloneness of that moment of waiting until Doctor Dan called her back into his office after the examination.

Of course she was run down. Mid-year examinations. One of the most nervous classes of youngsters she had had in years. Must cut down on her Saturday Morning Club work. Resign from programme-committee. Dinah, an old family-washerwoman, might be induced to come in once a week for the general going-over of the little house. Yes, run-down. Doctor Dan had been clever. Fortunately, it was Friday. She would sleep an hour later tomorrow, and possibly pass up the Club, although Miriam Chipman was to read a paper on Leonardo da Vinci she particularly wanted to hear. Still, it might be a good idea to lie abed until time to meet Henry at the Blue Bird.

Part of the appalling sense of loneliness, in that moment before her re-entry into Doctor Dan’s office, had been so complexly interwoven with Henry. Thoughts that she beat back from coming to life....

On Monday she was to call back at Doctor Dan’s for drops and further instructions. Run-down. Nothing much to worry about. But served her right for her absurd assurance, all these years, that her tough, lean body somehow had exemption from decay.

Well, anyway, it was sweet and normal and cozy to be back home again after the peep over the precipice into the abyss of loneliness that had yawned so suddenly at her feet. It left her a little weak and woefully in need of a cup of tea, which, somehow, she had not quite the energy to go into the kitchen and brew for herself.

Instead, Henriette just sat in an unwonted kind of idleness in the small sitting-room that smelled of dried grasses and chalk-powder, rocking away in a low chair with sawed-off legs, when, by routine, she should have been washing and peeling her usual two potatoes and pounding herself a bit of round-steak to lay in the skillet to fry, or fluffing up a pair of eggs into omelette. She just sat on, while the twilight began to pour around her, and the footsteps of Henry, who semi-occasionally of a Friday, stopped by to exchange a word about Saturday’s plans, drew up at the door.

It was particularly nice to have him come this evening. It was part of her grateful return to a world of warm normalcy that was safely remote from the cold-steel curve of instruments and the odor of iodoform and frightening kind of loneliness that had so suddenly pervaded her heart. Yes, it was particularly nice to hurry across to light the gas and draw the shades and drag the stiff-backed rocker with the cane inset that Henry always occupied in a sitting-forward attitude, closer to the table.

The dear delight of living, it flashed over her suddenly, was like a flame, unbreakable, though it bend and double upon itself.

It was good and warm and all right to be opening the door for Henry. They were always of few words together. She drew out his rocker and took a bisque wheelbarrow from the mantel, into which he could rap his pipe from time to time, and placed it on the table beside him. While he lit up, she lighted a lamp on a small stand in an opposite end of the room, that had a white china rose-painted shade, and drew up her own chair primly opposite him.

“Getting right nippy,” she said, narrowing her shoulders.

“Is it? I’ve been thinking, Henriette,” he said.

She hoped he had not trumped up some afternoon excursion for their tomorrow. It would be difficult to evade it without telling him of Doctor Dan’s dictum that she take it easy for the next few days. She would no more have told Henry of the ripple across the face of the tranquillity of the routine he had learned to expect from her!

“Here’s an article, Henry, I cut out of _The Nation_. It’s right in line with some of your ideas about the debt-cancellation. Bankers, it goes on to say, are beginning to realize the idiocy of the Versailles programme——”

“Nonsense! Neither Democrats nor Republicans will face the fact yet for a while that the War was a colossal failure——”

“But this article goes on to say that we are asking a country to mortgage not only itself but its children for two-thirds of a century—it’s as if we were pledging all the little unborn babies to give us their note for a war that took place in this world long before they had ever arrived in it from the land of the unborn.”

“Well, Mr. Mellon and Mr. Hoover know that, and will doubtless let their European friends know they know it; but no man out to get his votes is likely to dare talk such commonsense. But all that’s beside the point. I—I’ve been thinking, Henriette.”

Oh, dear—there _was_ something he must be wanting to do tomorrow!

“Yes?”

“Henriette, something hit me between the eyes today.”

For the moment, she seemed to take him literally, peering forward anxiously.

“What?”

“A realization.”

“They do hit one—that way—sometimes,” she said, and, for no reason she could diagnose, began to tremble.

“Life, Henriette, is passing us by.”

“Why, Henry Schuyler, what _are_ you talking about!”

“It’s been my fault. Twenty years of the rather despicable, detached inertia of a man who thinks so long before he leaps, that by the time he’s ready, the opportunity to leap has passed him by, that’s me. Henriette, I hope the opportunity hasn’t really passed me by.”

“Why, Hen-ry Schuyler, what on earth are you talking about? Why, Henry Schuyler!”

She had to say something. Anything. Because all of a sudden, around Henriette’s brain was racing and racing the excitement of her lifetime.

“Let’s catch on to what there’s left of life. You and me, Henriette.”

“Why, Hen-ry—I believe you’re proposing to me.”

“I am.”

She looked at him in a little short-of-breath fashion that was to become, from then on, a mannerism resulting from her ailment, as it settled, but which made it appear as if life were suddenly too large and delicious a gulp for her to swallow down easily.

“I think I’m going to giggle, Henry. It’s funny.”

“Let’s make it funnier, Henriette.”

“I never did!” said Henriette, and sat with her bony hands held up against her breast, and her mouth slightly open with the thirsty-bird look.

“You never did what?”

The impulse for hilarity was suddenly like a gale in Henriette. She began to laugh.[61]

“I like to hear you do that, Henriette.”

“Oh, Henry! It is funny!”

“Let’s make it funnier! Marry me!”

“When?”

“What’s the matter with now? Good a time as any. Let’s walk over and rout out Ed Sykes for a special license and carry it around to the parsonage.”

She reached out suddenly and caught him by the arm.

“Henry Schuyler, look at me!”

“Yes?”

“Look me in the eye. Who’ve you seen today? Are you being noble?”

“No more so than usual.”

“Nobody’s been telling you I’m run-down or anything? And need a little rest?”

“If they had, Henriette, I wouldn’t be proposing anything so arduous as married life.”

“Sure you haven’t been talking to Doctor Dan——”

“Doctor Who?” he said, with a bland prevarication he was never known to achieve before or after.

The sweet, eager look flowed back into her face.

“They won’t let me teach—married, Henry.”

“Dumb of them,” he said; “but it suits me exactly. My bank-account for the moment is the shape of a hen’s egg, but we can indulge in the amiable hallucination that two can live as cheaply as one.”

“I haven’t a thing to wear.”

“Take my coat, if you think it’s going to be damp talking over to the Sykeses,” he said, and took his flimsy top-coat off a peg.

Her own was hanging on the same peg beside the door, but she slid into his.

“Come.”

“Coming.”

FOOTNOTES:

[61] ... I do not pretend to be adept at the psychology of human beings, but to even the most astute it must have been obvious that in the sunshine of her happiness with my brother Henriette Simpson’s personality blossomed out into something almost unrecognizable from the Henriette we had known before. All her self-assurance, her prim restraint, her inhibited, timid little ways dissolved. She basked frankly and even a little lazily in the warmth of her new estate. She delivered herself up to the luxury of permitting her husband to wait upon her. She became a purring, pussy sort of little person, glorying in the relaxation of her happiness.

My daughter Paula always used to say that mirth was born in Henriette the day of her wedding. For a positive fact, it did seem to all of us that there rippled through her, dating from that time, a stream of good-humored and irreverent levity that was to amaze and delight Henry for the remainder of what was to be their singularly happy and by no means brief life together.

_Chapter Thirty-eight_

And so they were married.[62]

FOOTNOTES:

[62] ... that evening, when I arrived home from having supper with Steve and Claire, who were both in a great state of excitement over my son’s impending aeroplane venture which Henry and David had just made possible, I was met at the door by Winslow with the overwhelming news that Father had just telephoned out that Henry and Henriette had been married. And indeed you must add, lived happy ever after. With a chivalry that almost passeth the telling, and at a time when under the conditions, it almost amounted to foolhardiness, my brother took over what had hitherto been the prim little life of Henriette Simpson. While she was never again to be robust, and all the remainder of her life was to be subject to fainting-spells, against which my brother was on constant guard, she was destined to outlive many of those of her own generation about her.

For four years subsequent to their marriage, they remained in the home of my parents, the Igrotte place, which has since burned to the ground.

After the death of my parents, my brother and his wife spent the greater part of each year in Washington, where they had an apartment in H Street.

It was in this apartment that my sister-in-law Henrietta died of a singular and distressing accident.

Leaning out of the thirty-ninth-story window of the fine building in H Street, Level II, one morning, to wave my brother au-revoir, as was her invariable habit, she turned in the window-frame to look up at him, as his little two-passenger aeroplane slid from the hangar atop the building, just as the heavy window-sash gave way and fell across her chest, killing her instantly.

_Chapter Thirty-nine_

Thanksgiving again. A decade and a half since a sheepish-faced Old Gentleman had faced the bombardment of eyes most immediately concerned with the impending event of another Schuyler about to be born.

There were Schuylers assembled again about the board of the Old Gentleman. This time, a far more meager board in the sagging old house set into a patch of scrubby farm-land that was all shot with rock-stratifications which every so often came to the surface suddenly in sparkling little micaceous platforms.

The latter years of her life were to witness a recrudescence of power in Mathilda that amazed her children and husband even while it dismayed.

She continued to outdo in menial labor any hired-hand that came to the place. As her face paled and shriveled and certain diabetic tendencies began to manifest themselves, the iron power of her hands—at scrub-and-rub over a washtub, at churning, at lugging, at beating rugs, which she flung single-handed across a sill, at red-washing the brick walk that led from the kitchen, at calcimining hen-houses, sawing, smoking hams, salting pork, rendering geese, even to cooking lye in vats for its use about the barns—seemed to mount with the years, rather than decline.[63]

It kept her full of miseries that asserted themselves in backaches and swollen joints and the effects of chilblains which shriveled her valiant face into knots of pain for winter months on end. But there was no restraining the stern flagellation of toil that Mathilda had imposed upon herself, even back in the days when prosperity sat upon her house. Her hands and face were horny with it. In an age when grandmothers had silhouettes and stalked on tall heels, Mathilda was as gray as a moth. A moth with shriveled wings.

Strangely enough, in a way her children hoarded this horny-handed grayness of hers and the faded little streaks of her hair only barely covering the scalp, the corded hands and neck, the furiously wrinkled eyelids, like dried leaves, and the pointed basques she wore all inset with whalebones.

“Thank goodness, Mother has had the sense to grow old honestly,” was one of Bek’s frequent explosions. “If Mother looked like some of the freak old women one sees around, with their puttied-up faces and their diddering about all over the place with swollen ankles that sag down over their French heels, well, I—well, I just don’t know _what_ I’d do.”

“Mother’s got too much sense to make a caricature of herself,” was Phil’s invariable contribution.

“Why, I just wouldn’t feel like I had a mother if I had to fumble around for an unpainted spot to lay a kiss on, the way the Whittier girls do their mother,” trebled sweet Emma.

“I wouldn’t change her for fifty thousand of the green coupons it takes to get a covered vegetable-dish,” was the caliber of the Old Gentleman’s summing it up. Pleasantries like that hit Mathilda right across her hungry heart. He could be so outrageously inconsiderate of her in the trifles. He could have kissed her small, tired feet, out of reverence for her, and yet the slightest compliment he ever paid her was a mocking one, in the key of the covered vegetable-dish.

She regarded him unsmilingly most of the time, sitting mute and unamused at his effulgences.

There was something of a fierce, lean look of hunger in Mathilda’s eyes when she regarded her husband. She adored him. She wanted his caresses. Instead, he gave her persiflage, of this variety, and always in the hearing of others, which cut her even more.

She wanted something else, and the Old Gentleman, who gave so freely, and who would have cut off his right hand rather than hurt her, went on hurting her and did not know.

Forty years of being hurt and feeling herself on the rim of the life of a man by nature more intense, more gregarious, more boisterously alive than she, had taken any semblance of smile out of Mathilda. She regarded her husband, her children, her grandchildren, with solemn, worshiping, terribly concerned eyes. Concern for her husband’s loose, easy ways with what sparse moneys came his way and which he brought to her, except when someone intercepted him first, and placed in her hands like a child. Money she used with frugality and wisdom. Concerns of this sort kept Mathilda’s face a little stern. Concern for a grandchild’s first tooth, a daughter-in-law’s watery damson-preserves, Bek’s astonishing deal with the Governor, the incredible happening of the bringing-home of Henriette Simpson, a bride.[64]

Except for the eighteen-pound turkey gobbler, a basket of grapefruit and oranges which Phil and Rita had brought down from Springfield, Emma’s usual offering of five pounds of hard candies from the St. Louis Busy Bee, and Claire’s candied apples for the children, every dish of that Thanksgiving-dinner-to-eighteen, had been personally prepared by Mathilda.