Chapter XV: Part 15

There were two tables rigged up in the dining-room, another one in the kitchen, and the sewing-table spread in the hall for Rita’s youngest two children and Clara’s twelve-year-old, whom she had brought from St. Louis this time. Even then, neither Bek nor Claire nor Rita nor Mathilda sat down.

Henriette, with high red spots in her lean cheeks and a blue-checked apron on over her spotted-silk foulard (net dickey out!), was eager to join the brigade of the serving women. But the family, all of them aware of what she was unaware, would have none of it. After all, in a way, it was her day, only the seventh after her marriage. And Henry, who was already displaying what were to be, with him, chronic symptoms of concern at tiring her, forced her down into a chair beside the Old Gentleman, who took immediately to serving her with enormous helpings that overwhelmed and indeed defeated the prim appetite of one long accustomed to preparing her own solitary snack-like meals, and then sitting down to table for the lusterless business of dining alone.

And yet, to Mathilda, who drank her mug of felicitous cider to Henriette and Henry, the most outstanding figure of all that Thanksgiving day was the figure of Dave, there among the in-laws and the cousins, the nieces, the nephews, and the aunts; grave and courteous, in the solemn, detached way he had.

There was a lead pendulum to the beat of Mathilda’s heart. David, light of her wintry years—boy who had come to her long after she had ceased to smile, and could only dote silently—boy, who was so strangely, doubly dear with the dual preciousness of child and grandchild. To have begot a child again, after the climactic birth-throes of grandchildren—there was in that something beyond the telling. Not one of her big women daughters, who had borne and borne again, could quite sense that. And what was further beyond the telling, indeed almost beyond the admitting even to herself, was her sense of failure toward David. Her secret fear that she had been a wintry, distant mother to him, full of a sense of embarrassment toward him, the same embarrassment that had flooded her face at another Thanksgiving years before.

He had grown up around her tired old knees. The forest of the knees of the grown-ups. And of all the grown ups, Mathilda had been the most timid with, and of, him. Sometimes a fierce flame of jealous anger flared in Mathilda toward the Old Gentleman. His ability to synchronize with youth. To lean out of years that had never got him in their clutch. Life was not the serious business to the Old Gentleman that it was to Mathilda. Never had been. He was on back-slapping terms with it. It was to his father that Dave brought a joyous and adoring kind of irreverence that Mathilda coveted, in place of the timid kind of tenderness he had for her.

The Old Gentleman and Bek and Henry had somehow, each in a special way, got better acquainted with her boy.

And now, scarcely had she become accustomed to this late visitor into a household that had turned a lean shoulder to him almost from the very year of his birth, than here he was, like all the rest, turning his young face outward and away. Almost before she had begun to know him; begun to dare to know this boy, to whom books and long silences and heavy chores had been the order of his days.

In the same pale, secret way that she had endured the somehow less poignant passing of Phil and Clara, Emma and Bek from the nest of her household, so now must she endure the going of the last of them.

This last of them, who had been born so curiously into two worlds. One foot, as it were, straddling a pre-war and strangely remote universe, the other on a soil that was forever to remain strange to Mathilda. A mad, horrid, fascinating kind of world. A world thumbing its nose at most of the things Mathilda held dear.

David was going out now into it. In a half-dozen ways, he had been the least assertive of her children. Denied practically all of the advantages of the nicely-moderate wealth her others had enjoyed, there was something about his acceptance of the lean, menial days of his youth that could grip Mathilda by the tonsils any time she dared to let her mind dwell upon it.

How denied he had been. Denied even the warm, full breasts at which her other children had suckled. The founts of her being had been dry and runty to the pulling lips of the infant Dave.

He had been her only bottle-babe.

It had cost her secret shame before her husband and family every time she had inserted the viscid rubber nipple of a milk-bottle between his lips. He had not demurred, but had taken even his weaning gratefully. That was Dave all over for you. Had not demurred, but had drunk gratefully.

Then the long, arid days of pasturing, when her other children had enjoyed the advantages of the Centralia schools.

Squalid, pinched boyhood, spent mostly at such past-times as the flat of his back over Henry’s books, or dickering about over his ant-hills, or whooping at the game of Indian-in-the-corn, in a mangy little suit left over from Stevey, or exploring the Pacific Ocean from the top of a knoll in the cow-patch that overlooked the dry, cracked bed of an old duck-pond.

Many an afternoon, gazing from her window, Mathilda had watched him climb, while his handful of sheep grazed, to the mock eminence of the knoll, and there peer with much magniloquence of gesture, and occasionally with an old, lensless pair of Henry’s field-glasses, out over the Pacific of the duck-pond.

She had never known its exact meaning, except that it was one of the toyless games of her lonely and deprived youngest.

All the others seemed to understand better. Henry. Bek. Even Phil, to whom he was now going, would get to know him better. _She_ wanted to know him better. That way. It was to her that he turned with tenderness that was like the laying-on of hands. A diminished-seventh of a difference in his voice. A little bitterly, Mathilda did not want that diminished-seventh. With his father, he was a play-boy, wary alike of the Old Gentleman’s digging humor and the stern old eye of rebuke. To Bek, the boy turned for the swift sure quality of her understanding; and with Henry, this boy of hers was a new boy. Hero worshipper. Climber of mountains. Balboa overlooking the Pacific of his duck-pond. Star-struck with the swimming beauty of planets and the red lamp of Antares. Gripped by the communism of ants. Led by this older brother of the strange wisdoms and the half-smile, into intellectual tourney and jousts long before he knew that they were that.

It was, of course, priceless to have his tenderness. Perhaps, after all, it would have been her choice of the gifts he had to bestow. But, cruel paradox, it nevertheless kept in her heart, ache over David. Ache over what he was to her and over what she could never be to him. There was no time. Her life was too well burned along the wick. And now he was going....

Life was a pecking jackdaw, after her precious morsel.

Dora Tarkington was a pecking little jackdaw after her precious morsel. Mathilda knew! Well, so had she known long before Bek and Phil and Emma and Clara had quite seemed to know these sorts of things for themselves.

Mathilda had known this from the days when, beside her back window of the spacious house on Sycamore Street, she could see David shinny his way through the hole in the hedge.

In all the years of his very young boyhood, during the months and whole winters that he had never so much as clapped eyes upon Dora, Mathilda had known. She knew it now on the eve of his going-away. She knew it bitterly, jealously, longingly, lovingly.

Mathilda loved Dora where Davey was not concerned. But as one of the daws at the precious morsel of her boy, she dreaded her jealously.[65]

All through the whirl of that crowded Thanksgiving in the quarters that were so woefully too small; all through the national performance of the dishing-up the mucilaginous miscellany of stuffed gobbler; jellied cranberries; candied sweet-potatoes; creamed cauliflower; hot biscuit; strained honey; pumpkin, lemon-meringue, and Boston cream-pie; candied apples; crystallized ginger quince-preserves; nut-fudge, and cider—the eyes Mathilda were like scars.

“Blessed are the meek in spirit,” intoned the Old Gentleman, from a tome with all of Mathilda’s multi-colored ribbon book-marks dangling from the end. “For they shall inherit the earth.”

“For they shall inherit the earth,” mumbled Mathilda and the comings and goings of her big-shouldered daughters, eager to unburden her frail hands, began again.

“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness; for
they shall be filled.

“—Sing unto the Lord with Thanksgiving. Sing praises upon the harp
unto our God.”

Thank God for Henry! Years of the unreasoning jealousy, born of possessive instinct, that had rankled against Henriette, were dissipated already. It was good that Henry should have taken to himself Henriette as wife. It was right and it was good, and the heart of Mathilda, that had been sore, was rich with an honest gratitude that was fitting unto the day.

Thank God for Henrietta to round out the wise thoughtful years of this strangely practical, absolutely improvident eldest child of hers.

Thank God for the vigor and the grandeur of Bel and the plodding energy of Phil and good Clara of sweet Emma. Thank God for the radiance of grand children and great-grandchildren. Thank God even for Leslie, whom Bek had somehow managed to keep in the sweetness and the light of childhood, until God had taken him back.

Thank God for the flesh of her flesh that crowded this Igrotte house that day.

Thank God for the man with whom she shared all this living, vigorous splendor. Thank God for the vigorous, living splendor of the Old Gentleman himself, whose sense of duty was drawn along his mouth, making it straight as a bolt, and whose sense of humor shimmered in his eyes and made them like hospitable windows inviting the intruder to ignore the bolt and climb the sill.

Thank God—even—for Davey—going away. Thank God, of course, for vesting him with vigorous manhood, the pale, square face, the clear and seeing and sometimes too brilliant eyes. But the Old Gentleman’s mouth of restraint was Dave’s, too. Thank God for that. The time had come—Thank God, of course, for this man-child about to flutter from the sparse, old unfeathered nest. Thank God—of course—ah, yes—Thank God——

It seemed to Mathilda, glancing up over her mumbling lips three or four times as he read the blessing at table, that Thanksgiving Day, that the Old Gentleman’s voice might give out.

It must have seemed that way to Henry, too, who shoved him a glass of water.

FOOTNOTES:

[63] ... for a wiry kind of power of endurance, I have never known Mother’s equal. The least-robust member of all her husky family, it seemed to us as if, at sixty, her capacity for hard work had reached its peak. Remonstrate as we would, Mother began her day somewhere between four and five of the sleetiest, bitterest mornings. It was the only subject upon which I ever knew Father to be ugly with her. It angered and dismayed and humiliated him, as it did us all, for that matter.

Perhaps if Mother had taken better care of herself, she might have lived to even a riper old age. And yet, who knows but what the very rigors to which she subjected herself, were not the secret of her endurance. Thank God again and again that she at least lived to see the first of the great days for us that were to be followed by one epochal event after another.

[64] Coming into the home of my parents as she (Henriette) did, on the eve of Dave’s departure for Springfield, was nothing short of a blessing for Mother. From the first, Henriette fitted herself helpfully and synthetically into the life of the Igrotte farm. Mother was by no means easy to live around that winter. While you might never have guessed it from any outward demonstration, indeed, I doubt if she guessed it herself, my mother’s dependence upon Dave, what with all of us in homes of our own with interests of our own, was perhaps the motivating force of her whole existence. It was Henriette, I feel so sure, who saved her that winter from the throes of a nervous breakdown. I remember Father coming over one blustery winter evening, when he should never have ventured out, and begging me with ill-concealed tears in his bewildered old eyes to try and coax Mother to consent to a visit from Doctor Dan. As a matter of fact, all of us knew, Dave most of all, whose letters came to her regularly as clockwork, that what ailed Mother was heartache for Dave, who had never been absent from her side more than an overnight, in all his life.

[65] ... nor was Dave an exception. Mother reacted toward Dora, even back in her childhood, precisely as she had reacted to all of her “in-laws,” Sam, Rita, and Winslow. A dear, darling kind of jealousy of these pirate persons who came to carry off her children. There came a time, of course, when Mother would laughingly relate all this to Dora. Her jealousy of the little girl in pigtails, even back in the days when she had watched the squirmy form of her son, his blue-denim trousers-seats usually patched, wriggling through the hedge. Her prophetic awareness of these two, long before the boy and the girl had yet come into their rapture! I always say of Mother, she knew about Winslow and me before I had ever even clapped eyes on him. Oh, my dear Mother, sometimes, when I think back, it seems I must tear away this veil that divides you in your hereafter from me, and make up to you in sweetness what I fear me I may have failed in during your life....

_Chapter Forty_

The impending event of conclave shone in the Old Gentleman’s eyes all through the hours of serving, of eating, of the rushing of the women hither and thither of the tilting of the pitchers of cider, the ladling of the gravy and the vegetable-dishes, of the high, querulous voices of the children, grand and great-grand; through Mathilda’s fluty voice, importuning her young, her very young, and her middle-aged to partake more freely, or not too freely, of the bounty she quivered and fussed and rushed to place before them. Platters, held high to avoid spill and collision, clicked with narrowness of escape. Rose the rich, hot smells of winter foods that had simmered in their juices. The spice of cider. The flicker of blue flame across the dome of suet-pudding. The popping of the toy balloons that Winslow had ordered Bek to order by catalogue. And through all this charivari of the Schuylers, the Old Gentleman, his grandchildren from time to time crawling over his legs and matting up his beard, looked out upon the scene and waited. Waited while he joked with his daughters, rebuked, dandled, teased the youngsters, put out a sly foot to trip his Bek, as she slid her large frame into the narrows gauge between tables to remove plates.

“Father, that’s just terrible to do a crude thing like that! Bek might have fallen. Besides, I don’t think it’s a bit funny to do before the children either,” remonstrated sweet Emma in her treble.

“Aunt Emma is mad at great-grandpa,” said the Old Gentleman, mushing his lips against the soft, yellow hair of Steve’s eldest little girl.

“Puppa,” quavered Mathilda faintly, “a little dignity before the children, please!”

“Dignity comes cheap. Cigar-store Indians have it.”

“Well, we won’t argue it, Father,” said Bek, “only please don’t trip up your stout, middle-aged daughters as they try to serve you candied yams. It just isn’t done.”

He leaned back in his chair to regard her, his sly old face foreshortened and his eyes creased into a sucking swirl of wrinkles.

“My daughter’s been a good son to me.”

Almost without precedent for her, she leaned over and pecked a kiss on the wrinkled old mat of a face.

“Not one of us is good enough, Father! Hadn’t you better clear out the youngsters? They’re getting restless.”

It was then that the Old Gentleman brought down his fist as if it were a gavel.

“Clear out the children and close those folding-doors. Dave, sit over here.”

Conclave was on. Not a Schuyler but knew the call. A Schuyler about to be born. About to be praised. About to be rebuked. About to be reminded that the stern ideals of the House were the stern ideals of the Mosaic Law. Commandments. To be written on the tablet of the heart. A humble house, but one that already had plunged root deeply and proudly into three generations of the soil. The same soil that had first fostered the Old Gentleman with the straight bolt of duty for a mouth, and the pallid Mathilda, whose eyes were no less steadfast than the straightness of that mouth.

Bek bundled off the last of the grandchildren.

Finally, the doors closed, the shades drawn, the ugly little Igrotte dining-room cleared of the extra table and jammed with the Schuyler faces, every member of the family knew, without the first word having been spoken: that this wasn’t really Henriette’s and Henry’s day at all.

This was David’s conclave.

He sat on the arm of Henry’s chair, a lank fellow of square, white face that flickered behind his spectacles with a nervous batting of his eyes; and, above the soft blue collar of the adult shirts he was beginning to inherit from the well-worn stock of Henry, his Adam’s-apple rode like a buoy.

By now, there was a marked Schuyler-cast to his face. The something in the bone-structure of it that made it four-cornered. Cheek-bones strictly vertical above jawbones. Brow that was set across with the perfectly horizontal adjustment of a key pediment.

The Old Gentleman and most of his offspring—with the exception of Steve’s little boy, who was Mathilda all over again, and Emma, who was like a big, flowering Viking out of nowhere—had that rectangular type of face.

A great-grandfather, named Hans Milton Schuyler, who had been his own plow-ox on a Swiss farm sixty-eight years before, had been known as far as Engeborg and as wide as Saalsberg, as “Breitgesicht,” which in Swiss means “square-face.” It was just about now that David, ceasing to gangle his way upward into greater height, was to begin to settle tightly into the squat hewn and thewed look of face and figure that was to make him even more susceptible to cartoon and caricature than Roosevelt.[66]

He might easily have been the son of Henry, as he sat there on the arm of his chair, dangling a long, loose leg and batting his nervous eyelids under the circling buckshot of Schuyler eyes that were slowly swinging into tribal circle.

Conclave was on, and it was characteristic of the Old Gentleman not to bandy words.

“Dave, come here!”

His mother flung up a protesting flutter of hand against her throat, as if a pain had smote her.

The boy strode immediately beside his father, the dignity of his swift, sure obedience blurred a bit by the batting eyelids and that violent thing, his Adam’s-apple, beating relentlessly against his collar.

“Phil,” said the Old Gentleman, taking his youngest’s hand and swinging his quizzical old head round to where sat his rotund second son, “Dave’s made up his mind to go to Springfield.”

“That’s all right with us, Father. Isn’t it, Rita?”

“Indeed it is, Father Schuyler.”

Rita, who always wore large, pink pearls in her ears and against her soft and fat white neck, had an invariable gesture of seeming to protect the beads against the tugs of her youngest child. She was a soft, voluble little person, prematurely gone fat, given to a certain amount of self-pity but outstandingly generous in her sympathies toward others. The too-ready tear, the too-ready laugh, hung on the brink of Rita’s eye and lip. All her life, small partridge of a person that she was, she was destined to be interrupted in the middle of a sentence. They came so volubly. In such quick succession. So sure-fire commonplace. Even her children had a way of chopping her off along about the middle of the predicate.

“As I always say to Phil, we haven’t got much but, what we have got is ...”

“I think Dave has made a pretty good decision, Father. Maybe you wouldn’t judge so from my present performance, but what I said to him a year ago, holds today. Springfield hasn’t licked me yet by a long shot. It’s a live town for a live fellow.”

“St. Louis is a good town,” interposed Clara into this concatenation of family-events. “If Sam had only had the gumption when he was a younger man! Why, most of the men in the big wholesale-shoe crowd on Washington Avenue started in as city-salesmen!”

Years of bitterness on this subject had worn down Clara’s voice to a whine when she broached it. St. Louis, which she chose to denounce upon every occasion as a city which had throttled her dreams and initiated her into the scrimped existence of the wife of a city-salesman, had long since shed its first years of strangeness to her. Now, after eighteen years, it was secretly near and dear to her. But she still nagged persistently to Sam, that life there, so remote from her home and parents, was a meager and thankless affair.

As a matter of fact, at the close of the first few days of her annual visits home, an actual nostalgia for the scenes and friends of the city of her constant denunciations began to set in. Her eldest daughter was already a prize pupil in the third grade of the St. Louis public schools and Sam practically a pillar, by now, of the Second Presbyterian Church. They shared the upper floor of a “St. Louis flat” with a family who owned a Buick sedan and was generous with it. Clara herself belonged to a sewing, a bridge, and a window-garden club, and was beginning to enjoy contacts with the wives of men who were in business for themselves.

Clara’s Mecca. Business for themselves! Sometimes to Sam, who was a steady, plodding man of modest desires, that phrase could close like a tomb around his contentment. “Business for himself.” That phrase was a din in his ears.

“I’m a great believer that the boy who starts out in life with his eye on getting himself into business for himself as soon as possible, is the one who will escape the rut.”

Clara’s relationship to David was something as baffling to her as it was abstruse. Eight years after her marriage to Sam and her subsequent removal to St. Louis, David had been born.

He was a perpetual shock to her on her return visits. For the life of her, she could not associate him with her girlhood background.

Her own children were full of curious questions about him that she could not quite answer. It smote her one middle-of-the-night that he would be great uncle to her first grandchild, and she wakened the snoring Sam at her side to put the fantastical idea before him.

It is doubtful, if in all, Clara and Dave had ever exchanged an hour’s talk, and that never sustained beyond the casual. And yet here he was, this remote brother of hers, who might have been son, needing something she felt it part of her tribal responsibility to be able to give him, and feeling somehow, a smoldering anger against the absent Sam.

“If only Sam were in business for himself, instead of a man on a small salary, Dave could come to us and learn the wholesale shoe-trade. Sam says St. Louis is the coming shoe-center of the—whole world!”

“Know what I was thinking the other night, Henry? S’pose you double the grazing-area of this country by raising reindeer in Alaska. Well, double the grazing area and see how it affects the leather-industry——”

“Well, I don’t know anything about that, but I do know that if Sam had been the man to push himself——”

“Your point is well taken, boy,” said Henry, and the large, slow smile began to shoot in wrinkles from his eye-corners—“well taken, but out of order, I should say.”

With a sensitiveness to the slightest rebuke or poke of fun from Henry that was never to leave him, the sides of David’s head seemed to lighten suddenly with the flash of two pink ears, and a flooding flush of embarrassment ran down into the soft, blue, attached collar of a shirt that had already served Henry and served him well.

“It just kinda came to me, all of a sudden, is all I meant.”

“That’s exactly Dave’s difficulty,” said Bek, her eyes, that always flowed beneficence for him, full of a mock despair. “I’m sure that right now he’s standing there trying to decide at the last minute whether he’s starting out to be an astronomer, a taxidermist, or a——”

“God forbid!”

“A policeman, a Senator, a veterinary, a bank teller, a sheep-herder, an explorer, a wholesale shoe-merchant, a doctor, a lawyer, a merchant, a chief, or a——”

“Many the good veterinarian that has been sacrificed to the United States Senate.”

“Hennery!”

“Well, we don’t need any veterinarians in the family.”

“Better in the family, Bek, than in the Senate!”

“Nonsense, a veterinarian in the Senate is worth two in the family.”

“What’s all this talk about a vegetarian in the family?”

“A veterinarian, Father!”

“What’s the difference, they are both for letting the animal live, aren’t they?”

Paula, who outside of her teaching had started a batik, painted-shoe-trees, character-doll, telephone-doll, hot-muffin, jasmine teas, book-ends, art-smock, and candied-praline shop in Cleveland, in partnership with a teacher in night school (who had advanced the initial two hundred dollars), leaned over to her brother Steve.

“Isn’t the darling priceless? I could get him big time in vaudeville.”

“Or Sing Sing,” laughed Steve and laid a friendly and conservative wallop across his grandfather’s shoulders.

“At my age,” said the Old Gentleman, “I don’t expect big time any more. In Sing Sing, or out of it.”

“Puppa!”

“Guess, Mother, why my life is like a tail.”

“Puppa!”

“Because it’s all behind me. Sometimes I think it’s ahead of Davey, but like a tail, too, and one that he’s trying to put salt on.”

“Father—don’t tease!”

“But, Father—my mind’s made up for sure—this time!”

“That’s a fact, Father, all joking aside. Dave’s been over this thing with me same as he has with you. That’s the hurry idea of putting it up to Phil and Rita now. Dave’s missed three weeks of the evening law-session down Springfield now, as I understand. Dave’s come through about this present plan on his own voluntary decision. Isn’t that about it, Dave?” said Henry, fixing on him the eye of an ally.

“That’s it, Father,” said Dave, on a gulp, and looking around at the fortress of friendly faces, began to bat his eyes. “Not much to herding—is there—for a fellow like me——”

“There’s not much to herding except to a fellow that was born to be a herder.”

“Be surprised, though, Father—fellow learns a lot about how ants and sheep and butterflies and chipmunks and field-mice and skunks manage their world.”

“Skunks,” said Phil, “that’s a mighty helpful part of a fellow’s education!”

“Mebbe, if it helps you recognize a human skunk when you meet one. The world’s full of them without the smell.”

“Puppa!”

“Yea, and watching butterflies—they’ll get you pretty far, Kid, in the world you happen to be born into. Try concentrating on cream-separators or garbage-incinerators. They’ll get you further.”

“Oh, Phil,” cried Rita, with a ripple across a face that was seldom marred by petulance. “What’s funny in that? Can’t you let the boy alone?”

“I knew a fellow once, up St. Louis way,” said the Old Gentleman, “made a fortune out of some sort of a dredging-machine. Got the idea from lying on his back in the park zoo Sunday afternoons, watching the rhinoceros dig himself out of some Missouri mud they’d spilt in his tank.”

“Dave’s got more information,” said Henry, “up there in that kinda blockhead of his, than you’d think, offhand, Phil.”

“Don’t I know it? Can’t anybody around here stand a little kidding?”

“Cut it out, Henry. I don’t need anybody tooting my horn.”

“You see, Phil, the boy’s idea in going to Springfield is a sound one.”

“Sure it is. I’ve been after him to come to us for a year. Springfield is a live town, and a boy in a wholesale grocery-firm can work his way either in or out of it.”

“Exactly, and as Dave has figured it out, what with your offer to roof him, it’s as good a place as any, and maybe a little better, to—get his start in.”

“Better, I’ll say!”

“Exactly. To get himself a law-education evenings and at the same time scrape together his meal-ticket on a daytime job. That about it, Dave?”

“Yes,” said David, and stood up suddenly with a click of his muddy heels, in the attitude that was to be so characteristic of him on rostrum and lecture-platform. A rather defiant, inelegant throwback of figure, elbows hugging his sides, head tilted, and his legs in the attitude of a trained runner about to swing into motion.[67]

“You see, Father, I’m no good at inventing or engineering or exploring or any of those things that some fellows have done to move the world along. But Henry and I know that as sure as we’re standing here, the time is coming when aeroplanes are going dipping around the world just as plentiful as trains. No man-control at all, but operated by wireless. Well, that’s the way I feel about a job. I’m no good at inventing the wireless, but if I could get a job where I’m the wireless-apparatus itself ... that’s where I’d come in.”

“Times are better for a young fellow now than they were when I first went to Springfield,” said Phil, with sagging, disappointed lines springing about his mouth. “It’s the age of nerve and it’s the young have the most of it. Take the building-trade in my town. I took my plunge just ten years too soon.”

“I think I’d like the building-business, Phil! You know what? Henry, I was thinking. Take the lay-out of towns today. The whole system has got to change in the next twenty years. People ten miles out won’t be in the suburbs any more. They’ll be ten minutes by plane from....”

“The building-business, eh? Well, how would you like to go into the automobile, Oriental-rug, the ladies’-wear, the coffin-manufacturing, the vacuum-cleaner, the banking, the baking, or the breeding-of-tadpoles business? Or would you compromise on taking a twelve-dollar-a-week job licking stamps for a fellow named Ox White, whose got a _mail_-order business, selling radios?”

“I’d like that fine, Phil! Funny thing, but I was thinking to myself last night in bed, know something that will save a lot of time and money for the Government? Get before them, so they see what you’re talking about, the idea of the further development of the C.O.D. mail-delivery and it’s going to revolutionize——”

“Save it, or try it out on Ox. He’s a great one for ideas and cigar coupons!”

“Phil!” called Rita, and looked with her sweet eyes at Dave, as if she could cry for him.

“Oh, let me alone, can’t you, Rita? The kid’s got to get practical sooner or later, doesn’t he?”

“Oh, I know what I’m up against, all right.”

“I wonder!” said Bek. “I wonder!”

“He’s never had advantages like my other children,” suddenly bleated Mathilda, coming up behind the chair of her youngest. She was like a wraith of hunger, of yearning, and of torment of self-indictment. “He’s had just scraps all his life.”

“Nonsense, Mother!” said Henry, frowning. “What the rest of us had in advantages, he’s made up for in his way, and don’t you forget it! The boy’s all there—a little nutty on the speed-age, it’s true, without ever asking himself where all this speed is going to take us!”

“But, Henry, you’re the one who sees it as much as I do. More!”

“What if I do? Whither, is what I’m asking—now that we’ve got it, what are we going to do with it?”

“Davey!” There was his mother’s hand on his shoulder again. It was light as a leaf. It was lighter. It was as veined and as palsied as if a wind were trembling it. It made him want to cry. The lightness, the timidity and the fact that even with its frailty, its callous places hooked onto the nap of his coat. How doggedly and persistently, ever since he had known those small, claw-like hands, they had poured out twice the strength of which they seemed capable.

Her children like to tell of her, a little wistfully and a little humorously, how she had once lugged a kicking calf who had poked his luckless head into a hornet’s nest, moaning and plunging, the two miles from the ravine where she found it, back to the Igrotte house, where she deposited it in the barn and fainted.

The odor of lye and soft soap hung chillily about Mathilda. Every day that Davey had ever known her, the gray wisp of her figure had lumbered through the dawns, bent at some chore too heavy for her. The bluish smoke of frying foods enveloped this sudden heart-hurting procession of his memories of her, as her hand lay like a flake upon his shoulder. She was forever at doing things that curved her thin back into a hook. Winding a windlass to raise a bucket of water. Stooping to draw her pans of well-risen bread out of the oven. Sweeping out a hen-roost, her head wrapped in the blue bandanna kerchief that hung behind the kitchen door, waiting for her.

The bandages she had wound! Not only around Davey, but around the quinsy sore throats, the cut fingers, the twisted ankles of farm-hand, neighbor, man, woman, and child. The liniment she had rubbed! The ducklings, the bulls, the rams, the ewes, the kittens, the colts, the calves, the chickens, she had ministered to, moving through the soft or freezing dawns, as the case might be, barn and barnyard flickering to the swinging of her lantern.

Once, when Dave was eight and had a diphtheritic sore throat, and hoof-and-mouth disease was among the cattle, and a cow with calf was giving dangerous and premature birth, she had fluctuated, the night through, between helping the Old Gentleman in the barn, returning to the house every so often to strip off her clothing for garments that had not been exposed to the cattle; then to the swabbing of David’s throat and back into the gray slip of a cotton dress with the blood-spots on it; out once more into a blackness that seemed to cut her in two as it struck her on the walk from the kitchen across the chicken-yard to the low, red building that was filled with the sobbing of a cow in labor.

There was no attitude of a human being in toil or fatigue that all through his life was not to suggest to David, his mother. A figure lugging a pail of water across a field as his train sped by. A sway-back woman with her arms filled. A head lolling on tired shoulders. A pair of knotted hands that, in repose, were stiff and ill-at-ease looking.

How frequently she went about her service, drawing on the secret spring of her strength, her large, milky eyes tired, yet full of the strange exultation of self-torture.

The way she pressed food upon her menfolk, almost with the fanatical zeal of one whose own hungers could be vicariously assuaged by the sight of their indulgence.

For years the Old Gentleman had wailed, “Mother, stop watching me eat! Come eat with me!”

When her children, including Dave, had grown in years and weight to an age where she could scarcely bear up under the burden of lugging them in arms, she had continued to carry them, glorying with perhaps the inner exultation of sacrifice, in the burdens that her Lord had seen fit to bestow.

She was like a stone at the heart of her family, Mathilda was. Every one of her children, and the Old Gentleman as well, was sooner or later to come to know the bitter sweetness of heartache for Mathilda.[68]

Her relentless industry. Her fanaticism for service. Her mute power of reproach. Not reproach against those she served, but because under her very feet, as it were, her world, that she labored so to conserve, ran away from under her like sands.

Her hands were not only horny, but empty. She had gathered a harvest by their productivity, and the reproductivity of her body, only in order that she might lose it.

The granaries of her house and her heart were continually emptying themselves faster than they were restored. And now David, who had come into her autumn and was leaving her in the dead of her winter.

It was not merely as if the hand on Dave’s shoulder pressed against the nap of his coat and the nap of his flesh, it was more as if it melted and ran along through his veins, into their stream and pumping through his heart, made it ache.

Bek knew precisely what David was feeling then. That same pain racked her most when she woke up during the low-ebb hours of the night, with a troubled awareness of that small, shriveled figure of her mother lying two miles away in the Igrotte house.

Henry knew the ache that went with contemplation of his mother. It made him sometimes brusque with her.

Clara too, to whom events back home, as she viewed them from St. Louis, were somehow as through the wrong end of the opera-glasses, and Phil, who took the background of family too much for granted to notice, did regard his mother, once in a rare while, with something of an indefinable pain for the manner in which the years had gnarled her.

Mathilda somehow had grown old in the way of a fruit tree that had borne long and richly.

Emma sometimes frankly cried to Bek, asking passionately and rebelliously what Mother ever got out of it, she’d like to know.

Why—why—nonsense, Mother got plenty out of it.

The Old Gentleman, who loved her, and who was slightly afraid of her terrible meekness and the hint of hurt disapproval that it shrouded, thought too, when he thought about it at all, which was seldom, that Mathilda had got plenty out of it. Love and fear of her Protestant God. A good wifehood. A superb motherhood. A family consistently striking deeper and deeper root into a soil that had fostered it.

The Old Gentleman could strut of this sense of his Americanism. Probably once a year he got his yellowing citizenship-papers out of a drawer in his desk he kept locked, and with his steel-rimmed spectacles low on his nose, reread them. It pleased him to think that his children had never one of them set foot out of America. Americans all.[69]

Henry was the only possible exception. But as the old Ex-Governor had once put it, he was perhaps the best American of them all. That he dared, benignly, to challenge the cardinal virtue of patriotism, one-hundred-per-centism, Protestantism, Rotarianism was Henry’s way. Not to be taken seriously.

Mathilda herself never challenged. She was only hurt, deep down into the very sinews of her being, with the pain that she carried about with her into her barnyards. To her churning. To her perpetual task of laying patches against men’s clothing, and opening the squeaking beaks of poultry to the medicine-dropper.

It was as vague, this pain, as her sense of the surface of her body. She could not have analyzed it. But it was what her young son, standing there in the abashed throes of family-analysis, seemed to feel melting in the shape of her hand through his coat, into his blood, and washing painfully around his heart.

“It’s not easy for a boy with no advantages these days. Our Dave hasn’t had them....”

“Mother,” he cried, and turned passionately toward the hovering gray of her figure—“quit saying that, can’t you? I’ll get on all right. I’m going to get me a good job in a good town.”

“Attaboy, Dave,” cried Phil, “the boy that starts right in that town today, can clean it up and run it—I came ten years too soon.”

“Sure I am, Mother.”

“Attaboy,” cried Phil, and whacked him on the back so that his spectacles jumped.

“Quit!”

Mathilda regarded her youngest with eyes that seemed to crawl out toward him with their love and gratitude.

“I’ve got you ready, son. Six as new shirts as a boy ever left home with. Flannels and middle-weights. There’s a patch had to be laid on the blue serge, Dave, but it’s an excellent suit for every-day—with overalls, for sweeping out office of a morning. You can travel in it, son. The patch won’t show up, son, if you’re right careful about your stoops.”

“Mother,” cried Dave and sprang back from the stroke of her thin hand, “not that old serge to travel in! What if Dor—what if somebody’s down at the train to see me off. Wouldn’t I be a pretty sight—backing away? Gee, a fellow’s got to look right, traveling, Mother.”

“You can have my middle-weight gray pants,” said Henry, rising as if to conclude the occasion. “You’re right. A fellow on his way to the conquest of Springfield is entitled to a pair he is not ashamed to turn his back on his home-town in.”

“Hen-nery!” fluttered Mathilda, “be refined!”

FOOTNOTES:

[66] ... a young and enormously talented fellow named Donald Wight, who graduated from Harvard with my grandson, has done some of the most delightfully eloquent caricatures of my brother that have ever been made. The originals of these are in the portfolio collection of Paula’s second daughter. The strip of cartoons which I am pasting on this page is by no less an artist than the celebrated Nea. The one at the end, right, done in exactly six strokes, suggests in masterly fashion the square, rather pugnacious qualities of my brother. The second, with those quick, exaggerated quirks to the eyebrow and corners of the mouth, suggests, in uncanny fashion, the winged, visionary look that was characteristic of him in certain moods. The last, perhaps, is the most wittily characteristic of all. The four-square solidity of a man whose feet are to the ground and whose nose is sniffing stars.

[67] ... Henry Gothard says of him (David) that half of his platform-power (my brother was not a fluent speaker) lay in that almost eccentric pose of a squat, low, tight-sinewed man, self-flailed to endurance. Blierot’s statue of him, which stands at the head of Hudson Boulevard and Three Hundred and Thirty-sixth Street, suggests that dogged quality. The painting by Rockwell Bosworth, which hangs in the National Gallery at Washington, is still my favorite, however. Incidentally, it was while he was posing for that portrait that he is said to have dictated his Conciliation Message to Russia. I know that to be erroneous. That document was composed six months later, in the summer White House.

[68] The morning of the day of my dear mother’s death, on one of those telepathic and not quite explainable impulses, I drove over to the Igrotte house in the forenoon, although it was my usual custom to arrive there about four in the afternoon in time to lift Mother, who was so dreadfully crippled of inflammatory rheumatism that winter, from her couch into her bed.

To my horror, I found her this day (it was actually the day of her death, dear darling) trying, with her pain-crammed fingers, to knit a blue neck-scarf for Steve’s eldest daughter, Pauline.

I shall never forget the stab of pain with which I beheld those tortured fingers working their laborious way along the needles....

[69] ... the first member of our large family to go abroad, was my son Steve, who flew to England, _via_ Newfoundland and Ireland, the year he became president of the International Air Corporation. During his lifetime, Father, for some curious reason, was never sympathetic to the idea.

For a while, Phil and Rita were extremely anxious to send their second daughter to school in Switzerland, but out of deference to Father’s wishes, abandoned the idea.

_Chapter Forty-one_

The sleet came down and hopped off shoulders and blew and bounced along the streets and then finally formed a coating of ice that shellacked the windward side of buildings and trees and made walking a matter of balancing.

High Street wore its coating promptly away into a mucilaginous ooze of mud, but the tributary streets, except where housewives leaned from the top steps of their porches and threw out handfuls of ashes, or ice-cream salt, glittered in an armor of thin ice, and the naked branches of the double rows of maples along Sycamore Street shone like a regiment of fountains with their ornamental waters frozen in action. Shrubbery in front yards sagged under ice. Horses pedaled for footing and struck sparks. In front of the Five and Ten Cent Store, one was down, with a driver sitting on his head, while they shoveled ashes under his plunging hoofs. The pair of iron stags on the Court House lawn had ice beards.

In winter, Henry Schuyler persisted in wearing a veteran coon-skin cap with ear-flaps, probably the only one still extant in Centralia.

When he came down out of his office to emerge into the sleet, these flaps were tied down over his ears in a little bow of black tape under his chin. In his short reefer, coon-skin mittens, and goloshes that he lashed closer to his thin legs with a winding of hemp, there was a lanky Ichabod-look to him, as he strode surefootedly along the perilous streets.

David was leaving on the one-forty-nine. Henry had left Senator Jim Kearney, who wanted unprofessional advice on an extradition case he was handling in Cincinnati, waiting with his feet up against the base-runner, while he made the dash around to the station. As the Senator put it, he had just dropped in. As a matter of fact, Henry knew, and the Senator suspected that Henry knew, that he had made the trip to Centralia for the express purpose of the interview with Henry.

The one-forty-nine was due in ten minutes.

Henry hurried.

David, and his father, and Mathilda in an outlandish-looking dolman cape with ball fringe that gave her coachman’s shoulders, and Dora Tarkington in her white wool cap, were standing around a stove in the waiting-room, with their clothes steaming and smelling.

Tom Willets had raised the ticket-window grating and was leaning along the outer sill to talk with the Old Gentleman.

Katie, old Trina’s niece, who before her marriage had done day-work in the House on Sycamore Street, getting wind of Davey’s departure, had driven in on her husband’s dirt-cart from Ideola with her three-year-old twins, who kept up a constant trekking across the room to the water-cooler, Katie constantly after them for keeping the spigot open.

There were two other passengers for the one-forty-nine. A salesman with his sample-case and a shawled woman with a live chicken in a chip basket.

The sleet beat against the smoke-smeared windows in a monotonous tattoo.

“It’s a bad day for travel, son,” said Mathilda for the fourth time.

“Oh no, Mrs. Schuyler!” cried Dora. “I just love to travel on a rainy day. There’s something so cozy about being right out in the middle of the weather and not a bit of it able to get at you. Don’t you think so, Dave?”

David thought so.

“Of course, I know what you mean, Mrs. Schuyler. There’s something depressing about people going away in the rain. Sad-like.”

Dora’s voice was too high. It had a nervous pitch to it from talking to David’s mother. She was not quite herself. They were a little fierce together, these two, a rush of excitement out over them just from being in each other’s presence. Mathilda, without quite knowing it, full of unease, as if something were rubbing against the grain of her very being.

Pretty Dora. David’s shy eyes these last moments were furtively for her.

Mathilda knew it by the tight feeling behind her eyes.

Dora, by that same token, knew that Mathilda knew. With all of her astonishing capacity for rising to the demands of almost any sort of moment, Dora, even with her throat so hot and dry and nervous-feeling, knew that there must be just one right sort of kindness to make this moment more endurable to Mathilda.

In a way, she almost accomplished that miracle. Except for the overstrain in her manner, which David wanted passionately not to be there.

It kept her too eager. Too high-voiced. Too voluble. And not more than once did she let her glance be caught and pinioned by David, whose eyes ached to be caught and pinioned.

“Don’t you think it fun to travel in the rain, Dave?”

“Dora isn’t really this way, Mother,” he wanted to shout. “She’s sweet and neat and cozy. She isn’t really this way, Mother.”

“You do think it’s fun to travel in the rain, Dave?”

“You bet!”

He had a dry throat that kept breaking his sentences into gulps. There was even one between the “you” and the “bet.”

How beautiful she was in that woolly cap that shone against the dirty morning. And she had cut her hair. The curls that had romped through a thousand of his fancies of her, were gone now from their yellowish riot along her shoulders. And strangely, incredibly, the little bang of yellow that escaped her cap, and the short, straight line of yellow that lay along her cheeks, and the furry little peak where it petered out in the back of her head, like a boy’s, were just as goose-fleshingly lovely as the curls had been.

How beautiful she was. The secret thing between them that he had whispered to his mother a thousand times with the secret lips of his heart, was obscured for the moment by the enormous casualness of her manner. Too casual. Too obviously casual, he thought. Even strangers could be expected to meet eye-to-eye. The eyes that must serve him as lamps now. Two shining lamps down in his heart.

Yet there they stood, scraping their feet along the fender of the stove, dilly-dallying through the infinitesimally small talk of waiting for a train.

“When Father took me to Springfield when Aunt Genevieve died, we ate in a dining-car!”

Gabble. Gabble. Dora’s tongue was like the hum of his mother’s sewing-machine. Gabble. Gabble. Dear gabble, gabble.

“Of course, with local trains, it’s different....”

It made all the commotion of his emotions somehow subservient to just her nearness and dearness.

Once it seemed to him that something shining lay along her lashes as she half raised them to him. Only half, but it swept the plunging excitement higher and dryer into his throat.

“Only ten minutes, Dave,” said Mathilda, her words seeming to collapse against the rim of her lips.

“Yes, Mother.”

How beautiful she was. Dora.

“You’ll remember, Davey, to make a package of your dirty wash every-other-week and parcel-post it home.”

Dirty wash! At least she might have put it “soiled linen.” Mother!

“Rita’s got her hands full with her own family. Besides, son, it will be almost like having you back. The clothes—you’ve worn—close—to you. Don’t forget to change regular, son.”

“Mother.” What if he should cry. His throat ached so.

“I’ve put in two weights, Dave. The ones with the little red ’D’ embroidered on the drawers are the heavies, son.”

Drawers! How terrible. How Terrible. How TERRIBLE. In front of Dora. Dora, whose sweet eyes were almost looking into his now. Dora, whose sweet eyes were violets. Red “D” on the belt of his drawers. Ignominy drenched him. It made red signals of his ears. It made a throttle of his Adam’s-apple.

“Mother!”

“Dora knows, son,” said Mathilda, and fixed her ineffably tired eyes upon the two of them, standing flaming in the murk of the clogged air of that waiting-room which they enchanted for each other. “Dora knows such things have to be thought about. No right-thinking girl, Davey, is ever above thinking about those kind of things,” said Mathilda, and began to cry miserably and in sniffles that screwed her face cruelly because she tried to hold them back.

“Oh, Mother, Mother, Mother!” cried Davey to himself, as if his heart were turning to sand and running away from him.

And yet he only stood and gulped the Adam’s-apple that would not stay gulped.