Chapter VII: Part 7

It was said around town that the Old Gentleman attempted the incredible device of trying to sell his son Phil’s next five years in clerking-service to his old friend, Tom Wexler, who ran the Red Trunk. And on the same principle, his own services to Wexler, capacity and remuneration to be determined by Wexler.

That news of the Old Gentleman thus peddling about five years of his son’s and his own future spread like wildfire.

Henry Schuyler, upon hearing it from young Simon Wexler, who retailed to him the fantastic and embarrassing proposition, was reported to have cried out, shortly and sharply, as if some one had struck him, and then, without a word, to have walked over to the peg for his hat, unhooked it and walked out of his office, leaving young Wexler to his somewhat stupid self.

In any event, it did not come off that way. Smudgy account-books of Henry’s saw the light of day. Bills were rendered to clients for legal services that dated five, six, seven, eleven, even twelve years back. One statement sent to a Solomon Hilp, Esq., Middleton, Whittier County, for legal services tendered in the successful settlement, out of court, of an involved damage-suit, was returned to sender with “party dead four years” scrawled across the envelope. An expert accountant was called in to dredge into the dusty, profitless tomes that had lain moldering along two shelves in Henry’s office for year’s end on year’s end.

The Howey estate alone was rendered an accounting of six thousand dollars for legal services extending over years, and because of its incredible moderation, was paid with alacrity. The Giles Tool Works met a similar presentation of statement with similar alacrity, for similar reasons.

All in all, Henry collected a little less than one-fifth of his claims. And he went about it shamefaced. Not as a man claiming his due.

It netted him out of the twelve years, something less than sixteen thousand dollars. It made a single purchase. It bought Phil out of impending insolvency.

Even Clara, off in St. Louis, had for years been looking warily to her father to make possible that two-story, pressed-brick, seven-room, Georgian house in University Heights that she had begun to desire from the day her children crawled their way out of rompers.

The plans for the house, a fanlight over the front door, hardwood floors throughout, and a bit of formal garden with a bird-bath, were to repose in Clara’s top dresser-drawer until they curled and yellowed there.

The Holly children were also expecting a Shetland pony from their grandfather. A brown, with a cream-colored mane and a basket phaeton with side seats, like some of the youngsters in Vandeventer Place went bobbing about in.

Last, but not least, something that had sprung eternal in the narrow breast behind the spotted foulards of a lean and earnest little lady engaged in teaching the sprouting minds of Centralia that “we, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union ...” died that year the Schuyler fortunes were swept asunder.

Henriette, who had hopefully told herself for years on end that there was no hope, stopped hoping.

To the boy, David, trudging his way in winter to a one-room country school, instead of the two-story brick structure on Second Street, herding the sheep in South Meadow through the long, baking, fructifying summers, only no longer his father’s flocks, but those of a newcomer from Middleton, named Gus Kelsoe, who now occupied the House on Sycamore Street, the change had come sharply at first, but certainly not in the nature of a catastrophe.

Indeed, to the unrooted nature of childhood, there were thrills and the adventure of disorganization in the move from the House on Sycamore Street to the bald-faced frame house where Judd Igrotte used to live.

A bald-faced, packing-case of a structure, with its windows distributed in the pattern of two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, that stood flush to the road in a one-acre patch one mile and a half south of South Meadow.

Pictures came down during the weeks of that move from the House on Sycamore Street, that left great pale squares against the walls. Window-shades, the front ones with painted ovals and lace edges, dropped rotting right off their rollers, when it came to removing them. The mahogany sofa of great floriated curves had sunk so deeply into the parlor-carpet that there were four caster-shaped holes in it; and since the sofa could not even be moved through door or window of the Igrotte house, two of those holes, arrange and rearrange as you would, were to sprawl themselves out, mended two tones too dark, into the center of the small, square front room of the Igrotte manse.

They were a pair of friendly patches. You were forever aware of the presence of the two dark objects to trip over, and the consistency with which you did not trip was something to be perpetually surprised about.

The Igrotte house, as a matter of fact, faintly within David’s memory too, had once stood on the Schuyler property as a sort of auxiliary summer-kitchen. Hams, bacons, peppers, packs of dill, hanks of raffia, drying mushrooms, hung in its upper story; and the downstairs, entirely laid out in benches, was a wilderness of jars, crocks and casks of meat salting, corning, and pickling. Cucumbers in brine. Pigs’ feet stacked into cool jars of vinegar. Brandying peaches. Spiced pears. Stuffed mangoes. Blackberry-cordial. Grape-juice.

Len Tarkington had finally bought the little building from the Old Gentleman, and moved it bodily onto his own property, to be used as a granary.

All that week of the moving of the building, as it had ridden grotesquely and in scarcely perceptible jerks along the open road, causing horses to shy, tiny Davey had ridden in its upper-story window, shouting, grimacing, and wild with the novelty of it.

Then Judd Igrotte, known thereabouts as a squatter down near the Cranberry flats, up and purchased it from Tarkington, and moved it still another two miles down that same road, using it as a dwelling until his daughter Helga had married out of it and into a prosperous Iowa farming-country, and taken old Judd to live with her.

It was to the Igrotte place, then, that the Old Gentleman, disdaining every proffered scheme of combination-living with his children, moved with Mathilda, Henry and Dave.

The rehabilitated old box, with Helga Igrotte’s choice of wall-paper plastered to the wooden partitions, and with neither plumbing, nor gas, nor electricity, had a set-on-to-land look, as if it had been deposited there very gingerly, like some one sitting on the lap of another, without letting his weight relax.

There was a bony look to the land, probably from the way the rocky ledges ran through it, breaking the flesh of earth and showing in mica-streaks. A lean, meandering acre, for which the rental consisted of the yield of its potato-crop.

The day that Mathilda arrived to stay, riding in a rocking-chair to the rear of the van that bore her household chattels, she just sat on in that chair, frozen from misery, long after the last of the objects that surrounded her had been lifted down and carried into the house.

It was hard to begin life in the wooden box. The rocks surrounding it gleamed up so through the earth. To a woman who loved shade and the benign, grand bosom of fruitful farm-land, the scene before her was as lusterless as a lead nickel flung out there under the sun. Not so much as a maple tree or a plane tree or an arbor to relieve the glare.

What a move it was! The yield of that attic in Sycamore Street. It spoiled it a bit to have Mathilda sit most of the days with odds and ends and bits on her knees, crying over them. And the girls too, poking in among chests and trunks and hampers, and then sitting down to let a tear fall onto an ordinary afghan or a bit of unearthed muff, all mangy and moth-eaten, or one of the Old Gentleman’s buffalo-robes from sleighing-days, or a thread-lace baby-cap, stained yellow.

It was strange. The wet kisses that were suddenly mumbled against his neck, or the quick embraces into which they caught him, as he darted in and out of the wealth of those chests brought suddenly to daylight.

Smell of old harness. Rifle with a rusty lock, that hung broken. Pleasantly-chilled pungency of camphor-balls. A brown gavel that had been Henry’s in the days when he was president of the High School Debating Society.

“Ladies and gentleman!” cried David, when he came across it, banging against the window-sill that opened out from under an eave out upon the chicken-yard, “—out there—world, you! Listen! Listen, world!”

“Stop that banging, Davey!” said Emma, who was shaking dried rose-leaves out of the foot of an old white-lace stocking she had worn to Clara’s wedding.

“Let him be,” said Bek from the depths of two huge feather-beds crammed onto the top shelf of a closet. “That’s right, Davey. Make them listen. Gracious, listen to the quiet—even that big, gray rooster stopped crowing—I do declare he’s made all outdoors listen.”

“Bang! Bang! Bang!” went David with his gavel, from the pulpit of his window-sill overlooking the world of summer farm and fowl, and then paused again for the fancied silence, “Bang! Bang! Bang!”[24]

“Davey, stop! That’s my old golf-cape. Oh dear! Remember, Bek, when they were wearing golf-capes and rainy-day skirts? I’ll never forget, Mother, how I prayed for rain the first day it came all the way from Montgomery Ward and then because it really did rain you wouldn’t let me wear it, for fear of spoiling it. Oh dear——” cried Emma; and because tears were too close to the surface, the three women worked in silence, among the yesterdays.

To Dave it was like Henry’s picture of “Washington Crossing the Delaware” to stand in the center of the billowing old horsehair sofa, wrapped in golf-cape, and peer off into a corner that contained the stooped figure of Mathilda dragging gunnysacks of hickory-nuts out from under the old washstand that used to stand in the girls’ room before they married and left the House on Sycamore Street.

There was another cape, a black-plush one, with shaped shoulders and chenille ball-fringe, that Emma cried into. Then came along a boxful of albums, with tin-types of the girls, their panties showing, and Henry and Phil, with their ears very large, standing on either side of a small table, with a toy steam-engine on it. One of Mathilda, when her face was much rounder, holding the infant Bek against a black-brocade basque. There was another of her, when her face was rounder still (“Mother dearest, in this daguerreotype you’re beautiful!”) a small, black-velvet bolero spanning a swell of timid young bosom. Mathilda, in her teens, in the Tyrol.

More and more clothing tumbling out of trunks and bags. Every possible graduated size of trousers. Little-girl frocks. Yellowed. Two more rifles with rusty locks that would not budge. A fine old hand-carved musket filled with shot. A carpetbag crammed with the identical costume of an Austrian peasant-girl that Mathilda wore in the picture. That was the day pretty Claire plaited her taffy-colored hair into a braid over each shoulder and slid into the voluminous skirts of her grandmother’s dress, and Mathilda laced up the black-velvet bodice; and when she stood there with something of Mathilda’s gone prettiness to her, Mathilda began to cry feebly, and then Emma, and finally Bek, who did not cry, but held the two of them in the fine width of her embrace.

Strange days to the boy David, when even through the incomparable thrill of the move, his throat was somehow aching most of the time ... mostly when he looked at his mother. She ran hither and thither so. As if doors had been closed against her and she wanted to go in.

Those were the days of a suddenly-promoted sense of importance and a sturdy sense of standing by. Days home from school to help hammer cases closed, rip off the tops of barrels and boxes for the adventure of seeing them yield their strange content of feather beds in striped tickings. Family albums. Plush panniered dresses. Basques.

Boxes of the Old Gentleman’s papers. Deeds. Bills of sale; bills of lading. Packets of canceled checks. Notes. Stubs. Cattle-pedigrees. Henry’s high-school diploma rolled in a tubular tin case. Clara’s certificate of election to the Girls’ Good Deed Club, dated 1891. A group-photograph of the family, when Bek was in pigtails and Emma was in arms, taken against the side of the House on Sycamore Street. A riding-crop. A small pair of antlers, unmounted. A half-finished piece of embroidery, on linen, of Betsy Ross at making the flag.

There never were such days of loot. The unpacking of the cases of Henry’s law-books and miscellaneous collection, and of sitting beside him in the clouds of dust while he solemnly sorted them over, pausing for full half-hours at a time to pore. Once he read aloud, sitting there in shirt-sleeves, hunched under an attic-eave, part of _The Letter to the Sheriff of Bristol_. It was blunt reading, the words like hammers from a sledge. Some more of Burke’s books Davey had spelled out on a shelf in Henry’s office, a labeled _History of Political Philosophy_. Sometimes, in his room, evenings, Henry had talked to David of Burke. Thinking out loud, Henry called it. When Henry told you about Edmund Burke, or read parts of the conciliation speech, his eyes, under their deep eaves of brow, brightened. “Here was a man [Burke] pass-ion-ately and un-theatri-cally for freedom and justice.” That was a heavy phrase Davey had memorized from Henry. When Henry read Burke, as he unpacked him in the attic, there was something fine and rolling in his voice, that even, when David did not understand the lugubrious text, held him fascinated.

Henry must be like God. Henry knew everything. It would never do to say that out. Henry would begin to laugh. Silently. In the way that rumbled through him. And laugh. And laugh.

There were hundreds of these books of Henry’s to be pounded free of dust and stacked, tied with twine, into sixes, and then carted down to Henry’s office in Bek’s car. There was not room enough for them in the Igrotte house.

When Henry explained this to David, he kept his eyes averted as if he were guilty of something. There was not to be room in the Igrotte house for books to live under the same roof with them. Why, in books there lurked some of the great thrills that had come into seven short years of a life. It made Davey feel the elusive sort of tightness at his throat. For himself, but mostly for Henry, who handled books as if they were live things.

The Old Gentleman was the stoic of this move. He stalked among the upheaval of things, some of which had lain quiescent under thirty-five years of dust. There was the ax, rust crusted, with which he had hewn the first timber for the roof over his head. The roof that was no longer his. There was a large carpetbag into which his sole earthly possessions had been crammed the day he first set young eyes on Centralia. An old lantern he had swung through the dawn-darkness of the terrific winter of ’88, when his cattle sickened and froze in his barns, and his credit gave out about the same time as his winter-supply of feed. Bitter days that had crawled in wrinkles across the Old Gentleman’s face, to remain there. And now that the chimera of those old, lean days was lifting its head again, the Old Gentleman was unbroken, or so nearly simulated it, that there was something a little terrifying about his stride. The women dried their eyes and made wide détours at his approach. He barked with his manner, and the members of his family, eager not to seem to notice his over-emphasis, barked back. He was full of bluster, those days, moving men scurrying up and downstairs to his order. Bek’s light two-seated Ford, laden with such intimate chattels as chip baskets filled with dishes, boilers, crammed with percolator, awl, clothes-wringer, soup-tureen, hose-nozzle, vinegar-cruet, lamp-base and coffee-mill, rattled under the Old Gentleman’s orders, back and forth along the rutted three miles from the House on Sycamore Street to the Igrotte place in Pessimines Lane.

The Old Gentleman clung to his huge baize-top desk that had to be forced in through a window and placed under the stairway in the first-floor hall where the sole light and ventilation came from the transom above the front door. It was more of a closet than a room, scarcely larger than one of those under-stairs affairs for goloshes and wraps. In vain Mathilda expostulated, and Henry proffered the room over the rear porch that was to be his.

No siree! There, under the front-hall stairs, the Old Gentleman caused to be installed this baize-top desk of his that had stood for thirty-odd years in the window-embrasure of one of the towers of the House on Sycamore Street, adapting himself at once, by the vehement gesture of hanging above it a colored lithograph of the 1901 Cattle Fair at Sandusky. And if it must be admitted, providing his usual cuspidor of a cigar-box filled with sand, and hammering-in his pipe-rack of nails, which he drove into the wall himself at carefully-calculated distances to correspond to the respective sizes of the bowls of his meerschaum family.

It was a dingy hole of an office, that was to immediately become foul with smoke that permeated the entire lower floor. To the Old Gentleman, who for the years he could have afforded better, had swayed through town in the mangy phaeton and the chewed-looking old reefer with the dangling lining, it might not have been so much of a hardship. Except now, suddenly, and with a pathetic streak of the psychology of the needy, one of the first acts of the Old Gentleman, under the new régime, was to furbish up the phaeton, paint it a livid ochre, jack up old Jennie’s twine-tied harness, and venture forth into town in the brave trapping of a man who could no longer afford to be shabby.

That almost broke Mathilda’s heart. Her needle repeatedly jabbed into her fingers as she sewed up the reefer over which she had vainly expostulated during the well-to-do years, and which he now voluntarily handed over to her for repair.

The Old Gentleman was sprucing up to meet vicissitude. Not one of his adult children but what nursed secret heartache over the pathos of that.

Once, when she came across the refurbished reefer hanging in the hallway, Bek secretly smeared it with some dry dirt out of one of the potted geraniums Mathilda scrupulously kept on either side of the one front step that led to the hallway. Foolishly enough, she admitted to herself, the Old Gentleman’s reefer, mud-streaked, made her ache for him a little less.

And yet, to Davey, fickle with youth, filled with the wild, shy imagings of a mind vigorously and unprecociously beginning its unfoldings, the bald-faced house took on almost immediately, all the aspects of home.[25]

David’s room, where originally the garlic and peppers had hung drying, was little more than a pocket up under the slant of roof, that you reached by ladder. A snug enough little pocket, with a soda-pop bottle on the table beside the cot, and a candle stuck in. The candle in the bottle always ran down over itself in elaborate blisters. It was a flickering light to lie on one’s stomach and read by. It gave the page a crazy, breathing quality.

Down in Henry’s room, with a reproduction of a bronze bust of Benjamin Franklin by Houdon on the bookshelf, and a steel-engraving of a naval engagement between Paul Jones’s _Bon Homme Richard_ and the English man-of-war _Serapis_ against the wall, there was a student-lamp and a gouged-out armchair and a carpet hassock upon which to squat while Henry read aloud. There were long hours spent thus at the feet of his brother. But even longer and rather curiously dreamy ones spent alone in the room with the walls that were scarcely taller than he was. Teddy, who slept at the foot of the cot, usually snored through the flickery gloom. It left the boy alone to the crocheting shadows which, as the book in his hand might suggest, were armies, or navies, warriors, maidens or red-skinned Hiawatha, who was full of wrath when he came into the village.

The printed page loomed with him and stalked, and the soft hiss of the candle was the roar of Marathon over the plain where Miltiades saved Greece.

Henry’s telling the saving of Greece by Miltiades! It was something to listen to, and then, word-for-word, to store away like nuts, and later, up in the privacy of his attic, take out in the flickering shadows into which Teddy snored, and lo, the attic was the plain and the plain was Greece! A blazing Greece, because, in summer, the tiny room up there gathered heat unto itself like a sun-glass. Evenings, with the rolling meadows breathing out as if in an enormous sigh of relief, the room could seem to spin of the heat-waves. But the roll of the heat over the small nude body of David as he lay on his cot was, mysteriously enough, life-giving to him. He loved the thick and plushy quiet. The pulling mysterious sense of growth through the hot, black silence. The sun-soaked, vast outdoors of meadow-land and field, fructifying. Sense of squirm of life.

All of his life he was to carry that immunity to heat.[26] Those summers, drenched in the heat of that attic-room, were baptism of fire all right, his square boy’s body, as he lay there, pouring from every pore.

Yes, it was smaller and meaner in the Igrotte house. Even Davey, while the sense of novelty and adventure were still high, sensed that. It was something else, too. Something sad in the Igrotte house. And yet, within a month, every stubble in the lean little pasture, every lark’s nest, every winding of Pessimines Lane, every hidden spring, every rabbit-patch, was home to him. A home into which his adaptability fitted him with the same perfection that his bare boy’s body slid into the swimming-hole.

Author’s Note: See David Schuyler, the Man, the Statesman, the
Geographer. _Athenaeum_ Vol. XXX. Timothy Tyker, M.A., B.S., Ph.D.,
Fellow Magdalen College.

FOOTNOTES:

[23] ... once I remember hearing Phil make a slurring reference to what he called the stocking National Bank of old Rebba, which was supposed to have helped retrieve the Milliken fortunes. He was sternly rebuked by my father. In all the years of stress and strain which were to follow this catastrophe, no member of our family was permitted to refer at all, much less slightingly, to Mark Milliken. If my mother rankled when she heard of the twenty-room house in Toronto, she rankled silently. If my father owed the twist that had come into his face since reverses due to the betrayal of a friend, he bore it silently. Probably out of deference to Emma and Morton, who were to come in for bitter times. And just as probably out of the fine, high pride that was part of Father’s many-sided, but always inviolate personality.

[24] How well I remember a day in June, when David was about seven. A bitter, heart-aching day, as days go. I was over helping Mother move from the House on Sycamore Street. I can see us now. Emma, Mother, and I, in and out among the boxes and chests of that priceless attic, so filled with memories for us all, and Emma hot and blowy and perturbed. Poor dear, it was to be the beginning of many a hot and perturbed year for her. Mother full of tears. Davey, a squirrel in and out among us. Here. There. In hamper. Out of trunk. Little nuisance. Suddenly, pouncing upon an old gavel that had been presented to Henry by the High School Debating Society. David leaped to the window, hammering with all his might. “Listen, world!” he shouted—“listen here, world—out there—to me!” and ’pon my soul, it suddenly seemed that through the drone of that June afternoon, lowing with cattle, crowing with cocks, buzzing with insects, there did descend a silence. Fantastic, of course, and yet in the light of subsequent events—that child hammering his gavel up in the little window that overlooked his universe, was not just any child hammering his gavel for the world to heed him.

[25] It was about a six-month after the move to the Igrotte house that my brother Dave, a quiet and rather thoughtful child up to then, asked me a question that surprised me with its observation. There had been a labor-strike among the men who were laying the new-paved road between Centralia and Middleton, and one of the so-called scabs had been struck by a rock thrown by a union man. When old Jessup told me of this happening, I was salting out weeds between the bricks of a garden-walk. Helping me at this task, Davey, digging away, looked up to remark, as ants scurried from the path of his trowel, “Ants run their world better for themselves than folks do, Bek. Bees too. Bees and ants all work together. Why are folks always trying to crowd each other out?”

I sometimes wonder if right then and there was not planted into his heart the unconscious resolve that much of his life-effort must be waged against man’s inhumanity to man.

That day he was just a kid, faintly perturbed with his first awareness of injustice....

[26] On his tour of the deserts of the world, in behalf of his reclamation-theories, it was said of him that at noonday, when the natives lay scattered about the tents like so many meal-sacks, he remained at his desk throughout the siesta-period, reviewing in map and diagram the morning’s observations.

Midsummer campaigns across desert-country in the close density of sleeping cars, when members of his party succumbed to actual prostration, were not to faze him, nor for that matter, the terrific onslaught of mosquitoes the year of his famous Alaskan tour in behalf of his long-sighted domestication and cultivation of the ovibos, when the eyes of the dog-teams were literally bitten closed, and the motors of the aeroplanes, as they left the ground, were clogged with these pestiferous insects.

_Chapter Sixteen_

The most radical changes seemed to come so imperceptibly, that within the year it was as if there had never been a time when the spacious front verandah of his sister Emma’s, at the far end of Sycamore Street, had not been cluttered with boarders seated on round straw mats. A Max Juss, overseer of the Tallahassee Tobacco Factory, his wife, and two children. Old man Clotillo, a county-clerk. The Misses Breen, Daisy and Sachet, milliners, with a shop in the Renchler Block, and Miss de Lisle, who taught violin and guitar, a sign in Emma’s right parlor-window to that effect.

Even the disintegration of the outward appearance of the house had been too gradual to disturb the perception of youth, to whom years are long. The scarred, nicked places on the verandah-paint, where before the white and green had shone. Starchy lace curtains had become strings. Weeds and dandelions had cropped up between the bricks of the sidewalk, to say nothing of Emma’s once famous reception-hall, the first in Centralia, now always agog-looking with boarders’ letters stuck into its mirror.

In no time at all, it was as if Davey could not remember when his sister’s house was not the rather derelict-looking affair with the front shades all at cross-purposes and the Misses Breen’s handkerchiefs drying against the window-panes.

Claire, who taught kindergarten, and frequently came home with her tired, pretty hands filled with colored-paper mats and putty pigs, used to spruce bravely, after school hours, at the littered rooms, with the dining-table always half-set now, Mr. Juss’s bottle of iron-tonic and Miss Sachet’s box of Kay’s Komplaint Pills huddling around the catsup-bottle. But it was not much help to putter. The Millikens’ was an out-and-out boarding-house now. Emma served five prunes to the dish, and the sign over the bathtub read: “Please scour. Do unto others as you would wish to be done by.”

Poor Emma. It was hard to be a Milliken and a Schuyler. Morton’s mouth was bitter with it, too. The name of his father or of his brother never left his lips. Secretly, he wrote occasionally to his mother. After a while, what was practically inevitable happened. Morton, whose business connections had been solely with his father, lost his position as agent with a local realty company, and then one that Henry procured for him as collector for the Ice and Coal Company. Not through anything more than just mild inability. Gradually, Morton became just a putterer around home. Oiling locks. Mending rugs, fences, china, rain-spouts and pocket-book clasps. A handy-man-about-the-house. The Schuylers quailed over that; and as he lost subsequent position after position, just of mild inability, every time, they became extra nice to him. Emma most of all, who meticulously ended all household disputes and difficulties with boarders by stating that she would talk the matter over with “Mr. Milliken.” As a matter of fact, Mr. Milliken, as time marched on, could more and more frequently be found sitting in a basement room that had been fitted up as office, whittling on the wooden toys that Claire had brought home from the kindergarten, for some mysterious reason known only to himself, whiling away his time by making them leaner.

The change at Bek’s had come perhaps as more of a shock; and yet, in some ways, it had probably the least perceptible change of all.

Bek still strode the farm somewhat terrifically, with her skirts tucked into her boots. The perfection of cattle still stood in rows in her model barns of asphalt gutters, running water, and electric light. The clean-clipped acreage of yellow mustard, alfalfa, and grazing-land, scattered with salt-rock, silos, red roofs, stone hedges, flowed out to the horizon.

Winslow still smoked his pipe on the side porch and sketched his afternoons away down in the lower meadow. Steve strode about the farm now, doing such solitary odd jobs as breaking a colt or drilling for artesian water.

The great difference that was not on the surface was what changed the aspect of Bek’s farm so that about the entire place there was the feeling of something having died.

A dream had died.

Ex-Governor Howey now owned the Bek Renchler place. For the modicum of one hundred dollars a month, Bek remained on the farm as overseer, occupying the house as formerly, except during September and sometimes part of October, when the Warrington Howeys, from Washington, came on for their annual visit.

Then Bek and the family moved into the rooms over the garage. They were four, firm, square, bright rooms, with running water and clean new paper and yellow floors.

The Howeys were extremely nice about this, and urged Bek and her little brood to remain in the left wing of the house.

This Bek refused to do. The Howeys and Schuylers had never been on that sort of social plane. The Howey girls had been away in the East at school while the Schuyler girls were growing up. The Howey boys had been scattered since their days of Military Academy. Then, too, the family had lived in the state capital for eight years. The enormously wealthy old Ex-Governor himself, a widower for twenty years, spent two-thirds of his time in the East or abroad, negotiating all the while, by proxy of agent and telegram, in land and cattle deals back home.

Frequently, during his two terms, the Governor had called Henry to the capital for conference. Bek had stumped the country in behalf of his second campaign. The Ex-Governor, through his agents, had negotiated mortgages and sale of cattle and land with Bek.

The families mingled in this fashion, except, come to think about it, a Howey had never crossed a Schuyler threshold on social visit bent, and _vice versa_.

It is doubtful if Bek ever thought about it consciously. But the idea of remaining to occupy the left wing of the house, while Warrington and his French wife and three little girls flooded in, was unthinkable. She never batted an eye about the annual performance of that move into the flat over the garage; but from the first time that it took place, when she had sat up all night, placating Leslie, to whom the new sleeping-conditions were terrifying, some of the light went out of Bek’s face. The pages of her diary, into which she wrote with consistency, are blotchy in through here.

All this, the year that Davey was eleven and the World War broke out with a clap over what had seemed to all thereabouts, except Henry, the clear noontide of Peace on Earth.

_Chapter Seventeen_

At first, Mathilda cried secret tears over Davey’s having to attend the county school.

She cried secret tears over pretty nearly everything these days. That was why her face seemed to wear an almost constant smile stretched across the surface of her glassy teeth.

It was as if she had erected that smile on a stick and carried it about before her face as you would a lorgnette.

They were slightly larger than the life, these artificial teeth of Mathilda’s, with a dazzling-white lifeless glaze to them, and pink-celluloid gums that had an air of detachment from the unsullied porcelains.

The girls had remonstrated for years against this blazing dentistry, and once, on one of her visits to Springfield, Rita had decoyed her mother-in-law to the office of one of the town’s most eminent dental practitioners. But it was no use. Mathilda would not so much as mount the chair.

The great strip of smile, cutting so blatantly through the lean, bony structure of her cheeks, was a barrage behind which she could cry more secretly. It hurt her so terribly for the Old Gentleman, almost as much as for Davey, considering the school taxes her husband had paid into the town of Centralia. Davey, because of the move, obliged to receive his schooling in a little one-room county structure that was no larger than a shed!

Second Ward School in Centralia, where David had enjoyed only three months of primary grade, was a three-story brick structure, as regular-looking as a biscuit-tin. Henriette Simpson taught in that school. Every Schuyler youngster had at one time or another carved initials into its desks. Second Ward School was somehow David’s right! sobbed Mathilda, bitterly, to herself. David’s right. The Old Gentleman’s right!

Of course, there would have been a way to obtain special dispensation by establishing Davey’s residence, nominally at least, with the Morton Millikens in Centralia. Mathilda was all for that. Dave could leave with Henry each morning and return with him at night. But the Old Gentleman would hear to no such arrangement. No favor of any man! His back and his head were up, so far as his habits in adversity were concerned.

Besides, with the early-morning and after-school chores that were now falling to Dave, county school, only one-half mile distant, offered advantages.

At six o’clock, as early in the spring season as March, Davey used to help Tarkington’s old black Nemo drive a herd of about sixty Tarkington cattle to pasture, and then drive them home at dusk. Winter mornings, long before the stars were gone, with a black crocheted scarf of his mother’s tied over his ears, which he removed well before coming in sight of the lantern hung in Nemo’s barn door, Dave used to lickety-split over to the Tarkington place to help Nemo mix bran.

For this he received eighty cents a week. Sickeningly often, the winter that Davey was eight, Mathilda, secretly from the Old Gentleman, who even though knowing its inevitability would have yelled about it, was obliged to accept from the boy this eighty cents every Saturday night.

He gave it so blithely and yet a little furtively. No spoken word between him and his mother, and yet guarding the transaction from his father, even as Mathilda guarded it.

“I’ll make it all right with you some day,” Mathilda was in the habit of saying to him, as the coins slipped hands.

“Make it all right!” Why, as it was, the days were packed with being all right. All-too-fleet days, for the doing of the many, many things to be crammed into them. Even the ones of rising in the chilled dusk to the light and heat of the candle stuck into the bottle, or to perhaps a bit of gleam thrown in from a last great isolated star showing through the frosted design on the window-pane.

The names of those last stars of the cold dawns were “Procyon” and “Sirius.” “Castor” had a green fire in her. There was a way, with Henry alongside, to figure the distance from the earth of certain constellations. They had run across an old volume of Henry’s during the move, called _The Geography of the Stars_, and another old text-book, _Handbook of Astronomy_.

When it was not too cold in the room to have an arm out from the cover, there were volumes to pore over. _The Relations of the Planets._ Pictures of them. There was a precision about this business of the stars, once you were able to figure it out a little for yourself. There was beauty in precision. Soldiers had precision. Stars. Funny, even Dora had precision. The way her eyes made you want to look and look, because they were set at exactly the right equidistance and were just the precise blue of perfection.

There was an array of books which Davey had routed out of the attic for himself. _Canterbury Tales._ _David Copperfield._ _Around the World in Eighty Days._ _Black Beauty._ _A Condensed History of England._ _Peck’s Bad Boy._ _Golden Treasury._ _Forestry and Fisheries Report for the State of Maine, 1901._ _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde._ _Treasure Island._ _Essays of Elia._ _Franklin’s Autobiography._ _Æsop’s Fables._ _Burke on Taste._ _Boy’s Æneid._ _Voyage of the “Beagle.”_ _Gilbert’s Voyage to Newfoundland._ _Don Quixote._ _Gil Blas._ _A Study of the Diseases of Chickens._ _Circus Tim._ _The Jungle Book._ _Hoosier Holiday._ _Course in Telegraphy._ _Jesse James—The Boy._ _The Red Badge of Courage._ _The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew_, with “From Henriette to Bek, with best wishes for a Happy Birthday, June 6, 1889,” in angular script on the fly-leaf.[27]

A jungle of books picked hit-or-miss. For the lure of a title. Or because, as in the case of the _Boy’s Æneid_ or _Burke on Taste_ or Charles Lamb, Henry had paved the way. Or just because.

_The Red Badge of Courage._ Spelling out the title under its coating of dust, it came through at one so! _The Red Badge of Courage._ Years before he was ready to read it, that book was always lying around somewhere in his room. For a long time it propped the unsteady fourth leg of the small white-pine table. Once it was used for pressing mint-leaves and left on a window-sill all night to be rained on and warped. Motley of books, chosen for a motley of reasons or lack of them.

No, these were not days and nights to mope over, or to have Mathilda dry her eyes over. Each and every one of them was a key-hole to which you glued your eye and saw something of the great, grand, alluring tomorrow.

The schoolhouse, a one-room frame building with a fine-bellied stove on a tin mat in the center, adjoined the pasture where Davey helped old Nemo to herd the Tarkington stock. One of the fascinating aspects of the Tarkington pasture was that the city-limits imaginary line ran through its middle, cutting a salt-rock in two.

The school windows overlooked all this. There were blackboards around the four walls, and carved and whittled desks in sizes sufficiently graduated to accommodate seven grades.

Small Miss Hassebrock, who the winter that Davey was eight was beginning to sicken of a bone-disease that was to almost ossify her and keep her ridden to a slanted bed for the next eighteen years of her life, carried across her narrow shoulders the burden of that ill-equipped schoolhouse.

There was a handful of children, seven grades and first year High School entrusted to the tutelage of the gallant, ill-trained, underpaid and undersized little person who seventeen years before had graduated from the equally inadequate High School of a town called Ideola.

In the course of her seven-hour school-day, Miss Hassebrock taught two-plus-two; Ohio-is-bounded-on-the-North-by; James-Monroe’s- Administration-was-the most-serene-and-yet-one-of-the-most-important- periods-in-the-life-of-the-nation;

(2_x_ + 3_y_ = 8)
(3_x_ + 7_y_ = 7);

This-is-the-forest-primeval; The-battle-of-Bunker-Hill-all-things-considered-is-the-most...; Listen-my-children-and-you-shall-hear; Friends, Romans, Countrymen; How-many-yards-of-50-inch-linoleum-are-required-to-cover-a-floor-27×34; all interspersed with drawings of geometrical cubes, spheres; rhomboids in red chalk; and antiquated relief-maps of Europe and Asia.

It meant that in that small room of graduated desks and conglomerate subjects, there was allotted to each child about twenty minutes of direct instruction out of the day. Twenty minutes of Miss Hassebrock tilting her little brain, like a spinster at the old gesture of tilting her teapot, to let trickle the stale, small array of academic facts and near-facts of the vintage of Ideola High School Normal Course, 1897.

The schoolroom squirmed with this ill-assorted conglomerate of children, waiting or dreading their turn for the trickle. The mornings were riddled by their spit-balls, hacked up by their penknives, whispered into; hissed into; scraped into by their restless feet. Often, during the drone of these days, with his mind sliding and shying away from the chief exports of the Argentine Republic and “In 1066, William the Conqueror invaded England,” David would become part of a fast and furious spit-ball barrage taking place beneath desks.

These occasions could reduce Miss Hassebrock to a state of helplessness that sent her rushing and dodging pell-mell about the room, usually ending in tears, the poor pug of her hair lopsided and every pupil in the room suddenly subsiding into a state of repentant and aboveboard beatitude.

There was something a little horribly pathetic about her, as she stood there defeated.

Once Davey, who sensed that more strongly than was comfortable for him, let a few of the spit-balls lie conspicuously in his open palm, thereby offering himself up as victim to take the edge off her somewhat disquieting defeat. But if Miss Hassebrock saw them, she did not let on. It was simpler, somehow, just to take up her pointer and indicate on the map the point where the Suez Canal becomes the north outlet of the Red Sea.

That meant the spit-ball barrages must to her seem something appallingly outside her control. As a matter of fact, she used to cry over them after school, bitterly and privately humiliated by the realization of her lack of disciplinary powers.

Davey sensing that, kept out of future spit-ball encounters rather than endure what the sight of her, standing there with her hair sliding, did to him.

There were nine pupils in all. Ross Tawkett, a great lanky sixteen-year-old fellow in the seventh grade. How he could confuse and bully and intimidate poor Miss Hassebrock with questions specifically designed to trip her up. Thus:

“Now Ross, name three of the eight planets of the solar system.”

“Mercury-Venus-Earth!”

“Excellent. That will be all, Ross.”

“No, now you name the rest of them to me, Miss Hassebrock, ’n’ then I’ll know them all eight for next lesson.”

“Why—Ross, that’s not in our today’s lesson. Be seated.”

Poor Miss Hassebrock, sufficient unto the day were the facts thereof!

Once Davey found himself in the position of prompting his teacher.

“How can Thomas Jefferson have died on July 4th, 1826, Miss Hassebrock,” sneered Ross one day, “when you just told me John Adams died that same date?”

“Why, Ross—did I? Now did I? How come? Let me see—guess I must have meant—now how come I made that mistake?”

How well Davey knew that they had both died on that date exactly fifty years after they had signed the Declaration of Independence. Henry had read him that long before he had ever entered a schoolroom.

“They both died on that same date,” mouthed David; hissed David to Miss Hassebrock behind Ross’s back. And then when she continued to regard him helplessly, held up two fingers in emphasis. “Both. Both—died. Same—day!”

“Of course,” said Miss Hassebrock, rather coldly. “It is a well-known historical fact that both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on the same date. David, come to order or take a demerit.” Ross was a class terror, all right.[28]

Six out of the nine pupils were primaries, besides David, who fitted into third grade because of certain precocities resulting from the long evenings with Henry, and a girl named Flora Wohlgemuth in fifth, whose father ran a flour-mill. A great flax doll, with the loveliest lips, that adenoids kept rather breathlessly apart.

Knowledge of that educational boll-weevil, the adenoid, was not part of Miss Hassebrock’s teaching-equipment. She daily instructed little Flora to keep her mouth closed, and struggled to crash the principles of long division through the two greatly enlarged adenoidal impedimenta to Flora’s alertness.

Later, still without benefit of surgery, Miss Wohlgemuth was in turn to teach school, through those same two, even more deplorably enlarged, impedimenta.

There was something about Flora’s round little smudge of a face that one day impelled David to yield to an old temptation to wash it roughly with a snowball. There was an hour after school of writing “The Good That Men Do Lives After Them” fifty times down foolscap; and Mrs. Wohlgemuth, who ran a butter-and-egg stand “at market” in Court House Square, complained to the Old Gentleman in Low German.

For it, the Old Gentleman stood David up on the edge of the kitchen table and gave him three wallops against the seat of Henry’s cut-down trousers.

It was almost a pleasantly reminiscent chastisement, recalling the satisfaction of feeling the snow squash up against Flora’s boneless-feeling little face, which had to it the feel of mashed potato.

Years later, from the vantage of a private hospital room, made possible by the annuity of her one-time pupil, Miss Hassebrock used to strain her tired old hack of a brain for anecdotes of Davey. She was too conscientious to invent, even where anecdotes would have been treasures, but as she used to say, there was just nothing to be said about Davey as a youngster, those primary-years, that could not be said of the average run of them who had shuffled their small-boy days across the routine pine floor of that schoolroom. Nothing, except the certain precocity traceable to the home-opportunity of reading with an older brother, and the intent quality he had of listening and sucking in, well in advance, the work of the classes ahead of him. And then the funny additional precocities that contact with the older man’s mind had given him. Rag-tags of odds and ends of information that clung to his mind like fuzz. At six, he had already begun to hoard books in the secret library of the spring-house.[29]

Once at Friday afternoon platform-exercises, when a small boy named Ike Mintz, the son of a dealer in old iron, began to sniffle and shuffle of inability to remember his allotted recitation, Davey volunteered with the following:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy.
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the East
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

Henry frequently read this poem aloud to himself, evenings. It is doubtful if, at the time, Dave took in its meaning as much as its music. It is certain he did not know its source. Neither did Miss Hassebrock.

No, he was scarcely a memorable pupil, except for his sturdy little personality thumping in so dependably every morning. Never tardy. Seldom unruly enough for more than a passing reprimand. Seldom brilliant. Never remiss.

There is this little incident, which has to do with Teddy. All of the school-day Teddy lay in the vestibule that led into the small section where the children hung their hats and coats, or wandered the countryside of the vicinity, usually showing up at recess or lunch period for the droppings from Davey’s lunch-basket.

There was an old feud between Punt, a fox-terrier that belonged to Red Kelsoe, and Teddy.

Their masters had bitten the dust together more than once over the mangled ear or the torn flank of the conquered. Teddy was half Punt’s size, but an eye-to-eye fighter. Punt, on the other hand, had a trick of hurling himself from the rear, taking his adversary unawares. Teddy bore scars that had been inflicted by a rearward adversary.

One day, just as the children were filing out of school, a series of yelps split the tired, four-o’clock air.

Teddy’s moment had come. At the very threshold of the building, his teeth into the rear of the terrier’s neck, Teddy had Punt pinioned in the bloody dust.

Through the cries of excited children, as they formed a tight circle, the air thickening and blurring with more dust and yelps, there mingled the squeals and the high admonitive tones of Miss Hassebrock.

There was a red trail across the school-yard and with his teeth all of their depth into the terrier’s throat, Teddy was shaking him like a rat, releasing him only to prove further the glory of his sure vantage, by leaping at him for fresh clutch.

It was a one-sided struggle this time, and David had finally to pull Teddy off by the scruff of his neck, while he still leaped and yelped for more Punt-flavored blood.

It was Davey’s and Teddy’s moment, as Punt, limping, slunk off tail-down past his master, the children applauding the turning of the tables of this old feud between dogs and masters.

It was Davey’s moment all right, when Red, instead of leaping at him with his usual taunt of victory, stood grinding his toe in the dust.

Except that Davey knew what Teddy knew! Teddy had conquered his foe with his foe’s own despised methods. Teddy had leaped on Punt unawares! Davey knew, in his heart, that was the only way Teddy could ever have gained that particular first strangle-hold over an adversary twice his heft and cunning. Teddy must have leaped at Punt as he lay sleeping at the threshold, waiting for Red. It was in the half-slink of his tail, as he crept up to his master. It was in the fawning lick of his tongue. Davey knew! And Teddy knew what Davey knew, and victory was as dead-sea fruit.

And in that instant, as Davey stood looking down at his dog, and shame of shameful conquest lay in the eyes of both, the belated flash of understanding was transmuted to Red.

“You’re a dirty little sneak!” he shouted, and batted David sideways on the head, so that he saw things in waves. “He sneaked up on Punt—yer dog’s a dirty little sneak, too!”

“Red,” said Miss Hassebrock sharply, stepping forward into the ring, “that blow was a cowardly act. Either you apolog——”

“No,” said David, a little dully, “Teddy did sneak up. His winning don’t count.”

That evening, after the supper-things had been cleared, Mathilda, who had pains in her legs from having done a day’s washing in the damp Igrotte cellar, set about the unsavory task of stewing up some asafœtida in an old tomato-can.

This she sewed up into a small bag and hung about David’s protesting neck, for what she termed his right peaked look.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] I remember walking across the Tarkington pastures one day and encountering Davey, with Teddy and Grime minding his sheep, lying stomach-flat on a rock, reading an old book of mine which he had dug out of gracious knows where, and which seemed to be causing him some bewilderment and no great entertainment. “Five Little Peppers and How They Grew?” he said, looking up at me with his small, square, intent face, and a quality of eye-strain in his gaze that was later in life to cause him bad headaches, “Gee—I thought this was a story of the way pepper grows—and here it’s nothing but the name of a lot of folks.” He had picked the book on the assumption that it was on botany. There were years, watching Davey grow, when I sometimes thought of him as becoming a horticulturist.

[28] ... Honorable Ross Tawkett, who was probably responsible, more than any other individual, for my brother’s first candidacy for public office, made the introductory address. He did not, as many believe, first come into David’s life when they were fellow members of the International Board of 1937. On the contrary, Ross had lived in our county for one winter when he was sixteen, then his father, who was a dairy-farmer, moved to the outskirts of Springfield.