Chapter IV: Part 4

“Bek,” said Emma, eyeing her sister, with a furrow between her pretty eyes, “isn’t it sudden, Stevey quitting Agricultural this way in the middle of a semester? Nothing wrong, is there? Never knew a word about it until Claire told me she’d a letter——. Nothing wrong?”

“Nothing,” said Bek, looking straight ahead over the wheel upon which her square, white hand lightly rested. “His father and I think it best to have him home this winter. That’s all. It is good practical experience for him to be around while the state dam is under construction. He’ll learn more about practical irrigation that way in a month than in a college year!”

“Funny, though, his coming so sudden,” said Emma.

It was as if the slight figure of Claire, standing beside her mother, swayed as a fir tree sways, from its toe to its tip. An almost imperceptible sway, except to Bek, to whom most tiny things were perceptible.

“It’s Junior League afternoon, Claire. Why aren’t you there?”

“Just felt like running down to the station with Mother and Grandmother Milliken to meet Uncle Phil and see the four-ten come in,” said Claire, her pretty, her appealing but faltering blue eyes meeting the absolutely horizontal ones of her aunt.

“And, of course, you wanted to come down to see Stevey too, dear,” put in her mother, who was a great putterer in the name of amicability. “You didn’t even know Uncle Phil was coming until Gramaw telephoned just before we left.”

“And Stevey too, of course,” said Claire. Her voice was as thin as a quail’s and her white young throat beat like one, as she met her aunt’s gaze.

“Of course,” repeated Bek. Her voice was so level, to Claire swaying there, like a vast and level plain.

“Bek,” said Emma, and leaned close, “Mother Milliken is so sensitive. Hadn’t you better go pass the time of day with her? She gets more and more sensitive as Father Milliken’s notes to Father fall due. Better go over....”

“Indeed, yes,” said Bek. “Come, Mother, you too. And be sure you don’t ask her about her brother in Saalsberg, Mother. Intimate as you are with Annie Milliken, you cannot seem to remember that he died last year.”

“I am glad you reminded me Bek, it does slip my mind. Saalsberg is so far,” said Mathilda, lifting her skirts neatly, as her two daughters and Claire assisted her down the step of the car. “I think I’ll take her a bit of that nice, crisp celery; it’s under the seat. I just picked it up at market.”

“Hurry, Mother,” said Bek, striding across the platform toward the Milliken car.

“Bek,” said Mathilda timidly, and put out a restraining hand upon her daughter’s stride, “I don’t want to seem unchristian, Daughter, and I wouldn’t have Emma hear, seeing how bad’s Annie’s palsy, but you and me riding up in the Ford truck, Daughter, and there sits Annie Milliken in a Cadillac, them never out of your father’s debt.”

“Sense of humor, Mother,” said Bek, hooking her Mother’s arm into hers and patting it. “The Lord gave us ribs so we could keep them tickled.”

“Yes, but not jostled, while Annie Milliken rests hers in an upholstered limousine.” Just then Davey, spying little Dora Tarkington walking primly into the depot with her hand in her father’s, made a megaphone of his: hand and shouted to her:

“Stevey’s coming home!”

“Stevey’s coming home!” Bek’s heart, all the time that Claire’s was fluttering like a bird’s, was heavy within her.

Stevey was coming home....

_Chapter Seven_

Phil was the first of the Schuylers to go chubby, as the saying is. So rotund, in fact, that in his middle thirties, his waist-coat, that was usually a none-too-subtle check of plaid, buttoned over a semicircle. He was a teetotaler, from inclination rather than conviction, but there was something in the veininess of Phil’s face and the drape of flesh over the back of his collar that suggested alcohol.

There was an air of too-high blood-pressure about him. His face red and his voice a little breathless. At thirty, Phil Schuyler had twice been almost a rich man. The elusiveness of his quest glittered in his eyes. It was as if in attempting to force his destiny, he had antagonized it.

“Anything very special, Bek?” he said, through the light peck he deposited on his sister’s cheek, as she ran considerably ahead of the others to greet him.

“They’re after Henry again. District Attorney this time.”

“Suspected as much. Well, he’s got to take it. If he doesn’t feel he owes it to himself, he at least owes it to the family. Man can’t go through life turning down one honor after another. Howdy, Father. Well, Mother! Careful! There’s some geranium-cuts in this paper bag Rita sent along for your side-yard borders. No, Rita decided not to come. Baby seemed a little croupy last night. Well, Father, am I to ride in the one-hoss shay?”

“Better men than you have ridden in it.”

“Dirty crack!” cried Phil, who was accustomed to his father’s easy irascibilities where he was concerned.

“Puppa—Phil was only teasing.”

“Well then, so was I.”

“’S all right, Father. You’re immense.”

“So are you.”

“Now, Father, don’t taunt me for my figure. Who’s giving me a lift?”

“I’ll drive you home, Phil. I can bound Ohio—Ohio is——”

“Can you bind my kitten’s broken paw?”

“Phil!”

There ensued then the usual family-conclave, Emma bidding for Phil to sleep in her spare-room, where he could have steam-heat, Mathilda demurring that Phil’s old room in the House on Sycamore Street was ready and the fire laid. Claire threw her young arms around her uncle’s neck and begged him to wait for Stevey’s train and then to ride up in the Cadillac, David meanwhile lugging his uncle’s valise, and almost toppling backward with effort, toward the phaeton.

“No, never mind anybody waiting for Stevey’s train, Phil. Claire and Emma will drop you and Mother at the House on Sycamore Street. Davey and I will wait for Stevey.”

As she spoke, Rebekka’s eyes, round as two pinwheels, had come to full stop upon her niece Claire.

“Go, Claire.”

“But, Aunt Bek,” faltered Claire, her blonde skin pinkening furiously. “But, Aunt Bek....”

“Run along,” said her aunt and laid a firm, a heavy, an uncannily aware hand upon the small, frail shoulder of her niece.

“But....”

“Claire!”

“But, Aunt Bek—my own cousin—coming——”

“A good thing to remember, Claire. Your—own—_cousin_.”

“Oh, you—” almost sobbed her niece, and ran after the others, with her handkerchief pressed against her lips—“you’re—terrible to me.”

The family shooed off before Bek, with an automatic kind of acquiescence.

There were only Davey and Bek left standing, wind-blown, on the platform, as the five-fifteen, bearing Stevey, drew in.

* * * * *

How handsome Stevey was as he stepped off the day-coach, in his slip-over sweater and a pigskin bag and a tennis-racquet in a case and his cap crammed into his pocket so that his hair, Winslow’s waviness and baby-fine brown, blew backward giving him a swift, winged look.

Stevey was really David’s eldest nephew. Leslie somehow did not count, as ages go. A lean-jawed young fellow, with his father’s sensitive nostrils and his mother’s level mouth. Gray-eyed, with the depth to them that black lashes can lend; as indefinable a tang to an expression, as the flavor of the caper to sauce. Personable, after a fashion, cut along lines rather lighter than the Schuyler heft, wide-shouldered, light-waisted, with something correct about the line from femur to ankle that was not characteristic of the House of Schuyler in general.[11]

“How handsome he is!” thought Bek even when he could not quite meet her gaze in greeting. She wanted to take him in her arms, except that it would have embarrassed them both. For one second it flashed over her, as he made a quick movement of greeting, that the returning prodigal might be going to take her in his. Flashed over her in a warm goose-flesh. Of course, Stevey did nothing of the sort. People did not take Bek in their arms. He did exactly what she gave him the cue to do.

“Hullo, Mother,” said Stevey, and flung out for her hand and shook it low, down and vigorously. “Hi. Unk,” and caught up Davey by the armpits, as he was forever being caught up.

“Stevey, I can bound Ohio.”

“Bound it tomorrow!”

“Stevey, me and Henry have a chart and we followed the American fleet around the world with the red pins.”

“—as well as with breathless interest.”

“And, Stevey, I know where the American fleet was on February twenty-first. Ha-waiian Islands, and Teddy fired a salute to Mo-lo-kai where the lepers live. If I was a leper, I could get fired a salute at by Teddy. Know what?”

“Dave, you run home now! Bek is going to drive Stevey home for Winslow, and then we’ll all be over to Sycamore Street in time for supper.”

“Can I have a houn’-dog out of Tom Willet’s litter, Bek?”

“No, those Willet dogs are always flea nests.”

“The flea is a para-sit-ic animal that lives off——”

“Good Lord!” cried Steve and tossed him again. “Go tell your Brother Henry to get you bound in a soft-leather edition and sell you from door to door.”

“Run along, Davey, there’s a good boy, and tell Mother not to bother about the sweet butter. I’ll stop by Koerber’s and bring a pat. Jump in, Stevey.”

How easily as Davey with his short legs spun off toward Sycamore Street, Stevey swung into the seat beside his Mother, not bothering to open the door, just one long lithe leg after the other climbing over it.

“Shall I drive, Mother?”

“No,” said Bek, and threw a clutch that jerked them forward.

The town in its cold March drabs was a one-colored affair. Sky the color of the weather-beaten boards that houses and fences and many of its sidewalks were built of, dry wash in back yards half-frozen and flapping stiffly gray, against gray sky, streets merging off, with scarcely a change of gray, from the smoothness of made into the roughness of unmade roads.

Down Second Street, Beulah Kohn still swung on the broken front gate.

“Hello, Miss Bek. Hel-lo, Stevey.”

“H’lo. Stevey, that’s Beulah Kohn, the one with meningitis. Poor child, speak to her.”

“Hel-lo Beulah,” called Steve, and tried to smile through a face that, once alone with his mother, had grown stiff-looking and white.

At the wheel, Bek’s hand, ungloved now, was large and calm and pliable-looking as a surgeon’s. But inside, against the palm, it was throbbing.

“Nobody knows anything, Stevey. Not even your father. The dean’s letter came so—sudden, son. Your father might just as easily have been the one to open the mail-box and—find it first!”

Steve moved his lips, but nothing came.

“I—I’ve explained to everybody that I want you home—while they’re building the dam. Practical observation—irrigation, y’see?”

His face only whitened and tightened, and his lips handsome when in repose, shirred inward now, like a scar. Out of the tail of her eye, as she drove, Bek could see the young face becoming old. Terrifyingly old. A scarred old walnut of a face.

“I’m no good, Mother. Sooner or later you’ll have to reconcile yourself to everybody knowing that.”

“I’ll fight you to the finish,” said Bek, on a click of teeth, “before I’ll make up my mind that a child of mine is no good.”

“It gets me, Mother. It burns me. It makes a human bonfire out of me. There ought to be some cure for it, like there is for ulcers and scalds and hydrophobia. It gets me. Help me, Mother!”

“Help me, Mother!” At that, a cry that suddenly became the cry of the wind in her ears as they sped along; there lodged in Bek’s throat a ball of ache, so that it was a block before she could muster voice. Her kind of dead-level voice without flutter to it.

“I’ll fight with you, Stevey.”

“Help me, Mother!” Why, to Bek, trying not to wobble the wheel, that was a cry in the wilderness. It smote her. It cut her in two. It made her veer so suddenly, as she crossed Second Street, where it intersected Elm, that Skeet Mapey, the sixty-year-old police man on that beat, shook an unaggressive old finger at her, as they shot past him.

“I’ll help you, Stevey, to help yourself. You hear me! No one can help you but yourself.”

“Then I’m lost,” said Stevey, and quite horribly began to cry, sitting there with his face twisted and his lips a knot-hole, and his chin all tucked up like a weazened little old man’s.

“Oh! Oh! Oh!” Bek kept saying to herself. “Help me to help this boy! God, you—help me to help this boy!” She had the rather disembodied feeling of everything within her stopping like a run-down clock. A momentary inability to think or feel or do. A deadness, as if circulation and heartbeat and the universe of her body had ceased.

“You can do everything, Mother. Save me.”

That warmed one back, somehow.

“Is it so terrible, boy?”

“It burns, Mother. Not like anything you’ve known. It cracks one’s tongue, and then one’s whole body is like a cracked tongue—thirsting. You can’t know—ever——”

“God knows, no, Stevey. Never in our family—anyone—anywhere—or in your father’s—no one ever——”

“It’s like being lined with hot steel, Mother, that you want to cool by making hotter. Or go crazy! Or go crazy! It’s hell, Mother. You’re too strong to understand.”

“Too strong to understand.” There it was again. The alienating power of strength. Too strong to understand, when the hand with which she steered so surely was of flaming steel. The same flaming steel that tortured Stevey.

“Oh, Stevey—tell me. Tell Mother. Before we get home. Nobody must know. But you, Stevey, and me. We’ll fight it out. How did it happen again? So suddenly—you promised....”

“Not suddenly, Mother—for a little while nobody there knew—that was all——”

“Stevey, Stevey—as a child—as a little boy—you never even saw it around you, and now—now this——”

“Never—except Gramp——”

“Gramp!”

“No. No. I mean, first I remember ever seeing the stuff at all—Gramp used to keep a jug of cider in the phaeton for long drives—winter-time. I remember once or twice taking a swig or two out of it if he fell asleep at the reins. Remember, he used to think it amusing and cute for me to do that. Way back there—me a kid—it used to warm me, Mother, in a way I hadn’t ever felt before. I’ve always felt cold inside. Remember how you used to fix me hot lemonades with mint in? ... that was because I craved it. Even then. Warmth. Remember me always sucking peppermints? That was it, Mother. The burning. The burning.”

“Oh, my boy!”

“That time you found me by the mill—that was the first time, Mother—I was—that way. I’ve sworn that to you so often. You must believe.”

“I do.”

“And then—and then—after you got me away—the first three months—I didn’t—not a drop——”

“That’s why, Stevey, when it came—so sudden—I had thought—you were all right, boy——”

“Mother, those first months. The torture. No wonder my marks were so bad. Mother, you’ll never know. I used to get up at night—and run—Mother—go out and run around the track—until they began to get on—and think me nutty. I tried so terribly, Mother.”

“Stevey! Stevey!”

“And then—the fellows—they began to rush me for Beta Beta. That was the real beginning. I hadn’t even seen the stuff around, before I began to get in with the frat crowd. And then seeing it—in bottles—on tables—help yourself. The night they initiated me, I—that was the beginning.... Ugh.... Mother——”

That cry in the wilderness. The rumble of the tinny little car over it.

“Shame, shame, Stevey.”

“Oh! Oh, Mother, if you only knew! If I had any guts—I’d kill myself!”

“No. No. No. Stevey, I’ll help you. Mother will help you.”

“You will, Mother. You will, won’t you?” And sobbed, without troubling to cover his face, which somehow was most horrible of all to her.

“Father—what will he——”

“He mustn’t know, Stevey.”

“I couldn’t stand his knowing, Mother. Father so—so sensitive—so nervous—I—he couldn’t stand it!”

“Father so sensitive. So nervous.” What was the secret of Winslow, Bek asked herself. Not bitterly, but out of an enormous wistfulness and fatigue.

“We’ll make our fight together, Stevey. I’m not afraid, Stevey—if you’ll fight with me. We’ll win!”

“I will fight, Mother. There’s a bottle of—it—wrapped in a green sweater in the bottom of my bag. Take it away from me, Mother.”

“You’ll win, Stevey, like that! You’re a Schuyler, son. There may be families in the state hold their heads higher, but not any straighter. Look at Davey, Steve. I always say he’s everything in us summed up. Seventh child, I guess. Sturdy. Square. That’s us.”[12]

“Yes, Mother.”

“We’ve got to keep the family fine enough for him to grow up into, son. Ever think of that? Hello there, Supe. Stevey, that’s old Lem Dinwater’s boy. Speak to him. Supe, you tell your Pap to make me another offer on that hog corn. He’s going to lose a good chance not giving me a price on that feed. Good boy!”

“My Pap says you’n him can’t do no business, Miss Bek. My Pap says you’re a better man ’n he is.”

“Hop out here, Stevey, and into the drug-store, and get me a bottle of Sloan’s Liniment. One of my new mares has gone right lame in her foreleg. Never mind, I’ll hop out myself. I want to see how Granny Koerber’s asthma is today.”

“Mother, won’t that keep? How can you—_now_!”

“No, Stevey. My mare’s limping. Those things don’t keep.”

“But, Mother....”

“Open your suitcase there under the seat, boy. There’s something in it wrapped up in a green sweater. A bottle of something I want to make a present of it to Granny Koerber for her asthma.”

FOOTNOTES:

[11] ... poor kid ... destined as he was for the exhibitionism of lecture-platform, rostrum, grand-stand, David had not escaped the Schuyler femur. From the hip to the knee, with most of us, the line was too short, making us a top-heavy-looking lot. We girls managed to hide it. But with the boys, Henry excepted, the effect was stockiness. We used to laugh about “the Schuyler femur.” It is the answer, I think, to the fact that my brother Dave was what is known as a static speaker, remaining quietly behind his table or stand. It is also the answer to why, with the one exception of the Landsdowne painting, there are no full-length portraits of him. From the waist up, he gave the appearance of towering solidity. The effect of the long waist and slightly too short legs, even in the Landsdowne, was to make him appear stocky.

[12] ... as I used to say of our Davey, long before he showed the slightest precocity other than a sort of walking-encyclopedia garrulousness, for which we used to hold Henry to hilarious account, that he was the typical Schuyler. And so he was, embodying in his very babyishness the square, plodding quality of a small war-tank.

_Chapter Eight_

For the half-dozenth time, his mother, through the buzz of grown-up talk, had turned her rather breathless face upon him and pantomimed Davey to go to bed. By mouthing back violently and stretching his eyes and doing somewhat fearful grimaces with his mouth to indicate that he was the reverse of sleepy, it was possible to appease her from time to time.

The supper-table had long since been cleared, and the red-rep cover back in its place, and the silver bowl supported by the silver cherubs, in its center. There were seven apples in it. They shone under the swinging-lamp that had the buckeye dangling from it.

Henry was speaking. The faces about the table swam in light. Mathilda. The Old Gentleman. Bek. Winslow. Claire. Emma. Phil. Henriette Simpson, who never missed her Tuesday-night dinner with the family, and who was a sufficiently privileged old friend to “sit in.”

The scene reminded Davey of something. Something too vague to capture. Flat on his stomach on the carpet-sofa in the corner, elbows propped and chin in palms, he regarded it, when he could keep his fascinated eyes away from the to-bed pantomime of Mathilda. Ah, he knew! It reminded him, that circle of conclave, of a picture torn from Redpath’s Universal History, that hung in Henry’s dusty little old office, up over Schlemmer’s Hardware Store on High Street, “Signing of the Declaration of Independence.” The solemn array. The women, by half-closing the eyes, could be made to look like men in wigs. Henriette Simpson looked like a horse. But a nice horse. Such a kind, slender, solemn horse. A brown horse with a braided mane. But she, too, by squinting, could be brought to look wigged. Only the Old Gentleman spoiled the illusion. He was peeling an apple. You could never conceive of so much meticulousness crammed into the peeling of an apple. He held it poised between thumb and forefinger, as a sculptor might carve a hand holding a pearl in that position.

It was impossible, after the introduction of the peeling of that apple, not to keep the eye riveted. Even Mathilda left off her pantomime to watch it, and rose once, tiptoeing to a cupboard for a plate, which she slid under, and which the Old Gentleman kept shoving away. He was removing the peel, after his habit, in a single long curlicue. The thinnest possible ribbon. Gradually the eyes of the entire group, with the single exception of Claire, who kept her gaze fastened on the weaving motion of her needle over the round of a darning ball, became focused upon the intact unwinding of that apple-peel.

Henry was speaking. He had a solemn, monotonous voice and to David, even then, a wise, intoning voice.

“It is unfortunate that Father did not consult with me before calling you all together at this time. I have never been anything but settled in my mind about it. In fact, the party has already had my written refusal for twelve hours.”

“Stuff,” said Phil, watching the winding of the rind, and his purplish face pursed as he leaned forward across folded arms. “A man can change his mind. I can have Senator Burton on the telephone and that letter in the waste-basket in five minutes.”

“You’re talking nonsense, Phil.”

“Why, any man they put up in your place will be a stuffed shirt! There is not another possibility in the state except you and Scott Baring, who’s never going to get out of that French Lick sanatorium unless on a stretcher.”

“That may be,” said Henry, in his dry way, and strumming with his dry fingers, and his eyes on the slowly unwinding rind. “But my mind is made up.”

“If it was me,” said Emma, in that airy, cozy way of hers, tapping her darning-ball and holding a red-and-brown-checked sock off at arm’s-length, “I’d take it, just to show those horrid old Democrats that this state has never really had a District Attorney before.”

This remark was deemed worthy of nobody’s rejoinder. Emma was seldom answered. Nor minded.

“Well,” said Phil, who kept wanting to shout but after the first word or two restrained it and toned himself down, “if you ask me, and you don’t, I’ll say it’s a dog-gone shame that the party comes into a Jim Crow town like Centralia to pick its man, does a Schuyler the honor to put him on the sure-fire ticket for District Attorney and....”

“You’re right, Phil, I don’t ask you. This is the kind of question a man has to decide between God and his own soul.”

“Yes, but what the dickens can your soul and your God find in a proposition like this except honor?”

“Son, take not the name of the Lord, thy God, in vain.”

“Excuse me, Mama, but, good Lord, look at the honor for himself and his family. It was enough turning down mayors’ committees, trusteeships, school-board appointments, and pretty nearly every honor the town has to offer. But when it comes to a big state job like this—’tain’t fair to us!”

“Sorry you feel that way about it, Phil.”

“I do. Mother and Father are entitled to a little something out of this game. I’m bringing up my little family to the best of my ability, struggling along to make good American citizens out of them. Bek’s got standing and children. Claire. Emma. Davey’s going to want the background of good, sound family-connections. No one person’s got the right to deprive an entire family of honor. No, by God, not even——”

“Phil!”

“_Gad_ was what I said, Mother. Wish you’d try to remember that, Ma. No matter what I may happen to say—it’s ‘Gad’ I mean—no siree! Father here comes to this country a poor boy. Not much more than an ordinary farm-hand. Mother here a girl that had never been out of her Tyrol village——”

“Kufstein, son.”

“Kufstein, mind you. Well, what do they do, these two? Practically not a penny to their names. Strangers on a strange shore.”

“We were awful strange, son,” said Mathilda, and placed the tip of her handkerchief to a reminiscent tear.

“Phil should set this lyric he is singing to ‘Hearts and Flowers’, Mother,” said Henry, and slid one of his sly, wry winks to Henriette, who laid an admonishing forefinger against her lips.

“I think it’s beautiful, Phil—I love to hear it over and over—the coming to America of our Mother and Father. I just think it beautiful,” said Emma, leaning over her darning-ball, her soft, blue eyes filled with tears of melting dolly sweetness. “How was it, Mother, you and Father stood hand in hand when you got off the old coach at Centralia, all those years back? Tell it again. I love it. Father holding the carpetbag and your two precious quilts wrapped up in a huge sheet, and you clutching onto your great kerchief-bundle of clothing, with a pair of Father’s brogans joined by string flung over your shoulder. What a cute, adorable greenhorn you must have looked. I can just see you!”

“Your father was down to his last twenty dollars, son. At Ellis Island they wouldn’t let us——”

“Yessir!” cried Phil, warming. “There’s a picture for you. Scared out of their lives. Practically broke. What do they do? I’ll tell you what! After managing to eke their way out here just because a fellow named Hans Stengle from their same little village was living hereabouts, what do they do? I’ll tell you what——”

“When Puppa and I arrived greenhorns, and first set foot in Centralia, son, I can tell you, except for some few kronen inside my bodice and——”

“They come out here practically penniless and with their bare hands, and their courage, and their grit, they build up the name Schuyler to one of the most upstanding in the state. We’re not what you’d call a moneyed family, but by Gad, we’re as upstanding as they come. The name Schuyler has come to be in these parts synonymous with salt-of-the-earth. Those two little peasants that got off the coach here forty-odd years ago, have put their notch in what’s called the backbone of this country. We’re the backbone. You’ve got it in you, Henry, with your head on those shoulders of yours and your reputation for being a sort of Cincinnatus at the plow hereabouts, to make this here name Schuyler not only the salt of this here county, but salt of the earth the country over. I know I haven’t always done all the fine things I set out to accomplish, due to no fault of mine. I’m part boob, but you’re a big man, only you haven’t got the sense to show it. No siree, you haven’t got the right to deprive this family of adding inches to its stature. Why, man alive, men with no more brains to them than you’ve got have become President of these United States of America. Men with no more brains than you’ve got are sitting on Supreme Court benches while I’m saying these words. Fellows holding big office and with twenty times your money, and running to you for advice on the laws of the world, aren’t they?—No siree, you haven’t got the right to deprive the Schuyler family of being as big as its biggest man! No siree!”

Here was Phil, with the little roll of fat above the rear of his collar, bulging and apoplectic with purpose, and his two fists striking against the table again and again, making the apples in the silver-cherub bowl rattle, and all eyes slowly swinging away from the unwinding of the Old Gentleman’s perfect one-piece rind, to burn solemnly upon the speaker.

“Phil’s right, there,” said Bek in her square, even tones. “Leastwise, he’s right until we hear what you have to say in rebuttal.”

“Why, everybody knows Henry’s one of the smartest lawyers in the state. He could be in big-league boots today if—if everything didn’t always seem to seem funny to Henry, instead of worth wanting.”

Curious how even the occasionally pithy remark of Emma’s could go by unheeded.

“Hennery—it would be a fine honor for me and Puppa——”

“You hear now, how your Mother feels! It isn’t often she asks what she wants, in so many words. She just sits and eats out her heart.”

“Phil’s right, Henry.”

Here went Phil, soaring again: “Why, with your mind there’s no telling how far you can go. You read a valedictory on this here town’s high-school platform, when you were sixteen, ought to be printed and put in every boy’s hand in this state today.”

“Beautiful,” said Emma. “I remember I cried. And to cry on a hot night like that meant something.”

“You’re one of the biggest authorities on international law in this country, only you go holler down a well about it.”

“For God’s sake, Phil—let up!”

“Hennery!”

“Sorry, Mother.”

“Why, men from as far east as Pittsburgh and Washington have found their way to that little old dusty office of yours up over a hardware-store. What do you think it does for the rest of us having a man of authority in the family? Take the matter of a man’s credit. Why, just take a man like me. The difference it would make to a man like me in a town like Springfield. Family-standing. Brother of Henry Schuyler. Yes, I’ll say it right out. Selfish, maybe, but I’m honest, that’s all. I’m not afraid a fact will bite me if I say it out. Yessir, I believe in calling a spade a spade, and a big one.”

“Not much sense to calling it a steam-shovel, Phil.”

“That’s all right, Bek. I’m showing my hand a little bit plainer than the rest of you. Pull. Influence. Power. That’s what it will give the family. Not asking anything of him except honor for himself, and, what’s left of it, for us. Why, there’s no telling how far—gives me the shivers, that’s how far a fellow like him can go——”

“Me, too ... right down my spine,” cried Emma, and did shudder a little quite cozily, between her shoulder blades.

“Know something? Well, if you don’t, I’ll tell you. Man named Bill Slade down in our town, newcomer from Indianapolis; nice fellow, quite a promoter from what I understand, and bringing some good capital behind him for a garbage-incinerator project he’s backing, well, that fellow sat next to me at Business Men’s Club lunch other day. One thing brought on another and finally, talking over the Republican state ticket, this fellow says to me, he says, ‘You’re not by any chance related to Henry Schuyler, down Centralia, are you?’ ‘No,’ says I, ‘excepting he happens to be my brother,’ I says to him, just like that. Could have knocked that fellow over with a feather. ‘Well sir,’ he says, ‘there’s a fellow, they tell me, could have the biggest political plums in this state, if he’d a mind to. Why, I hear, if he wasn’t such a queer duck for hiding behind a bushel-basket—why, sir, they tell me that brother of yours, with his slant on things and his reputation for having been the inside brains on everything from water-power to franchise in the state for the last ten years, why, sir,’ Bill Slade says to me, ‘why, sir, a fellow like that there brother of yours, proper handling, can go far. Why, sir,’ Bill Slade says to me, he says, ‘What this state needs is more brainy men like him with hindsight, and fore. A fellow indifferent enough to glory to be able to refuse to let his party tweak his nose and lead him. Why, sir, a fellow like that, proper handling, can go far!’”

“Go far!” said the Old Gentleman, on a sudden snort. “It does me a lot of good if I enter a horse in a race that’s got it in his legs to win, only he won’t leave the post.”

The family laugh broke out on that, and Morton Milliken, entering in corduroys and hip-boots just in time to catch the drift, seated himself beside Emma and placed the large sprawl of his hand against her shoulder.

“What Henry needs is a little political catnip,” he said with the sort of disinterested amiability characteristic of him.

“Yes,” said Henry. “It’s a great game, if you weaken ... enough.”

“Oh well,” said Phil and pushed back his chair with a toss of his napkin toward the center of the table, which his mother caught up and neatly folded, “I don’t see why I am the only one seems to be taking this thing seriously——”

“No, no, son, we all——”

“What say you, Henriette?” cried Phil, suddenly finding her out with his bulging eager eyes, where she sat quietly, a little out of the group around the table, her chair pushed a discreet few inches to the rear, as if to suggest that even though she was a privileged friend of the family, after all, even so close a friend must know her place. “Seems to me, if anybody is entitled to a say around here on this subject, it ought to be you! What say you to Henry’s making little of everything big that comes his way?”

There was Phil for you! Every time! The family drew in a simultaneous breath of embarrassed dismay. Leave it to Phil to overstep. To go too far. The same bungling tongue that doubtless kept matting up his business affairs. The one wrong thing, here it came. The wrong thing that Phil could usually be trusted not to leave unsaid. Sooner or later he would not fail. The composite breath of the family was a pained and embarrassed one.

All except Henriette and Henry. Strangely enough the long, rather spinster-like face of Henriette was not unlike Henry’s in its lantern-like contour. A face shaped somewhat like the sole of a foot, and that even in its twenties had had no particular youth or age to it. At this time Henriette’s face was practically what it would be at forty-six, even to the coloring of the brightly brown bangs. Frizzed ones, worn unfashionably above handsome brows. There was about her, and remained even after she had ceased to teach, the odor of the fifth-grade schoolroom.[13]

Chalk-dust seemed to hang on Henriette’s skin, making it pale and brittle. And chalk seemed forever against her finger-tips, which made her brush them together lightly of a dryness that had a tiny harsh sound to it. She wore a shirtwaist dress of dark-blue silk, with polka-dot collars and cuffs; and a round bag made of tiny steel beads hung from her belt after the fashion of the day.

Except for the fact that she fumbled at this chatelaine, there was nothing about Henriette to denote the flutter of heartbeat underneath the blue silk at this spot light of a remark thrown suddenly upon what might be regarded as her equivocal position of intimacy with the family.

“If Henriette Simpson and Henry Schuyler aren’t engaged, they ought to be,” was about as far as local insinuation could possibly stretch to the apparently impeccable friendship of these two.

To the wrongness of Phil’s question, Henriette revealed an illuminating row of slim, beautifully white teeth.

“Seems to me, Phil,” she said, “that Henry is a pretty fair master of his own soul.”

“Staunch words, friend-ally,” said Henry.

“Who am I to match my judgment against his?”

“That’s what lots of us would like to know,” growled Phil cryptically.

There was a long, stunned moment after that, nothing said, except that over the back of Henry’s neck, so that he put up his hand as if to stem it, there rolled a flush.

To David, lying flat on his stomach, heels waving, and his bright, square gaze carefully averted from his mother’s fluttering one, that rush of red across the back of his brother’s neck was like the running-up of a flag. It was fascinating to have seen it happen. He bored with his bright gaze against the spot, waiting to see what next. When the red that did not belong there faded out, it was disappointing. It just blinked out. Like a light.

“... No siree—neither Democrat or Republican——” Phil was saying to more stamping of fist—“no siree—neither Democrat or Republican——”

“Nor,” said Bek.

“Henry,” said Dave in a shrill voice that he threw into the group, “to be a Republicrun, does it mean to run the Republic?”

“Davey, go to bed!”

Henry had a peculiar kind of ingrowing laugh. Davey loved to watch it. From the carpet-sofa, he could see it begin. Had he been silly? Well, to be a Republicrun could mean to run the Republic. Henry’s was sure to be a silent laugh, almost an imperceptible one, except for the heaving of the shoulders. There was something furtive about Henry’s laughter. There was something about laughter that seemed to make Henry ashamed. He seldom, if ever, showed his teeth. Curiously, again, they were strangely like Henriette’s in shape. Long. Only quite yellow and twice the size of hers. A clean old-ivory yellow. When he laughed, he kept his lips down carefully over them; and, as if from the effort, tears sprang into his eyes and the color dyed his face in splotches. It was altogether a sort of a contortion of a suppressed impulse. He laughed now until the tears in his eyes took form and began to roll, and he had to fumble for the rear trousers pocket of his nondescript gray suit and fish out the great square of cotton handkerchief which his mother ironed for him into the four large folds he liked.

It impressed the family to see Henry laugh. Because he laughed seldom. There was nothing about Davey’s remark that had appealed to the risibilities of any of them. It had only happened to strike Henry’s, probably tapping him of nervous strain to let it rumble out in laughter. Just the same, it was the signal for family-hilarity to mount.

“What’s the joke?” said the Old Gentleman, who himself loved to be the one to arouse family-risibilities and then pretend to feel aggrieved. “Here we sit! We’ve got a fine fifteen-hand trotting-horse, there’s the finest pail of water in the state before him. He won’t drink!”

“You can lead a horse to water,” cried Emma, leaping brightly, “but you cannot ...”

“Yes,” said Morton, and patted her hand.

“... but you cannot—make him drink,” she concluded, on a soprano shriek, and not to be done out of her _bon mot_.

Henry cleared his throat, and with head lowered, set his piercing eyes upon the Old Gentleman’s apple. The family knew precisely what the Old Gentleman was going to do about that now nude apple. He was going to plug it with his penknife as you would a watermelon, impale each segment upon its tip, and pop them, one by one, into his mouth, for short, audible mastications. The women hated the grinding sound he made, the men scarcely noticed.

“You’re exactly right, Father,” said Henry, strumming his fingers, and his eye unswerving upon the apple. “I’m not thirsty. You people make the mistake of reckoning without your host. Naturally enough, I suppose, under the circumstances. Except you, Bek. I should hardly expect this of you, after the number of times we have been over this sort of thing together.”

“This is different, Henry. This is big stakes. Not just local chicken-feed.”

“It isn’t different. It is just another plan to project me into public life.”

“Sooner or later, Henry, the world will find its way to your door.”

“If what you say is true, Bek, then it must do just that. I am not the man to run out into the public marts to meet it.”

“Man alive, who’s sending you out into the public marts? You talk like Julius Cæsar or one of those guys in a toga. The party for which you’ve never turned a hand comes to your very door to seek you out.”

“‘Know thyself’ isn’t just a copy-book line, Phil, that you used to write in Spencerian fifteen times after school. It’s about the darnedest good advice was ever packed into two words. I’m onto myself sufficiently to realize that my greatest service to my family, my state, my country, does not lie in the public service of holding office.”

“I’ll be dog-goned if it don’t look to me like your idea of your ‘greatest service’ is handing out free advice to everybody from a poor-white squatter who has had his hog poisoned, to a state commission which needs expert advice on a franchise situation. And a pin for your pains! That may be service all right, but its damned idiotic service. All that gives a diamond ring any value is the fact that there’s a price-tag stuck on. Start giving them away, and see how long they keep their value.”

“You’re right, Phil. But hang it, for the life of me I can’t seem as interested in intrinsic values.”

“For the life of you,” said the Old Gentleman, “is the best reason a man has got to be interested in values. In-trinsic—if it means what I think it means, is what you try to forget when you’re trying to sell a fellow a bronze medal.”

“Puppa!” bleated Mathilda.

“Pah!” said the Old Gentleman, dusting his hands free of apple. “Don’t worry. I’m not joking, Mother. If Henry chooses to live and die a poor nobody, that’s his own business.”

“It’s nothing of the sort, Father. It’s the family’s business, too.”

“Well, I’ve never asked any help of my children and I hope to God I’ll never have to.”

“There’s not one of us would fail you, Father,” said pretty Emma.

“I know that. But all the same, I hope to God I never have to.”

“There are men in life, Father, who belong on the captain’s bridge, and there are men who direct the course of a ship, and there are men who build ships, and there are men who raise money to create ships. My job is in the engine-room of a ship. As Phil says, these matters we are discussing are not my own business alone. I have you to consider. But I know myself, Father. I can serve you well from the lower decks of this old boat we’re bobbing along in, but not if you force me out of my greasy old overalls into brass buttons and try to proclaim me captain, when I have the heart of an engineer. I want to serve as passionately as you all want me to serve. But in my own way.”

“What way is that? Hollering down a well? Hiding behind a bushel-basket? Back-door diplomacy?”

“Phil!” cried Henriette, as if she could endure no more—“You don’t understand Henry—none of you—I mean—oh, I mean you can’t tamper with the course of a river or the course of the sun—oh, I mean—what do I mean?” and sat back with her knuckles pressed against her lips as if to stem what further might come indiscreetly rushing to them.

“What Henriette means,” said Henry, stepping in calmly, as if to build a wall of words between her and her flooding embarrassment, “is that my way is the way of a man, Phil, who knows the limits of his strength and the extent of his weaknesses.”

“A man, when the big men of his state and even from Washington look him up in his little office in a small town, don’t talk about his weaknesses.”

“But, Father, therein lies my strength. I am a spectator. I stand by. I can develop wisdom only by attaining knowledge, and my kind of a brain can achieve knowledge by contemplating from the side-lines. I’m like that old fellow Cincinnatus, Father, in one respect anyhow. I think best behind my plow. And my plow is that little old yellow desk up over a hardware-store. It’s the nature of the beast. Surely you must understand.”

“I understand that no one with the brains you’re supposed to have, would turn down the opportunity to put some of those brains to turning a wheel. I’m not saying the attorneyship in itself is the biggest plum in the world. It’s what it can and will lead to. Power, man. That’s what counts.”

“That’s Henry’s whole point, Phil, and as usual, you’ve gone elaborately out of your way to miss it. He’s just finished saying that his power, he believes, lies behind the machine of state.”

“That’s it exactly, Bek.”

“Pah, wouldn’t give a nickel for that behind-the-throne stuff. I’d rather have been Marc Antony than Mark Hanna. Believe me, the up-and-coming man of today is the up-and-going one. Get into big business, or politics. Not only get your hand on the lever that controls the machine, but _be_ the machine. Huh—if I had your chance——”

“If ifs and ands,” said Emma, and smiled at her brother—“were pots and pans——”

“You want this town to furnish bond to secure factories and foundries, don’t you, Henry?”

“Yes, Centralia’s water-power warrants it.”

“Good. You believe that the grade-crossing conditions in this town are a menace to public safety and should be radically dealt with! You believe that outside capital should be attracted into the state. You believe, according to an article of yours in some law magazine called _Civic Inventory_, that Elihu Perkins quoted at the Chamber of Commerce, up home last week, that towns under half a million population, Centralia for instance, should be run by about twelve members of a board of estimate and apportionment. Well and good! You believe, according to that article, that in making a budget, the civic organization must be the hub, bringing all the civic interests together like the spokes in a wheel. Mighty fine way you put it, ‘The spokes in a wheel.’ Well, you try just blowing off steam about it in a magazine article, and then being in a position to pull strings, that can set some of those theories into practice, and see which gets you there quickest.”

“I know, Phil. Every man who shares Blue Plate luncheons with you at the Business Men’s Club agrees with that.”

“Bet your life they do, because they’re the go-getters without your brains to go-get! Yessiree, you disbelieve in capital punishment, don’t you? You say Prohibition is bound to come in this country, but you favor a light-wine-and-beer plank, but only one that the people themselves demand, don’t you? You’re watching that Hague show over there, aren’t you? They come to you to get your opinion on the Johnston extradition-matter, don’t they? You were the mainspring behind the Centralia municipal-bond issue for sewerage-extensions and additional fire-protection, weren’t you? You believe that the Taft administration is in a position to do important things for the country, don’t you? Well? Well? From up over your hardware-store, what wheel does it all turn? No wheel! You spend your brain-money like water, and the other fellow cashes in on it. Bah, that’s not even good Americanism!”

“Phil,” said Rebekka, regarding him with a slow, tired tolerance that made her eyes crinkle, “you’re a fool. Perhaps it is Henry, of all of us, who is truly American. Show me a man in this town, in this county, in this state, with enough idealism in him to turn his face away from the marts of men, if he had the ability and the opportunity Henry has. Would you turn yours away?”

“No, by God. _Gad_, Mother. _Gad_, and I’m not ashamed to say so. Maybe Father might. Hanged if I know. With all his shrewdness, I’ve seen him do sky-larking things in business that you couldn’t account for. He’d be a far richer man today except for those blind spots in his dealings, like staying out of the Fulton Market project that time, for fear of having a hand in damaging Milliken’s residential property along Third Street when there was a garage already horning in. That’s what they call in the classics, tilting at windmills. Guess you know all about that deal, Morton?”

“I do seem to remember something about it.”

“I never knew, Pap, up to a year ago, from old man Grokin in Springfield, that you went flat broke the year Bek was born, trying to save some low-down crook of a cattle-dealer, who had double-crossed you, from going to pen.”

“Why, Father, did you really?” cried Emma, her mouth falling open in easy surprise.

“Sure he did. That’s fine. That’s great. But it was tilting at windmills. Didn’t save the dirty little crook from dying in the pen, so Grokin told me, did it?”

“But I didn’t put him there.”

“Why, take Fulton Market today, what you bet, Morton, that your old man would think even better of Pap than he does, if Pap had jumped in and cleaned up on that deal.”

“I’ve never discussed it with Father, Phil.”

“Maybe Henry is a chip off the old block, eh, Pap?”

“Henry is chip off the old block, but the block is not me. It’s the block of his own hard-headedness. I don’t go into a deal that will shove meat-market business property next door to my friend’s residential holdings, and ease my conscience telling it there’s a garage already there; but I don’t hesitate over the difference between doing something and getting the honor for it myself, or doing it and letting somebody else get the honor for it. If it was me in Henry’s place, I would say to myself you’re a fool if you don’t take all the honors they pile on you.”

“Now you’re shouting, Pap!”

“But if I was in Henry’s place, and felt like he does about it, then I would tell the whole business of them to go straight to hell.”

“Puppa! Davey, go to bed!”

“You’re swell, Papa,” said Rebekka, winking broadly, brazenly and with an open grimace toward Phil.

That seemed to startle the family plumage. Clara, sitting forward on the edge of her chair, with her china-blue eyes dots of exclamation, and Emma looking like a broody hen that had suddenly been startled off her nest.

“All right, have it your own way, Pap, only I say again, Father ought to be as rich a man today as there is in the county, instead of just bobbing along, middling well-off and putting up what he can lay hands on as collateral to help somebody else get by.”

“That’s the least, Phil.”

“Easy enough, Henry, for a bachelor to look at matters this way, and regard money as only a secondary consideration. Guess if the truth is known, that’s the answer to the mystery why you stay bachelor.”

There was Phil again with his turtle-shot gesture of head toward Henriette! The family fingers curved inward, of instinct to throttle him.

“Yes siree, easy enough for a bachelor, but there’s not a member of this family with his head high enough above water financially to see shore. We’re a funny crowd thataway. I’m not here to talk about myself, but take me, for instance. You don’t need me to tell you, Pap, that with capital in back of me, I’d be in a position to ride in on a land-boom in my town that would put it on the map.”

“No, Phil, I don’t need you to tell me you need money.”

“There you go, always ready to dig the spurs into me. But look at yourself, Father. Generally acknowledged to shrewdest cattleman in the state, natural kind of smartness to you that can’t be learned in schools—what have you got to show for your years and years of rising at dawn, trapesing through snow and sleet and rain while other folks are asleep—what’s it got you, compared to what you ought to have?”

“I’ve got this much. I don’t owe a penny that I can’t show land-collateral for. I’ve got a name as clean as a whistle. I’ve got——”

“Of course you have, Father. That’s just the point. Here’s as straight-dealing a family as there is. Father’s word as good as his bond. Misses-out making himself a rich man in the Fulton Market deal, out of purely ethical consideration for a friend....”

“That’ll be about enough of that, Phil,” drawled Morton; “nobody’s contesting that point.”

“Sorry, Mort. No reflections on your old man.”