Chapter VI: Part 6

It meant, with Mark Milliken’s and the Old Gentleman’s reciprocal habit of calling upon each other for loans of cash and land-collateral, that cash was pretty usually at low ebb. Often, indeed, for the Schuylers, at least, it meant an old story of fending off the little crisis of having to sell a parcel of land. The land-acquisitive Schuylers! They came by it honestly. In the Austrian Tyrol, generations of Schuylers had somehow managed to own an acre, even if the only other property-holding was a sow. Mathilda’s great-grandfather had owned an acre which was so meticulously tilled that it resembled a colored geometric drawing. That acre had passed immaculately from father to son. Mathilda Schuyler’s hands were still horny with her girlhood part in coaxing and tilling it.

The Old Gentleman’s battered safe, in one corner of the dining-room, and the drawers of his still-more-battered old desk beside it, and the stacks of deeds and notes, current and canceled, bore documentary evidence of the years and vitality that had been dedicated to trying to make real estate real, in terms of yield.

Bek’s love of land was ingrained. So was Phil’s. Twice in five years the family’s cash resources, scant beyond credulity, had been rallied around Phil’s love-of-land ventures, which ultimately were to make local history.[21]

This summer of fright, threat of hoof-and-mouth disease, and general money-tightness, Davey, to save an extra hand’s wage, was put to tending the South Pasture flocks during school vacation.

Long, slow, sun-drenched days, that vacation after his first year in public school, with the earth rippling under him as he lay flat against it until he could seem to feel it pushing softly, like a breathing flank. Days that moved so slowly from the east where they arrived pinkly, to the west where they departed redly, that they seemed to stand stock-still for hours during their middle, pouring into him their warmth, their hot lush smells. They had a taste, too, all their own, these motionless days.

Sometimes, when he rolled over on his stomach away from the light, as it became unendurably strong, and all of him seemed gathering the heat like a disk, the taste of the earth came crawling into his mouth.

The taste of the land rolling, billowing, and riding him along like a petal upon its current. The toes bit in. The nostrils breathed in. The body of the boy wiggled down—wiggled in—close to turf and earth.

At twelve o’clock, Trina, who wore a sunbonnet with a starched visor that buttoned on, came down to South Meadow with a tin pail of lunch. Good, square chunks of his mother’s bread, smeared with apple-butter. Strips of bacon and sometimes strips of the rind itself, tough enough to be chewed the afternoon through for the last squeeze of flavor.

The tussle with Teddy, as he bounded up from keeping tidy the edges of the flock, to fasten his teeth into that remnant of chewed-out rind, forelegs squatted, tail high, white-fanged, eyeballs bulging, ears laid! Then for the grand jerk! Gorgeously futile jerk. Teddy with his teeth sunk into the leathery morsel and snarls mixed up with his breathing, beginning to spin!

The boy and the dog. Teddy out on the horizontal. Sustained momentum. Terrific momentum. Spinning boy. Spinning dog. Riot of sunlit afternoon, with the dirty sheep grinding their teeth in a low thunder and nibbling their strange-eyed heads off.

They had no sense. Teddy was better at making them herd neatly than Grime, the eleven-year-old sheep-dog. All you had to do was to circle the flock once every hour or so to close them in a little tighter, Grime or Teddy yapping at the narrow ankles of any straggler, or Davey flecking at his flock with a peeled switch off a plane tree.

Otherwise, just hours and hours of his flesh close to flesh of earth. Lying face-up or on a slope against which the sun banged. When it rained, and the smells that had been baked into grass and tree-bole and leafage came out in cool breath, there was the hay-rick to burrow into, the sheep gathered pat as a mat beneath the spread of two maple trees that sort of linked arms.

There were books, too, which he concealed evenings in a little spring house down by the Tarkington hedge. Books off of Henry’s shelves. Sometimes, if a down-pour came along, or a quick, thick thunder shower, there was a scurrying of dogs and sheep and boy to cover of the hay-rick and interleafing maple trees, and the books remained out, usually face-up, and were drenched, and then, as they dried in a quick, repentant sun, warped.

There were books on Henry’s shelves twice their normal size. Volumes that bulged from the damp of the spring house or from hasty showers. _Around the World in Eighty Days_ was as bedraggled-looking as something the cat might have dragged in. _The Voyage of Magellan_ had a great blister on its cover; and the most exciting book in the world, that meant everything when Henry intoned it in his slow, careful voice, but meant so little when Dave tried to pick it out for himself, _The Life of the Bee_, had a great rent down its cloth binding. A combination of damp and Teddy’s teeth.

Henry never remonstrated as his shelves of books began to wave and careen and warp.

He used to plant himself before them first thing when he came home evenings, regard the new vacancies and inundations with a wide, slow smile lowering half of his face, so that his jaw hung over his cravat.

Curious relationship, when Davey was seven and Henry was four times that seven, and more.

FOOTNOTES:

[21] ... I suppose it can be said that the years of our childhood (years that of course excluded Davey) were Father’s palmy years. If, with our proverbial family-capacity for land-poverty, there were times when Father felt actual pinch for ready money, we children knew nothing of it. Excepting Davey, everyone of us was given the full advantage of a grade and a High School education, to say nothing of Henry, who took his Law and Bachelor of Arts degrees at State University.

Phil was probably the most energetic of us all. Restless, ambitious, impulsive in a dangerous way, up to his fortieth year, he was a source of constant anxiety to my father, who had scant patience with his daring land-ventures, and who came to his assistance only after terrific flares of temper.

At this writing, and while my dear brother lies desperately ill at his country home thirty miles out of Springfield, I suppose he ranks as one of the richest men of the state. I actually remember the day that dear Phil’s tide turned, so to speak. The day that my Stevey, with one hundred dollars in his pocket, closeted his Uncle Phil, who happened to be in Centralia on the difficult matter of borrowing twenty-five hundred dollars from the bank, and put up to him a proposition for a landing-field and hangar that had to do with an aëromail parcel-post-delivery scheme.... Ah me, what acorns of days those were....

_Chapter Thirteen_

The day was like a crystal fish-globe, crammed with light. On all sides the horizon had a transparency. At noon, when there were no shadows, it was like lying at the bottom of the transparency, munching thick, white bread that you had to tear because it was cut twice as deep as your teeth. It was like the most perfect kind of drowning imaginable. It was like the piece Dora Tarkington recited so shyly Friday afternoons from the school-platform, her skirts maneuvered constantly between her thumbs and forefingers:

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams,
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so all the night-tide, I lie down by the side,
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Anyway, if it wasn’t like that—it reminded you vaguely—of a sep-ul-chre by the sea. No, not that! This drowning of the long afternoon was in a sea of blue and silky air that jammed the enormous fish-bowl with the nicest kind of universe.

If you slitted your eyes and lay on your stomach, down on the green floor of the bowl were the backs of the grazing sheep. Dirty foam. And no shadows. Just light. Light. Light. Light was grand. You wished you were made of chicken-wire. That was to be all light.

And Teddy, while you lay with your eyes closed, panting short and quick and hot at your side, and taking sudden rough licks at your hands or wallowing on his back, so that without opening your eyes you could hear the nice noise his rough coat made against the nibbled grass.

The days were as long and as slow and as big as the eternity they sang about in the hymn-books of Sunday mornings in the vestry-room where you “had” Miss Lare in Sunday-school. Eternity was full of God. What was God full of? The hymn didn’t tell that. Henry would know. Yet, somehow, that was the one question of all you would not ask Henry. God was something private. He wasn’t quite that way to Henry. Not that Henry had ever said so. It was something you just kind of knew.

Henry’s _World’s Almanac_, face-down, rustled when his flung-out hand fiddled with the leaves. Earth pressing warmly into one’s face made it difficult to even delve into its panorama that helped so to while away the hours. The Territories. Descriptive. Hawaii—Territory of. Area 6,449 square miles. Capital, Honolulu.—The crossroads of the Pacific—Henry’s map showed the mountains and the volcanoes. Hawaii had not the right of statehood—Henry said—the right of statehood?—the brain reeled lazily—life was just a swinging foam of the dirty backs of the sheep. Of the _World’s Almanac_. Of a blur of last night’s impressions of Magellan skirting the fringed edges of the Philippine Islands, to the guiding waggle of Henry’s long forefinger across the page. Of Lincoln on the rostrum, delivering the Gettysburg Speech that hung framed over Henry’s mantelpiece. Lincoln’s face was the shape of the bottom of a foot. Lincoln made it grand to have a face the shape of the bottom of a foot.

Long, dozy high-noons of munching the deep bread, with your eyes closed, and high-noon lapping over into afternoon. Teddy squatting himself flat on your chest, and the two of you, for the briefest moment while Grime kept watch, dozing off, nose to nose, eye to eye, breath to breath.

It was in the middle of one of these June-drenched afternoons of perfect, drowning peace, that Teddy, who was a terror for detecting sounds, leaped off of Davey’s chest and ran down barking toward the spring-house.

Once before he had routed out Stevey and Claire, who had been seated down there without Davey ever having perceived their coming. They must have strolled along by the creek-banks, where trees, skirting South Meadow, blotted out a brief moment of sky-line.

That was the time Davey had lain on his stomach at the top of the slope and shouted to them while Teddy whizzed downhill.

Poor Davey, in the unwonted excitement of having human figures walk into the lull of one of those long afternoons, had tried to lure them, with cat-call and shouts, to the top of his slope. But Stevey and Claire had hurried away so strangely, and not friendly at all, into the concealment of the bush that lined the creek. And, presently, there were their silhouettes once more, hurrying homeward.

Now Teddy had found them out again. You could see Stevey’s head coming cautiously out from the other side of the spring-house and the yellow that showed beside him was the edge of Claire’s skirt. Stevey was stooping as if for a stone—surely not—

“Stevey! Claire! You—hoo—come on up. Stevey—come on up—not hot up here. Come on—up—’s me—Dave!”

Foolish whirligig of Teddy wanting to leap and yap and dash himself against these friends whom he recognized—pulling at the yellow of Claire’s skirt—hurling his body against Stevey—yelping....

What was Stevey—what was Stevey—doing? No. No. No!

But it was then that there crashed through the brain of Davey, shouting from his hilltop, a sort of an insanity. Something locked his breathing so that it could not get through. A paralysis. Sight became a blur. Pain became a devil.

Stevey was kicking Teddy. Body-blows. The yelps that leaped out were kicked out. At first, under the rain of blows, Teddy had started to run, bellying to the ground, bewildered, full of pain. But Stevey had followed him up. With terrible, terrifying, careening strides, that zig-zagged crazily, and now Teddy was lying on his side against a salt-rock, pinioned there by one of Stevey’s boots, while the other was kicking that soft spot above Teddy’s ribs that made the yelps leap out. And the world was gashed with those yelps and the dancing horror of Stevey’s foot, and the yelps ran into you and then out of you like blood, and Claire was beating with her futile girl’s fists at Stevey’s shoulders and still Stevey, with his teeth bared back, was kicking—kicking—

Teddy’s eyes were being kicked, and the yelps were out of his eyes—that was how it seemed to Dave in the midst of the insanity of seeing black.

Twice as he tore screaming and strangling down the slope, he fell as if into the spinning yelps and the spinning insanity that gave him speed.

How Claire screamed! In high, harsh sleigh bells, and by now the yelps were like a shower of red-hot butcher-knives that leaped out of the dog and into one’s breathing. And breathing became a delirium that pulled and roared and exploded in blasts, and you were plunging through high waters—tears—and Teddy down there, in a crouch beside the salt-rock, was being kicked into and kicked into.

Then, as he tore up and threw himself across that small crouch of his dog, one of the kicks intended for Teddy went into David’s thigh, so that, with Teddy in his arms, he went down flat, winded, gagging, the color of chalk for the moment, jerking Stevey to his senses with a suddenness that seemed to make him, too, the color of chalk.

There were only the wheezing noises Stevey made as he stood looking down at the sprawl of Dave, with Teddy in his arms, and the small sound of Claire as she began to cry, with her face in her hands.

The horrible, pain-riddled afternoon, where before there had been just the peaceful translucence of a goldfish bowl filled with niceness of universe. Stevey, with sweat making his white face glisten with the strange pallor of an arc-light, continuing to stare sickishly down at the sprawl of Davey. His lips kept twitching so, as though they could crawl along through his cheeks and on—away—

Teddy whimpering as though the very yelps had been bruised. That was what kept the insanity boiling, even after the wind had been knocked from Dave. Teddy trying to lick his hands, between bruises of whimpers. Incredible pain of that. It made him leap to his feet. It made him beat with his fists, claw with his nails, batter with his palms against the rather dreadful pallor of Stevey’s face, which felt sticky and sickening, with a clammy kind of sweat that was cold. It made Dave, with Teddy swooped up into his arms, run hiccoughing and strangling through the red-speckled, hot afternoon; run blindly, with dust caking his tongue and his tears, and making the world a slime of horror and pain.

The destination of Bek was instinct rather than impulse. Somewhere, in the terror of things, she must be waiting calm and true and cool. Out of the pain and the chaos, out of the hurt world full of the red specks and yelps from a kicked dog, there was Bek! It was like lugging a sheep, his long legs dangling, his head lolling so, that from the open mouth the saliva spun off the tongue in flying rills. There was that red, wet spot against Teddy’s side, that kept Dave’s hands sticky. It was a pain-crazy world. Crazy world of Teddy’s dangling head, as if he were fainting as he whimpered. Crazy world of stones that bit up into bare feet. Of up hill and down dale, through strangulation of rage and horror. Fields that had flowed so placidly about him, all his life, now seemed to rise up, to throw him, to cut him with lurking stones, to stretch and to stretch endlessly between him and the haven of Bek.

Dave wanted Bek. Through the strangling passion, the first he had ever known, that seemed washing away the roots of his small heart, Dave wanted Bek.[22]

As luck had it, she was striding along the cinder-path to the house from just having superintended the loading of six calves up an incline and onto a truck that was to carry them to Centralia Junction for shipment.

At the scuttling sound Davey made tearing through the cinders, and the low whimpering of Teddy, she turned in time to catch them as they hurled against her skirts, foamy saliva streaming from the pair of them.

“Why, Dave!”

She had never seen passion before. She had never seen tears lash at a face, and that a child’s face, and leave it so rigid and bony. He was a knot of strangulation; and, for the moment, the fear smote her, what if his breathing should get too clogged!... “David! What?”

“He—he—he!” screamed David, “He—he——”

“He what, boy? He—who—what? Davey!”

“He—he—he——”

“Stop it! You’ll choke! He what——”

“He hurted him,” shrieked David. “He hurted him.” And thrust out the body of his dog so that the side which panted and was moist and red from having been kicked in, was between them. “I’ll—I’ll run him through with a pitchfork from the barn—I’ll get a pitchfork after him——”

The screaming, childish voice. There was that constant fear that his breathing could not get through. The mounting hysteria of his rage. The tear-lashed face streaked with runnels of mud.

“Dave! Hush, do you hear? Hush, I say!”

“He—he—he—he——”

“Who, Davey?”

“Steve.”

“Steve what?” said Bek and closed her hand over her throat. “Steve what, Dave?”

“Kicked him! I’ll pitchfork him,” screamed Davey and lunged again, this time into his sister’s arms, so that she caught and shook him until his small, square teeth rattled.

“David, behave!”

“I—yi—yi.”

“Quiet. Not another sound.”

“Old Teddy——”

“Lay him out. There, on the grass. Quit your crying. Do you hear? Quit it! Get me one of those window-sponges under the porch. Dip it first. Teddy, good dog. Don’t snap, old fellow—I’m going to hurt a little bit—good old Ted.”

The long, even strokes of the sponge were enough to set him yelping, and then gamely to subside, with his forelegs held out as stiff as sticks.

“Dip the sponge again. Wash your own face there at the hydrant. Hold it under. There—old Teddy—patience——”

“Is he, Bek—to death—”

“No. Broken rib, I think. Flesh-wounds.”

“He hurted him, Bek—with kicks—”

“Sh-h-h! Get me fresh water.”

Stevey had done this unmentionable thing. Stevey had kicked in the side of a dog until a bloody tatter of his flank hung down. Stevey, who was supposed to be surveying up around North Dam had been somewhere around South Meadow instead, and had kicked in the side of a dog. And Davey, whose heart was as good as kicked in too, had seen him do it. Had not only seen his dog kicked, but had seen him kicked by Stevey!

The _terrible_ Stevey must have done that! The terrible, secret Stevey who must be kept from the knowledge of Winslow and of the family, of the community, of Davey, must be at large again. Stevey, drunk, must have done this atrocity!

“David, run into the house and fetch me my first-aid bag from the hall-closet. And, David, you won’t mind if Teddy hollers a little. Looks like I have to yank this bad old rib into place.”

“I won’t mind, Bek,” said Dave, with a smear of pain across his face and started running toward the house.

Between them they held Teddy, while Bek poked at the rib with a forefinger, and Teddy moaned and quivered; and with the dog’s head locked down between David’s small knees, Bek started winding the gauze. On the first tightening pressure, the frantic muzzle of Teddy slipped Davey’s hold and sank teeth into Bek’s arm, above the wrist. A long ooze of blood appeared slowly.

“Hold firmly, Dave. Don’t move. Teddy didn’t mean that. He thought he was biting the pain. Don’t mind the blood, Dave.”

“I—won’t.”

“Hold him firmly.”

“I—will.”

“If you faint or do anything silly, you’ll mess things up for Teddy, now that I’m getting him in his splint all righty.”

“I—won’t—”

“Try not to mind his yelping, Davey. No, No. No. Hold him firmly by the hind-legs—it’s got to hurt.”

“I will.”

Finally, he was bound and laid under the porch on an old horse blanket used for covering bulbs in autumn.

Without talk. Then there was Bek’s wrist and arm to be bound. It was hard to hold the bottle of peroxide properly above the wound and pour it on and see it bubble in with the blood, and not begin to feel squeamish all over again. The bottle kept seeming to rise up and down and the blood to be all running through one’s eyeballs in threads—except—the shame of feeling squeamish before Bek—one dared not—before—Bek—

“Now, Davey!”

“I’m all right, Bek.”

“A little more here. His teeth got snagged, you see.” Finally, the blessed relief of the gauze clamping down. The almost instantaneous spat of blood against the white made it hard for the moment, but then the winding covered that—the winding—the winding—and through the winding, the insistent impulse to slip somehow underneath the somnolent afternoon that was suddenly so slashed with the yelps of the kicked dog and the red bands of blood. Then, too, was the sickening background consciousness of forty-eight sheep with only Grime for guard.

And through the swinging sickness of it all, there suddenly was Stevey, with his face like a pat of dough before Mathilda flattened it out beneath her rolling-pin. Stevey standing beside his mother and leaning against a rain-barrel because he had to sway. It must have been the dizziness—the wanting to slip underneath it all that made Stevey seem to sway so.

Just the same, sight of him brought the old impulse back to batter, except that Bek’s hurt arm was trembling, and one must keep on winding—winding through all the red impulse——

“You’re drunk, Steve,” said Bek, without the pretense of even so much as turning her face away from Dave hearing. It couldn’t matter—now. It was the only way to explain to him that the Steve who had kicked a rib broken, was a Steve outside of himself. Evenly, and with a cold manner of appraisal, Bek repeated it, regarding her son teetering beside the rain-barrel.

There was something of enormous and omniscient calm about Bek, so casual about her gauze-bound arm, with the red spot widening, skirts tucked into boots, feet spread, strong black hair with the bluish light over it, and the enormous levelness of her eyes—the prairie-flatness; the un-undulating squareness of Bek’s gaze, pouring against the bloodshot, watering eyes of Steve. It seemed almost to grip him into standing erect, as something loose and boneless can be grabbed by the back of the neck and pulled to its feet.

Steve looked like that. Boneless.

“You’re disgustingly, bestially drunk. You’ve done a cruel terrible thing to a child and to a dog!”

“You—bad devil you,” cried David, and began to dance on his toes and make lunging, hysterical throws of his body toward Stevey—“you bad devil you——”

“Sorry—didn’t hurt him, Davey—didn’t mean to, Davey,” said Steve, trying to fasten his watering gaze upon the white-faced boy. “Sorry, Davey—shorry, Dave——”

“You bad devil——”

“Davey—go, do you hear? Stay with Teddy beneath the porch. Go!” Finally he had to be dragged there by Bek, who lifted him by the underneath of his arms. “Dave, stay with Teddy.” She left him, a silent huddle beside the silent dog, his lips still sucked back against his teeth and the flanges of his nose sea-green. And Stevey, watching her retrace her steps toward him, wavered as she came, tottering a little, like a scarecrow in a wind-swept field.

“You’re a drunken—sot, Steve.”

“Well—so was Cæsar—the Julius one—many a time. Excuse me, Mother—didn’t mean—that——”

Her throat ached for him. His young, flawed handsomeness. The black bang of his hair, down over his eyes. Soft shirt open at the throat. Legs slim in puttees as he had worn them on the campus at Agricultural College.

Olive pallor. Gray eyes, with black flecks like his grandfather Schuyler’s, behind the too-quick batting of black lashes. A slim, handsome, insolent drunkenness. A fastidiousness to Steve, even in his cups.

“Where did you get—it?”

“The stuff? For God’s sake, Mother, don’t catechize me like a revivalist. Where did I get the filthy stuff? Ha! The gin mills have got your fair-haired boy. The dens of vice. The cesspools of iniquity. Dens of vice and cesspools of iniquity. Where is my wandering boy tonight—oh, Lord——”

“I can’t fight it alone much longer, Steve. Your father will have to know. The family, too. It is getting beyond me single-handed.”

“What they don’t know, old-dear Mother, won’t hurt them. They’re safe in sobriety. They’re so damn safe in sobriety.”

“Where did you get it, Steve? You promised to come to me when—when you had to have it.”

“Yah—yah—with my throat on fire, with the lining of me on fire—begging a thimbleful from the bar of the holier-than-thou.”

“Where did you get it?”

“Em’s.”

“You mean—Claire—gave it to you?”

“Yes, I mean Claire.”

“You got Claire—innocent, unsuspecting Claire to dole you out drink from her mother’s cellarette?”

“Betrayed the hand that quenched me,” cried Steve, and threw out a mock gesture.

“Steve, look at me. You and your cousin have been meeting clandestinely for a month. Ever since you’re home.”

“Interesting way to meet. Hadn’t thought of it that way before. Clandeshly—clandesthly—clandesh—ly——”

Suddenly Bek’s hand leaped out. The one with the red-stained gauze.

“Hurt your hand, Mother? Been indulging in one of your feminine pastimes like hay-forking, I take it. Poor old Mum’s hand.” He started to carry it to his lips on a grand over-balanced bow—and teetered.

“Steve! Steve! Pull yourself together. For God’s sake, Steve—poor little Claire—you like this——”

“What do you mean, poor darling? She’s as fine and as sweet as gold—if gold is as sweet as I think it is, seeing’s I’ve never been on close terms with enough of it. What do you mean, poor?”

“I mean, Stevey—I’ve seen it happening day by day. You two. Grown-up and cousins!”

“What do you suspect, my dear mother Bek?”

“Suspect?”

“Yes, old dear—you have been suspecting—now haven’t you?”

“Change your manner to me.”

“Sorry, Mother. But you have been suspecting?”

“Only with my eyes. Not with my heart.”

“Well, she’s a darling!”

“Steve!”

“Yes, I’ve been meeting her. Actually seeing my own cousin—how would you call it in movie lingo—er—ah yes, clandeshtinely. Safternoon. Many safternoons. Yessir—when everybody in the world, except the canniest person in the world, known as my mother, thought I was at the dam, and that Claire was at her this-ing or that-ing, or whatever it is small-town, young-lady school-teachers do with their late afternoons. We, we—the darling—guess I’m pretty drunk for admitting it——”

“Guess you are, Steve.”

“Guess I’m pretty damn drunk for saying so.”

“Guess you are pretty—damn drunk——”

“Well, I like her. She likes me. Dammit, a fellow’s got no right to stay sober. Makes a mollycoddle out of him. Saps his courage. But I’m not afraid. Of you. Of the family. I’ll march her up to Thanksgiving dinner in the House on Sycamore Street and face the whole battalion of you. I’ll tell the family. I’ll tell the world. She’s a darling—even if she does come from the horse-faced Millikens. She’s a darling. I want her!”

“Steve,” said Bek, in her foggy voice, and went up to him and took hold of his teetering shoulders to steady them, and tried to pinion his eyes with her own. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I’m drunk enough to have the courage to say what I’m afraid to say when I’m sober. I want her. She wants me!”

“You’re drunk, I tell you. Listen, Steve, Mother understands.”

“Mother doesn’t. Mother’s too damn strong to understand.”

“Steve!”

“Mother’s not human. I am. Claire is. Mother’s noble. From the too-damned-noble, deliver me. Sorry, Mother. Excuse. Mother’s always shielding. Mother-the-shielder. Nobody’s got to be shielded from me. If Father’s going to have hydrophobia over me, let him have it. If Gramp is going to yell—let him yell! Won’t be the first time. If the whole holier-than-thou house of Schuyler has got to be protected from me, dammit, I’m not going to do the protecting. To hell with this salt-of-the-earth stuff. Where does it get you? Suppressions. Repressions. Listen, world, I’m in love with my cousin, my first-cousin, even if it gives Father hydrophobia and Gramp the screaming yammers. It’s a grand idea, Mother, walking through life and keeping it as calm as Dickery-dickery-dock, the mouse ran up the clock, for the whole family. Grand, if you want to make yourself the go-between—and take the buffs for the whole clan. Strong. Strong. Noble. But here’s one blow the family’s got to take square in the solar plexus. I’m in love with my first-cousin. She wants me. I want her.”

Bek took hold of her son’s arm with her own blood-stained one and shook him until his teeth clicked. “You’re a drunken fool!”

“Tell me that again, darling. Didn’t hear it the first time. Claire knows it too. That’s part of the infernal glory of a woman in love. She cannot help forgiving. Mother-love. Sex-love ... both pretty much alike, when it comes to the quality of mershy.”

“Steve!”

“’Course. Forgot. Sex is unmentionable in a respectable world that has been created by sex.”

“You and Claire wouldn’t dare to do a thing like that to the family. Your silly little yellow-haired cousin. Of course she thinks she’s in love with you. Always has. I’ve known it, only don’t you fool yourself, she’s too much of a Schuyler to be guilty of——”

“Guilty of what?”

“Guilty of dangerous social behavior like marrying your own cousin. That’s—almost what the Bible would call——”

“That’s vice! I know it all before you say it. You’re in the intellectual backwoods, same as the others. You’re no different except in strength. Intermarriage of cousins. That old myth went out of date with antimacassars. Ask Henry! Everybody who’s even half-abreast with the times knows that the horrible thing we used to call inbreeding needn’t be horrible at all. You’ve seen it among your own cattle. Can even strengthen the breed. Ask any biologist. Pff! That for the first-cousin myth. If I marry Claire, you let biology, not the family, worry about progeny.”

When Bek spoke next, standing with her feet in their wide plant, her hurt arm gripping her son’s, her face almost touching his so that he could feel the shape of her low, intense words in breath against his face, it was as if, through her son’s fogged brain, her force were blasting itself and staggering him sober. “Biology, piffle. Isms! Sophomore-twaddle. You’re not dry yet behind your ears!”

“I won’t be made ridiculous!”

“Too late. You’re already very that. Biology. It may be all right theoretically, and from the laboratory of the guinea-pig. I don’t pretend to know even your half-baked science. What I do know is that there are too many examples of its wrongness right here in this town. You know Jean——”

“Yes, yes, I know. She’d have had imbecile offspring if she’d married all of Harvard College.”

“All of which is beside the point. The point is now, that you’re drunk. You’re standing there reeling in the way of my life-long ambition for my family, in this community, in this state, in this country. But so far as I have anything to say, this family is going to remain the salt of the earth, clean straight through.”

“What you going to do with the salt? Sprinkle it on a sheep’s tail?”

“No, I’m only going to maintain the traditions that those two old people in the House on Sycamore Street have started for us. Your grandmother and your grandfather literally worked the earth you are standing on, teetering on, to make it fit and fruitful for you.”

“Yah——”

“Yah! And your aunts and your uncles represent the decent, law-abiding, upstanding citizenry of this country. We have that heritage to carry on. And you!”

“Heritage of middle class.”

“Heritage of decency! Decencies that you, as you stand here before me now—a drunk—are dragging down. As you inveigle a sweet girl, your cousin, into clandestine meetings with you, because you dare not be open and aboveboard. Because you know the wrongness of it. You’re loafing on your job! Betraying my confidence in you. You, insulting by your dishonor, your grandmother and your grandfather. You, imperilling your father’s health. And lowest of the low, you kicking dumb brutes. Offending every decency, and then, when there are none left, you turn beast yourself.”

“Mother——”

“I’ve lied for you. I’ve protected you against the punishment of your father and the terrible wrath of your grandfather. If you haven’t any decency left for me, then, for God’s sake, have it for them. For your Uncle Henry. For your Uncle Phil. Your aunts.”

He began to cry a little, licking off tears with the tip of his tongue as they straggled loosely toward his lips.

“That child over there. He’s handicapped as it is, growing up down there by himself years and years away from the companionship of brothers and sisters of his own age. I want this great big growing family of ours to be the finest imaginable for a child like that to grow into. He deserves it. You can’t smash his heritage. Not while I’m your mother and his sister.”

The crumpling-up of Steve was more of a collapse than a faint. Perhaps a little of both. His mother caught him as he tottered.

“Steve. Please. Sh-h-h. There’s your father coming up from the orchard. He’s been painting. He must not see you this way. Steve, I want you to walk! Erect! Up to your room. With me. With Mother—Steve—don’t you dare to stagger——”

“I——I——can’t——make it——”

“You will. You must.”

“I will—I must——”

With the support of her left arm against him, as the figure of Winslow came up above the rim of slope that led from the orchard, they walked up the steps, across the verandah, unwaveringly, into the house and on up to Steve’s room underneath the eaves.

One hour and forty minutes later, Bek came out again. Alone.

“Where’ve you been, Bek?” asked Winslow, who was working away at his pipe-stems with “cleaners” she kept him supplied with by mail-order.

“Putting my house in order, Winslow,” she said.

FOOTNOTES:

[22] ... seldom, if ever, did I see my brother in the throes of those rare fits of passion that invariably were to leave him the victim of one of the black headaches to which he was subject.

Of course, there was the unspeakable occasion of Steve and the dog. My pen will scarcely drag across the page that memory of the face of a child torn with anguish. I recall how I trembled for the pain-of-the-world that must inevitably find its way into a heart that was capable of suffering as David was the day he came running to me with a wounded dog in his arms. O Steve—Son—Boy—except for my unquenchable faith in you which you have so superbly justified, I think that would have been the sorriest hour of my life.

In subsequent years, I have, of course, seen David control my Father’s kind of wrath, but only with great effort. There comes to my mind that memorable occasion of a state dinner to the Queen of Holland, in the days when visiting queens and royalty were still a novelty to us in America. At this function an Italian plenipotentiary constituted himself an ambassador-without-portfolio, and introduced a diplomatic topic at the banquet-table which threw great embarrassment upon the guest-of-honor and drew admirably restrained but nonetheless angry public rebuke from the President. Another time, when my brother’s face was my Father’s all over again, as it quivered in anger, was when I happened to be seated in his office, and he overheard, with what I always call that curious third ear of his, a secretary out in an anteroom, insolently dismissing a World War veteran, who was presenting what he thought were sufficient credentials for admission to see the President.

_Chapter Fourteen_

The Mark Millikens, Senior, lived in a twenty-two-room wooden house, with a tower at one end where Annie Milliken wintered her geraniums and rubber trees; a millwork “gallery” ran clear across the front of the house, with two hardy perennials of rocking-chairs, that in summer wore linen slip-overs and most of the winters a light ruching of snow.

Originally, the Milliken homestead had stood in the center of a square block of ground. Now the Opera House nudged it from one side and a gasoline station from the other. To complete the insolence of this last, an iron negro boy, with a hitching-ring in his fist, stood resting at the Milliken curb that was nearest the gasoline station.

Once, some town-wag, (Aloysius Chipman probably,) had hung a pasteboard tag about his neck, “TAKE A TUMBLE TO YOURSELF, JOE.” But Mark Milliken had unsmilingly broken the cardboard across his knee and crammed it into his pocket, to avoid its cluttering up the lawn.

It was estimated that Mark Milliken had made a quarter of a million, when suddenly the two next-to-the-principal streets of Centralia had elected to run along two sides of his property.

One of Annie Milliken’s great trials as this situation began to manifest itself, was the soot-balls that fell from the chimneys of the three-story brick office-buildings, so that the Milliken wash could no longer flap itself sun-dry on clothes-lines stretched between two fine plane trees. In fact, one of the trees had to make way for the Opera House and the other was jammed up against the gray-brick rear wall of a Woolworth Store.

So a steam-drier had to be installed in the Milliken basement.

“I know the days when her washing wasn’t fit to be seen on the line for her laziness about mending,” said Mathilda Schuyler, whose tongue could be trenchant where Annie was concerned.

A Schuyler had married a Milliken; there was a thirty-two-year-old staunch, if tempestuous friendship between the Old Gentleman and Mark Milliken, Senior. The two men, in fact had been business partners for eighteen years, and even after dissolution were more or less in constant negotiation; children of the two houses had grown up with the closest of interrelated interests, and yet, the thirty-two-year-old antagonism between Mathilda Schuyler and Annie Milliken remained just about intact.

An anniversary, an illness, or even a slight mishap in one or the other family was sufficient to bring about tearful reconciliation, after estrangements of sources too trivial to recall. The marriage of Emma and Morton had tided them over years of suppressed misunderstandings; but, at heart, both of them, women of tough endurance and patient noses-to-the-grindstone of large families; at heart these two old women were anathema to each other.

The drop of a hat could send them flying asunder. They could quarrel over the relative blondness of their children, the respective excellencies of spouses, the clarity of their respective apple jellies, the complexion of daughters, the fidelity of hired-hands, the relative consistency of the soft soap stewing in their respective iron kettles, methods of chicken incubation, the selling-price of butter, the buying-price of unbleached muslin, the this and the that of quilts, poultices, grandchildren, resemblances, giblets, sons, pip, county fairs, cheese-bags, and growing-pains.

Their men tacitly ignored these ructions, their own overshadowing them in proportion, if not in frequency.

High and terrific words had from time to time raged between these two. As a cattle-trader, the Old Gentleman despised the methods of his erstwhile partner. Secretly, Milliken had a contempt for the Old Gentleman’s virtue in the Fulton Market deal, which he regarded as virtue only because it had been applied to him. They were ultimately to disrupt partnership. First as cattle-dealer, later at those real-estate operations that were to alternately make Mark rich-man, poor-man. There was never a time when, at the bottom of his heart, the Old Gentleman did not doubt the Milliken integrity.

And yet, not entirely trusting intuition and the rather insufficient evidence, even when Milliken was in a position to buy and sell him, he was constantly in the Old Gentleman’s debt.

The Old Gentleman had been known to sign notes for Milliken that were up to the hilt of his holdings.

Mathilda cried bitter tears over this. It riled her to see Annie Milliken ride out in her surrey-and-two, and later in a Cadillac sedan, on moneys that she knew were made possible by financial cooperation and maneuverings of the Old Gentleman.

It was a tumultuous feud between these two houses. The women at their small bickerings, the men waging bitter if more infrequent wars of deeper portent.

On the day that the Old Gentleman’s sheep were wandering at more or less loose ends in the pasture that had been so precipitously deserted by David and Teddy, Mark Milliken, with his long, lean, leather face showing a peculiar pallor through its tanbark, was huddled opposite the Old Gentleman in a small room to the rear of the Whittier County Bank, where depositors were allowed privacy for conference and opening of safety-deposit boxes.

They were two stricken old men’s faces. Milliken had a long, lean, Yankee figure and a white goatee that turned up like a Turkish slipper. The Old Gentleman, looking actually atrophied, seemed to wither as he stood. Eye to eye, the two of them. Pretenses down. Lean, primitive fears out. Something vast, and all that vastness stupidly spreading across the Old Gentleman’s face, turning it into a rimless plane surface of widening and widening incredulity.

“If—I thought you meant what you are saying, Mark, by God—by God—I’d ram—your teeth down into your heart.”

The figure of Milliken, with the wattled brown throat throbbing like a peafowl’s above the soft, low collar, crouched back against the wall, after a fashion of a figure hugging for shade on a desert.

“I’d sooner be struck dead than live to see this hour, Schuyler.”

“You mean,” said the Old Gentleman, whose head was lowered like a charging bull’s, and whose breathing came up through his chest as if it were dragging heavy chains with it, “you mean—you can’t—ever!”

“I can’t, Schuyler! God forgive me! I can’t——”

“Can’t!” said the Old Gentleman. “Can’t!” He seemed to gargle the word around his mouth as if it were a dry old marble. “Can’t.”

“I could cut out my tongue rather than have to say it, Schuyler,” said Milliken in his whisper, backing and backing against the wall as if he would force it to yield and swallow him.

Suddenly the Old Gentleman let out a sort of yell of realization that banged into the quiet morning.

“No, no! Tell me I’m crazy! Damn you, tell me I’m crazy!”

“For God’s sake, Schuyler, hold yourself together! Don’t shout—don’t let them—know—yet—out there——”

“I am crazy! I must be! He stands there and tells me I am a ruined man for going on his notes. I’ve gone on his notes for the last thirty years. For bigger amounts than I would trust to my own blood and kin. Every cent between me and ruination lies in his hands,” cried the Old Gentleman, and began to dab, in the rather horrible fashion of the frenzied, against his face and his throat. “I am crazy. I am crazy! I am losing my senses. It can’t be true!”

“Schuyler, for God’s sake, hold yourself together. Don’t shout. Sit down, Schuyler. Don’t take on, Schuyler. It’s enough to give a man a stroke. Sit down, Schuyler. I—I can explain——”

“Explain!” cried the Old Gentleman, clasping and unclasping his hands. “Explain! What else is there to explain? I come to a man, that man my best friend, I come to him weeks ago, the day my notes are due. Not an hour before. I’m not worried. Only under a strain. Like a man will be when it’s the biggest loan he’s ever made and everything is in one basket. Only under a strain. I must have had the feeling in my bones. I see it now. Even this morning, you remember I said to you out at Dittenhoeffer’s farm, ‘Mark, you don’t look so well. Is anything wrong?’”

“I haven’t closed an eye for eight nights, Schuyler.”

“It is true, then? I can’t believe it. By God, I can’t believe it—if you’re fooling with me, I’ll make you regret——”

“Schuyler, you have sons.”

“Yes, I have sons. Clean-livered ones.”

“You’d have done as much for yours.”

“You-mean-to say-that you-placed collateral—my collateral—in the hands of that scalawag of yours in Toronto?”

“You would have done the same for one of yours!”

“Not with my best friend’s money. Not to save a thief!”

“Don’t say that,” cried Milliken as if pleading not to be goaded, while the right was not his to strike back. “Don’t say a thing you’ll regret, Schuyler.”

“Regret? What in God’s name is a man to say? Maybe I didn’t get it right, Mark. Tell me I didn’t?”

“I’m afraid you did, Schuyler.”

“What else—damnation—what else, then, am I to call him? Scalawag, good-for-nothing thief!”

“Schuyler!”

“Ran away from home twelve years ago to get into one scrape after another—and now—a thief—on my money—on everything in God’s world between me and ruination.”

“It’s the old story, Schuyler. But you’ve got sons. Think, if you found yourself in my terrible dilemma.”

“A son of mine who embezzles, God forgive the thought, would have to—I can’t think! I’m going crazy. I can’t seem to think.”

“Like a hundred boys before him, he meant to put it back. He saw great real-estate possibilities in Toronto, just as your Phil——”

“By God, take that back! Don’t mention my Phil in the same breath——”

“I only meant, Schuyler, the same impulse was behind him. He meant to put it back. Frank’s been a good boy, Schuyler. Wild in the early days, but married and settled in Toronto these ten years now and cashier in the town’s largest bank.”

“I see now. I see now. God! Good God! I denied it when Alf Dreffous told me he saw Frank Milliken and you walking along the railroad tracks night before last.—He must have stolen down to see you—sneaked into his home town like a thief in the night—a thief it took my lifetime of labor to save——”

“He’s desperate—Schuyler! Desperate a boy as ever kept himself from shooting his brains out to hell——”

“I see it now—I see it now—God! God! God! What is to become of me? Every cent I can count my own, put back into a Toronto bank to save the hide of a thief.”

“He meant to put it back. He kept drawing out good money to send after bad. A land-investment deal. He says he’s sure to realize on it in time. I’ll be able to meet things in time, Schuyler. But they wouldn’t give him time. They were watching him three months before he knew it. They closed in on him, Schuyler. If I hadn’t let him have it—mine—and your collateral—it would have meant—penitentiary! His mother—your daughter—and my son—me—my family—yours too, Schuyler—much as mine—your daughter bears my name—I had to let him have it to save your flesh as much as my flesh.”

“Why—” said the Old Gentleman feebly, this time like water spluttering onto a hot stove-lid, “why, I’m ruined. I’m a penniless old man with a family—my hard-earned—my life-earned thirty-five-thousand collateral—I’m a penniless old man with a family.”

“So’m I, Schuyler.”

“My woman, who helped me to scratch it together—she’s ruined—my children—who count on me to help them—cheated—my seven-year-old boy cheated out of his rights—growing up into a penniless future. God damn you!” cried the Old Gentleman, and lurched and struck with his knuckles into Milliken’s forehead above the left eye so that a spurt of blood jumped out and ran down warm and thick under the Old Gentleman’s cuff.

The red glue of it in the smear across his arm and his eyes made him rear back squeamish for the instant, and in that instant old man Milliken had fallen to his knees, and hooking himself to the table-leg, lifted his face with the blood on it and said:

“All right, Schuyler, hit!”

“No you don’t!” screamed the Old Gentleman. “You don’t get me thataway.” And as the figure hooked to the table-leg lopped forward a bit, the Old Gentleman’s arm shot out again and again, and they locked, the long, lean, Yankee figure of Milliken and the thick, squat one of his adversary. Locked. Swayed. Tottered. Panted through the noises that chairs made, scraping as they staggered themselves a path through the room.

And suddenly the Old Gentleman felt the flesh of his knuckles break and spout blood from hard steel into which his fist had crashed and there clattered from Milliken’s breast-pocket something shiny, the something the Old Gentleman’s hand had struck.

It was a cumbersome old model of a Colt .32, with a black hartshorn handle and a long pull-trigger of a twenty-year-old make. It made a clatter falling out of Milliken’s pocket. It struck against the table-leg and went off with a loud report and a shower of plaster began snowing down from a new scar on the ceiling.

“Shoot me with it, Schuyler. I hadn’t the nerve to do it myself——” In the confusion of feet running over the tiled floors of the bank, of the opening of doors, bustle, hustle, two old men, on the floor of the small room reserved for depositors, were sobbing arm in arm, the bleeding face of Milliken dragged up into the embrace of the Old Gentleman, whose spade of beard was riding up and down like a latch.

“It’s all right, Mark, it’s all right!”

“Finish me, Schuyler. Shooting’s too good. I’d have done it myself. I hadn’t the nerve.”

“It’s all right, Mark! Everything’s all right—crushed to earth—all righty—but by God—rise again——”

_Chapter Fifteen_

When Mark Milliken went down, it was a case of the tent-pole toppling pretty nearly everything with it into a muddle.

And there were more Schuylers to pitch into the maelstrom than there were Millikens. There were only Mark and Annie and Morton Milliken. But Morton, who had never known a day’s financial independence of his father, was, after all, married to and therefore half a Schuyler. So there it ended for the Millikens. Except, of course, for Frank in Toronto, who was ultimately, some twelve years later, to build a twenty-room Tudor mansion on a Toronto boulevard, with a wing for his parents, who, shortly after the crash, left Centralia to take up residence with him.

There was, to be sure, an old maiden-aunt Rebba, who had lived with the Millikens for half a century in dual capacity of cook and poor relation, but who died half a year after the crash.

In the shadow of quick, cataclysmic events, there crept into furtive existence a rumor about this old woman. She had really been Mark Milliken’s half-sister. She had moved with them to the county forty years ago, under the guise of distant relation. There were certain stocks and holdings in her name. Rebba, who during her life had no significance, came, upon her death, to have a sinister one, builded on rumor that was never to be either justified or discredited.[23]

With the Schuylers it was a matter of interrelationship of affairs that pulled them all down into a heap, a sprawling, bewildered heap, that for a time could not be jerked to realization because of the dust of collapse.

When the Old Gentleman went down, practically to the last acre of his holding (counting some grazing-land up behind Middleton), every plan of Rebekka’s, land-acquisitive ones, and the paying-off of mortgages on her present holdings that were chiefly dependent upon loans from her father, went up in a puff of appalling smoke. Overnight, as it were, the Model Farm and hopes for its future slipped out of her hands.

With Phil, for a moment that struck terror to the house of Schuyler, it looked perilously as if his only way out of the crimp his father’s catastrophe had put into his affairs, was to let himself slide non-resistingly into a state of bankruptcy.

For weeks he had been tuning up his courage to approach his father for the loan that would forestall that already impending event. And then on the very day that he had steeled himself for what was sure to be a bitter wage of war with the Old Gentleman against speculative land-methods, the crash!

The peregrinations by which that bankruptcy-act was ultimately avoided bear not the telling here.