Chapter VIII: Part 8

[29] I think that David’s library, begun, I always say, back in the days when Father accidentally stumbled across a whole nest of books he had secreted in the spring-house, is probably the greatest commentary of all, upon his kind of intellectual curiosity. On two important occasions, it has fallen to my lot to superintend the moving of his library. First from his home in Springfield to the State Mansion. There were then, as I remember it, about fourteen hundred, exclusive of law-books. Many years later, in the move to Washington, there were over again as many to be recatalogued and boxed. Nor were these volumes books with uncut pages. A book never reached his permanent shelves until its contents had been either read or “duly noted.” Insatiably curious, the headings under which his books fell into catalogue were as grotesque as varied.

He loved and revered lyric poetry, although modern verse was on his shelves. The only soothing agent ever discovered for one of his blinding headaches was curiously enough, Dora’s low and rather sing-song voice which she had cultivated to a monotony that could fairly drone him to sleep on the word-rhythms that he loved.

His personal collection was catalogued under such headlines as Horticulture. Electronic Theory. Soil Chemistry. Parasites in Central American Tropics. Geographies. Organic Chemistry. Evolution. Psychiatry. Aeronautics. Physics. History. Greek, American, French, Russian, Scandinavian Literatures. Drama. Sociology. Church History. Heredity. Determinism. Behaviorism. Anthropology. National Parks. Deserts. Travel. Genetics. Shorthorn Cattle. Morphology. Race. Essays. Philosophy. Waterways. Radio. Theater. Birds. Chess. Dogs. Population. Fundamentalism. Astronomy. Public Health. Theory of Relativity. Fisheries. Astronomy. Furniture. Architecture. Journalism.

Senator Harmon once said of my brother, that he knew so well the secret of surrounding himself with brilliant minds on every subject, that he had only to press a button marked Coinage, Immigration, Mexico, or Techno-Psychology, and lo, a specialist on that subject appeared before him.

That, of course, is an amusing exaggeration. It could more truthfully be said of my brother’s library. Books were literally at his elbow by the thousand, on call for almost any reference.

_Chapter Eighteen_

A man down at Wohlgemuth’s mill was enlisting. He was a fellow with a receding chin and a reddish birthmark seared across his cheek, who had drifted in on a freight-train from Kansas City, and who claimed to have walked it overland from San Francisco.

For over a year he had been working about the neighborhood. First as herdsman at the Howey farm, for a while doing chores for Bek, and finally running a truck for Ed Wohlgemuth.

He was a gangling, big-jointed fellow, full of the lore of the open road, and with a quid as big as a nugget protruding from one cheek or the other. He had fought in the Boxer Rebellion and in the Spanish-American War, and “guerilled,” as he put it, in Mexico and done six years’ navy-service. A soldier of fortune in the literal sense of the word. Anybody’s fight was his fight.

The boys, for miles around, clustered about Pete (the only name by which he was known thereabouts) along about sunset-time, on the row of barrels that flanked the Wohlgemuth Mill. He had the knacks that delight boys. He could spit straight, and twice any competitor’s distance. He could lure a rabbit out of a hole by a jargon he knew. He could also, by another mysterious jargon, entice grasshoppers to the back of his tattooed hands and make them spit tobacco there without so much as touching them. He could tie a sailors’ knot with one hand, cause hairs from a white horse’s tail to stand straight on end at the tip of his nose, pull a cork from the inside of a narrow-necked bottle with a bit of twine, bring down one blackbird to every shot and do a snake-dance that he had learned from the Pueblos.

And now Pete, who was an Australian by birth, was about to set off for Montreal to enlist under his own flag. It was the closest that remote thing, the World War, had penetrated the uninterrupted rhythm of Whittier County.

To David, racing home that dusk, from having sat about on the row of cider-barrels with Pete and his cohorts, the fuzz of the day’s heat was a taste up against his tongue. Cattle lowed. The winding of smoke from his father’s chimney curled languidly against a torrid sky, and out of all this gentle trance, something a little terribly alien seemed suddenly to have come to life off the printed page of a history-book. War had come to life.

Pete, some one who was as casual to the countryside as—why as the very barns, the meadows, the silos, the hedges, the farmers themselves, was going to war. War had come up off the history-pages into reality.

Pete was going. The tidings made Dave’s bare feet send pebbles spinning from under them. He was panting when he reached home, from the dual consciousness of being late, which always grated against the Old Gentleman, who was more easily irascible than formerly, and with the burden of his news.

His mother and Henry were just about to draw up around the supper-table.

Supper served as near as possible to the range, even in summer, made dishing-up an easier matter for Mathilda, who no longer kept help. Trina, poor distressed creature, at the catastrophe of the family-move from the House on Sycamore Street, had been obliged to accept another position in Centralia, for the support of the two invalid old sisters she cared for.

Besides, it was cheerier in the kitchen than in the little aperture of a room off the parlor that was jammed, except for a narrow rim for slithering around with the dishes of food, with the heavy, grape-and-leaf-design, walnut dining-room set from the House on Sycamore Street.

There was no prevailing upon the Old Gentleman to let go of that ponderous “set,” even to the antique-dealers from Springfield, who came sniffing.

There was a lamp with a green-paper shade burning in the center of the kitchen table; and Henry must have been reading _War and Peace_, by Tolstoi, because it was hung now, to keep his page, over the lower rung of his chair, and his place was rumpled, and his unused plate pushed center toward the sugar-bowl and castor. The exuding heat of countryside, mingling with the blazing breath of the range, was like steam, and had the cling to it of a hot, wet blanket.

“Father, Pete’s going to war!”

The Old Gentleman, seated on the kitchen porch, with his shoes and socks on the floor beside him, and his hot feet dangling to the ground and soaking in the dew of the small surrounding plot of grass, screwed around a face that had been jerked from the intent observation of his dozen or so wyandottes taking roost.

“War?”

“What war?” asked Mathilda and began tilting a skillet of steaming okra-and-tomato stew into a bowl.

“Why, Mother,” said Henry gently, and rising to take the dish from her, “you know what war. We’ve discussed precious little else at this table for weeks.”

“Of course I know, Henry,” snapped Mathilda, and turned toward him with a flick of her cup-towel. “Don’t speak to me as if I were a baby!”

“I’m sorry, Mother!”

Mathilda’s memory was beginning to lapse on her, more and more. Sometimes in stretches that were impossible to ignore.[30]

In the beginning, the family met these lapses in pretty much Henry’s wise fashion, usually succeeding in jerking her back to an injured, if resentful air she always employed to cover up these hiatuses that bewildered her and made her constantly afraid of the next.

“Of course! Of course! And what’s he going to war for?”

“He’s going to fight for his country, Mother. His country is—the Brit-ish Empire. A fellow’s got to fight for his country, Mother, if his country’s gone to war.”

“Stop talking like a parrot, Davey,” said Henry with rather an unheard-of-for-him kind of brusqueness and jerked his chair closer to the table.

The Old Gentleman was pretty apt to become excited and shout at his mild-mannered son, if these supper-table controversies led to certain political topics that had particularly to do with the situation in Europe, and upon which they differed.

Conscription was one of them; and here was Dave running home with a subject perilously sure to lead up to it. Be it said for Henry that he made a gallant effort to divert it.

“While I think of it, Mother, here are those washers you’ve been asking about for your faucets. Ed Ryan, whom I defended way back in a horse-thieving case, gave me a pocketful.”

“Thank you, Henry. I can do with them nicely. Seven washers for defending a body against a horse-thievery charge. Ah me, that’s why you’ll remain a poor man all your life, son. Fine a lawyer as there is in the state, and taking washers for fee. ’Tain’t dignified, son.”

The Old Gentleman ambled in then, his attention persistently snagged by the subject Henry had tried to divert. “Who should stop talking like a parrot? It’s high time the boys of this country should begin talking like parrots, from the look of yesterday’s _Enquirer_. Wilson can’t any more keep this country out of wa——”

“Puppa! Now Puppa!” trebled in Mathilda, herself tired to death of these supper-table reiterations between father and son. “Taste, Puppa! Bek sent Stevey over with this okra special for your supper. Stevey’s not looking well, Puppa. Sometimes I think he must have caught some kind of a slow fever up there at Agricultural School, where he was last year for that spell.”

“And if talk don’t do the work,” bellowed the Old Gentleman in immediately argumentative key and starting to swirl the coffee in his cup with a gouging, angry spoon—“if talk don’t do the work—then I say _conscription_! And the man who don’t favor conscription for the salvation of his country in time of need, don’t deserve to have a country to defend. If you’ve been through what I’ve been in a country where they demand the best years of a young man’s life, war or no war, a little conscription in time of need shouldn’t be necessary, and if it is, by God, I’m for it.”

“You are talking the phraseology of militarism, Father. You’re the parrot! Go out and train cigar-Indians on such flimsy logic, but not men who think. Besides, if it is your patriotism that is so aroused, the modern doctrine of neutrality is an American idea that Washington conceived and Jefferson phrased in 1803. You can be equally American by adhering to them.”

“Doctrines of neutrality don’t change the natures of men. Men are men——”

“Except when they are hyenas.”

“Even a hyena will fight for his——”

“Only a hyena should——”

The Old Gentleman began rapping the table with his fork. “I won’t have sedition talked in my house, where I’ve got a future citizen growing up to fight for his country, right or wrong.”

“When Decatur said that, Father, he was in love with the magic of a phrase, not its meaning.”

“He was a brave man and a patriot.”

“He was both, Father. But there is a valor born of hysteria.”

“I talk facts. Not high-sounding phrases.”

“Just the reverse. You talk phrases. The phrases of the immemorial cant of warfare. Embroidered banners of phrases, made to cover up the stinking realities of greed and war.”

“Hen-ery! Use nice words.”

“I’m sorry, Mother. Please, Father, there is no use going over it all again. Whom do you think I ran into on High Street today? Remember Al Hopkins——?”

“There is this much use,” shouted the Old Gentleman, working himself more and more into the luxury of an orgy of rage, “I won’t have a—pacifist in my house! I haven’t raised two sons, and a third one growing up, to say nothing of sons-in-law and grandchildren, to have sedition in my house in my old age.”

“Puppa!”

“Let him rave, Mother. My hope for him is that he will never have anyone in his house with more seditious thoughts against country than I.”

“I don’t know about that. When a man questions another man’s right to fight for his country——”

“I question every man’s right to fight. To shed blood. To splatter out of a man’s heart, with bullets, the life that women go down into hell to bring forth.”

“Hennery!”

“And I say a country’s honor comes even before that!”

“Puppa, your biscuit is getting cold.”

“And I say no country’s honor can be raised or lowered by shooting the blood out of human hearts.”

“Such talk is traitorous. I won’t have it talked before Davey. You’re a traitor. Damnation, you’re a——”

“I won’t be talked to like this, Father.”

“Hennery! Puppa!”

“You don’t deserve the benefits of the country you live in. You don’t honor it. You don’t know what it is to come like I came, penniless, and after years of an empty belly, into the country that gave me my everything. You don’t honor the country that honored your parents and gave you a full belly. A country whose cobblestones you should kiss as I kiss them. Traitor!”

There shot along Henry’s slowly mobile face the first quick flash of heat-lightning David had ever seen cross it. Small areas around his nose turned jade-white and quivered. Sweat sprang out across the considerable bulge of his forehead. His lips moved as if trying to moisten themselves and his neck began to beat. Regarding him, Mathilda sprang from her chair. Once, in his childhood, she remembered a paroxysm like that. His sister Bek had dared him to fight a debt-of-honor over a slate-pencil, in the yard of the House on Sycamore Street, with a town-boy named Cutty Ditweiler, who had been killed a year later by the accidental side swipe of his father’s scythe.

Henry had stood by and let himself be bullied, sooner than fight. Bek, unable to endure it longer, had sprung on Cutty, raining blows, until the weaker man of the two went down before her. It was then that Henry had turned sick and run indoors to Mathilda, his face locked in the same kind of paroxysm that his mother beheld there now.

“Hen-nery!”

His whitish lips were pulled across his face like strips of adhesive tape, and Davey could not keep his fascinated eyes off them.

“We won’t go into that, Father,” said Henry and swallowed with such an effort that you could hear his throat click.

Mathilda, frantic at what she saw gathering in her husband’s face, tilted the whole of the okra-bowl, noisily scraping the last of its viscous contents to her husband’s plate.

“More okra, Father. Bek sent it over by Stevey. She raises the best I ever tasted. Stevey isn’t looking so well. Sometimes I think he must have caught a slow fever——”

“We won’t go into that, won’t we!” exploded the Old Gentleman, his face a darkening blur, through which he could not or would not see the darkening face of his son. “We won’t? We _will_ go into that. I’m an American citizen, grateful for the benefits such a country has given me and my family, and even the bad times I am in now can’t change that. I’m an American citizen, willing to give every grandson and son I got, if, God forbid, the country gets into war. When you talk as you do in front of your brother, even if he is only a child, I say it again, you are a traitor. A traitor to your country, sir! A damn traitor!”

The Old Gentleman was launched into his rage now. He shouted. He screamed. His voice came leaping over his lips, plunging into choking incoherence.

“God strike me—down—before I should have a son—a—damned traitor!”

It was then that Henry rose to his feet. He had the look of a man whose blood might have stopped in his veins, and he walked over to his father and took him up by a loose handful of the shoulder of his coat, and, for an incredible moment, it looked as if he were going to strike him down. Only he did nothing of the sort. He just began to shake, gently at first and then a little more furiously, until the Old Gentleman was half-off his feet.

“Don’t you dare say that, Father!” To Davey, it scarcely seemed Henry’s voice. Only something thin, as if some one were clapping two tin plates. “You—with your bombast! You don’t know what love of country is. You only love your country enough to die for it, on a battlefield, the martyred death that gets monuments to it for the spilled entrails that have fertilized the earth in the name of Hate. You don’t love your country enough to crucify yourself for it in the name of Love. You hear me, I do! Yours is the easy patriotism. The patriotism of the band-wagon. The patriotism of the self-flagellation of feeding the red dramatic jaws of war with the flesh of your flesh. Of feeding your sons’ entrails to the bawdy, uncontrolled passions of men of power. Yours is the easy patriotism. The patriotism that gets its name smeared across tablets in public squares. I—oh God—what do you know about love of country?” said Henry, and suddenly, incredibly, released the bunch of his father’s coat-sleeve and went sobbing from the room.

Davey crept after, but then only after long minutes had elapsed. Minutes of a silence that was punctuated by the great, unnatural-sounding ticks of the kitchen clock, with the nosegay painted on the glass door before its pendulum.

After a while, Mathilda began to cry softly into her apron, and the Old Gentleman began to swing the low contents of his coffee-cup and drink it down in slow, untasted gulps.

When Davey crept into his brother’s room, there was the bulk of him across the red-and-white Paisley quilt of his cot, his head buried in his arms and his body as felled-looking as a tree.

“Henry,” said Davey, and touched him timidly on the arm, “you’re not a—a trait-or.”

“No,” said Henry, and jerked himself up and walked to the mirror to run a runty old hartshorn brush over his baldish spot. “I’m only a damn fool, Davey.”

“You—you’re great—Henry——”

“Yes, a great ass, Davey,” said Henry, and lifted his small brother by the armpits and set him down again and walked down into the kitchen, where his father, in a wilt, still sat in his chair beside the table, swinging the last dreary contents of his coffee-cup.

“Forgive a fool, Father,” said Henry, and walked up and held out a hand.

“Forgive an older fool,” mumbled the Old Gentleman, taking the hand without glancing up.

“Hennery,” quavered Mathilda, “will you eat your corn pudding now?”

“A big helping of it, Mother.”

The lamp burned like a round and gracious eye into the thickening gloom of the kitchen. There were a dozen and one after-dinner chores to be done, the two men and Davey scattering for them after the meal, and Mathilda lifting the dishes in clumps and carrying them to the pan of hot water on the stove.

Out in the hen-roost, where Davey scuttled to count up his wyandottes, first stars could be seen through the square little window in the roof of the chicken-house. Lovely Vega, which Davey knew by name, popped out even as he stared. Curious, that men could bicker unashamed beneath the placid enormity of stars....

There was water to be carried. On the crest at the back of the house where the pump stood, the billows of the miles of meadows, peaceful under the whitish night, ran out to horizon, the occasional farmhouses, barns, silos, and hay-ricks, looking like frail boats riding a gentle sea.

The pink patch of kitchen window, against which the hooked figure of his mother moved now and then, swam disembodied from the rest of the dark house, and might have been a window to the sky.

Across the silence, a figure, dangling a lantern, moved more deeply into the gloom. It was the Old Gentleman stalking past the barn down toward the pig-wallow.

It was deep night. Almost as if the evening were holding its breath before exuding a deep sigh of satisfaction.

Curious, that this peace had held the turmoil of men’s passions that had raged in that little room down there behind the pink patch. Passions that must even now be whirling in its timbers.

The pump squeaked as Davey leaned his lips to the spout for the first cool gush, Teddy standing by to lick the overflow with more greed than thirst.

How cool it was! It seemed to Davey he could feel it run along his throat down into a spot against his chest that hurt.

The country stretched out before him as he lifted his head and ran his tongue around his lips. Tides of country that seemed to emanate from the spot on which he stood, appearing to rise and fall, even as his own breathing, and making the flesh of earth feel almost the same flesh as the soles of his feet.

“My country,” said Davey, in the recitative voice of Friday afternoons, and standing there with his bare toes oozing into the cool, thin mud around the pump—“my country—my country, right or wrong. Mr. Hen-nery—you!—smartee—’tis anyhow!”

FOOTNOTES:

[30] ... even though, as old Jessup used to say, “I says it who shouldn’t”, if ever a mother was blessed with children who adored her, that mother was ours. Not only Davey. My sisters were her obedient little girls to the end. I can still see Phil, on the very evening that a business venture with which he was concerned took on, overnight, as it were, proportions that caused us all to gasp, sitting in the drawing-room of his new Springfield home; telephone jangling, messengers arriving, reporters and friends in and out, trying to make Mother, whose memory, as time went on, became paler and paler, comprehend the dramatics of the thing that was happening all around her.

Dear soul, her dim eyes wanted so to understand what it was caused his hand to tremble as he told her the same thing in every imaginable form, trying to penetrate the thick, cruel fog, beating about in his brain for ways and means to help her.

As for David—I cannot write it clear-eyed—long after he had passed out of our family jurisdiction, so to speak, and had become the property of the people, he was at her beck and call. I have seen him sit beside her for hours on end, patiently trying to answer her feeble and insistent questions. Tides in the affairs of state and nation beat up around the very room in which they sat with a terrific imminence, but they never budged him from her side while she wanted him there.

Poor Mama—yet who am I to pity her!

_Chapter Nineteen_

No, it was not the same at Bek’s any more.

The family was only visiting itself, so to speak.

For instance, Davey never returned home from the Model Farm any more, bearing big, yellow-toothed ears of corn, or pats of Bek’s inimitable sweet butter, or an occasional squab, all picked and plucked and wrapped in cheese-cloth for the Old Gentleman’s supper.

The squabs on the farm now belonged to Ex-Governor Howey, and so did the sweet butter that came out of Bek’s churns just a little sweeter and creamier than any butter Davey was ever to know.

In some respects, Bek’s scruples seemed a bit beside the point. According to her interpretation of what was actually a rather loose arrangement with the Howeys, board and lodging had been allotted to herself, Winslow, Steve, and Leslie. Therefore Paula, on those few of her vacations that she spent at home instead of doing summer work at normal school, slept on a sofa in the dining-room at her aunt Emma’s in Centralia.

Davey never slept at Bek’s any more, either. His old room at the top of the house was once more occupied by Stevey; and besides, the old, easy generosities of being permitted to straddle bareback the pick of Bek’s stables, or of scuttling into the cool, dark cellar for dill-pickles stewing under juices and vine leaves, were of the past.

They were Howey property now. Even the pail of huge dills that had gone annually to Clara in St. Louis was a thing of the past, although Bek still did put up one private crock of the dark-green beauties. And a dozen for old Senator Allen, a gentleman farmer forty miles to the north, who admired Bek and always referred to her as the finest woman in the state.

Howey property! The very side rails of porch upon which Winslow loved to prop his feet and tilt back for hours with his eyes closed and his pipe drooping, were Howey property now. Feet off. Hands off. The old, easy household, with the enormous bounty of Bek, her largess, her come-hard but go-easy, were of yesteryear. Even Leslie, who liked to dig holes and bury such inconsequential addenda as bits of wall paper, empty spools, playing-cards, was now confined to a fenced-off little bit of dirt that Bek nightly spaded back into place. Howey dirt.

The overseer of the new Howey holdings, up with the first streak of dawn, stalking the barns of prize-cattle, riding on the running-board of trucks, as they rumbled out to field where the threshing-machines loomed, superintending the installation of new Howey machinery, inspecting feed-troughs, cattle-hoofs, water-drains and chickens for pip, had the hard precision of one of the new machines themselves. Ephraim Howey could have rented out the main house at good profit, and installed an overseer in the flat over the garage. Bek knew that. It kept her mouth straight and a little bitter with her scrupulous sense of obligation.

Anybody’s foot on the rung of a Howey chair, even though that rung were hidden from sight under the dining-table, grated a message to her alert nerves. Winslow, who used to paint on a Windsor chair which he toted about with him from one to the other of his five or six landscapes, tried and true, had to lug a stool instead now, which Bek herself built him out of pine-wood and a strip of canvas.

It was a tight, constrained household of conscientious economies.

It is doubtful if the Howey family ever came into much realization of this fanatical conservation of their interests.

It was ground into Winslow, all right, whose meek inefficiency under the rigors of the régime seemed to blow him out, like a candle. Bek no more realized this! On the contrary, she tried with every ounce of her grim energy to conserve him against the impact of their reverses.

Largely through her insistence that his work be served first, Winslow still painted throughout the long mornings of Bek’s drudgery, puttered at picket-fences or lawn-mowing as his share of the farm chores, trembled and got ague at the mounting problems that had to do with Steve, and started to execute Bek’s occasional request for further assistance in a low-geared fashion that almost invariably caused her to brush him aside and accomplish the task herself, with a power which never failed to amaze and further reduce him to impotency.

They never ceased, these two, to hypnotize each other by these temperamental divergencies. They made him precious to her, in the way that her children, in the first years of their life, had been precious. As Davey was still precious to her.

She liked to hurl the bulwark of her body between Winslow and the workaday things that would somehow have made him less dear to her, had he been able to cope with them.

She lifted from his shoulders, or rather never permitted to descend there, the burden of so much as the responsibility of choosing the color of his suits or the weight of his underwear, never realizing that she doused him with every breath she breathed, as she had done from the first day she met him and wooed him and married him.

She kept from him as much of the truth about Stevey as she dared. Not even Bek knew all of that truth. Davey did.

In the crammed routine of his workadays, he used to be sent twice and even thrice a day, scurrying over from the Igrotte place with a batch of his mother’s muffins or a fowl for broth, that winter that Stevey was half-sick most of the time, with pains throughout his body that made even the light work outlined for him by Bek more than he could drag himself about to do.

Davey knew the furtive thing about Stevey. He had known it since the day that Teddy had lain before his eyes with a kicked-in side.

To Davey, in the fretful, pulled, nervous face of his grown nephew Steve, there was no longer mystery. Only a certain horror that not improbably played its part in what was to be a life-long aversion to the taste or smell of spirituous liquors.[31]

Not that anything in David’s experience had prepared him for realization of anything that had to do with Stevey’s plight. To be sure, he had seen old Jessup drink, and the Tarkingtons had once had a gardener who used to come staggering home from periodic Saturday-night trips to Middleton, to sit under the spring-house and crazily play a mouth-harp.

But the slaked throat and the burning eye of a member of the family, that was another matter. Davey knew that, with his intuition.

One dusk, coming across from the Igrotte house with a pan of his mother’s clabber for Winslow, who yearned for it, now that Bek meticulously either fed it to the Howey hogs or sent pails of it over to the Howey farm, Davey came across the strange spectacle of Stevey standing in some knee-high grass beyond South Meadow, with the figure of a girl in his arms, one of her hands hanging limply into the grasses and her head dangling back and showing a great arch of white neck.

“It’s Claire,” said Stevey almost with relief at seeing David, whom he was given to avoiding since the incident with Teddy. “She’s fainted. Can’t seem to revive her. Help me home with her, there’s a fellow.”

Davey had known of these meetings. Two or three times, on that short-cut across the lower rim of South Meadow, he had heard their voices and skirted a rock-ledge to avoid being seen or heard.

One somehow did not run tattling to elders about knowing this—and yet—more than once, waking into the quiet of his room underneath the eaves, something that was not entirely right about his remaining silent smote Davey with the kind of depression that can overtake in the small hours of night.

It was quite a job getting Claire to the house. She was in the dead weight of a swoon from which she did not seem to want to emerge.

FOOTNOTES:

[31] Following that 1920 prohibition-fiasco of America’s, I often think that my brother’s enormous influence as author of the famous Modification Bill, which is already beginning to sweep the civilized world in its application, stands as a particularly fine example of his unparalleled capacity for balanced middle-man’s judgment.

His personal aversion to drink, dates back, I feel sure, to an incident that had horribly to do with my own son. Throughout Dave’s boyhood, it existed to such an extent that I have seen him turn pale from squeamishness at the sight of someone drinking a cup of cider.

As Police-Commissioner, as Senator, as Governor, he was consistently austere in meting out punishment to the man whose family suffered of his intemperance.

And yet, almost marked from childhood, as it were, with an aversion to drink, this was the man who ultimately was to draft out a compromise bill that was to save the face of the ridiculous America of the Volstead Act.

_Chapter Twenty_

There were seldom family-conferences now, at least not in the old sense of the word. Except when Phil came down, (never with Rita or the children, because of lack of space to put them up) he spent the night on the curlicue sofa in the Igrotte house.

When Paula came home, she stayed at Emma’s and slept on the day-bed in the dining-room alcove, and always left her board-money under the fruit-bowl on the sideboard, over which Emma wept.

Phil worked for an automobile concern in Springfield now, on a commission basis, and lived in a little two-family bungalow at the opposite end of town from the one where the boom was taking place.

Every month or so, Phil sent the Old Gentleman a check for ten or twenty dollars. These, knowing to what extent the Phil Schuylers were reckoning to the penny themselves, his father never cashed, causing confusion in Phil’s small banking-matters. Incredibly enough, however, on the margin of income that forced him to reckon in terms of car fares, he was already manipulating on the side again, and one month along with another automobile salesman, had turned over with profit, two hundred dollars in a speculative land deal.

But the gathering of the clan, even for the festal purpose of Thanksgiving dinner, was no longer comfortably possible in the little house in Pessimines Lane. Eight people would have jammed any room in the house to capacity, and the kitchen range, bought from old man Igrotte because the one from the House on Sycamore Street would not fit in, had a top scarcely large enough for a pot, a kettle, and a skillet.

Mathilda, who was accustomed to six and eight pots seething at once!

And yet, by the mysterious sounding of some sort of a clan-cry, there did crowd into the stuffiness of the little old Igrotte packing-case, more Schuylers than had convened together since that evil day brought down on them by one Mark Milliken.

A little over a week after Davey had helped Stevey carry the limp and fainting body of Claire from the edge of South Meadow to the Model Farm, there gathered, in rather muted fashion, most of the family.

Even Clara, who made a great ado about leaving Sam, who was sure to play penny-ante poker in her absence, arrived this time from St. Louis.

A good baker’s-dozen, counting Dave and Leslie and Stevey and Claire, were crowded into the Igrotte dining-room that Sunday for the plate-lunch that Mathilda, with the aid of her daughters and Trina, who came out to help on her every day off, passed in and out among the company.

The smattering of grandchildren on an occasion which ill-befitted them, complicated things a bit. Leslie was there, mild and patient, but a little timorous even among his own. Grown to the great gangling height that had not yet reached its full development, it was difficult—it was grotesque, to seat him among the children. And yet.... Finally Bek, with the most drawn look anyone there had ever seen on her face, placed him on a chair between the open folding-doors, so that from every vantage, as she hastened about with a coarse, white sort of butcher’s apron the Old Gentleman used to wear into the smoke-house on Sycamore Street, she could observe him.

Indeed, this austere occasion revolved around grandchildren. A dark, defiant-looking one, who sat out on the stoop, smoking cigarette after cigarette, and throwing them away only half-puffed. In a corner of the dining-room, seated white and silent and absolutely impassive, sat Claire. A flaxen-haired snow-maiden of imperturbability.

It was a wretched “lap lunch” of restraint, ill-balanced plates, and buzzing noonday heat that crowded into the little clapboard house. The Old Gentleman, whose face could be so sly with humor, clamped-looking and grim now, seated like a troglodyte at the end of the table.

There were no preliminaries. Before Mathilda, followed by Emma, had carried out the last plate of Brown-Betty-with-hard-sauce, the Old Gentleman came out like a cannon at his grandson, pointing him out as he sat twirling his spoon around an untasted dessert-plate.

“A Schuyler,” he boomed at him, “has disgraced us!” and began shaking his pointing finger and beginning at once to rise to the dreaded climax of his dreaded wrath.

“Oh, Father,” called Bek, “don’t begin it that way! Not before the children——”

“Dave, run along.”

“Leslie, darling—come, Aunt Emma will take you out and get you a pail and let you pick some string-beans for grandmother’s and grandfather’s supper.”

“If Grandfather does begin that way,” said Steve, rising and kicking his chair back savagely, “I’ll walk out of the house in the very beginning and stay out. I was a fool to let myself be dragged here anyway, like a head of cattle.”

“Stevey,” said Bek, and walked over and placed her palm against his forehead, “what did you promise me?”

She was a mountain of calm, standing there between her son and Winslow, who had receded into his chair as if it were sucking him in.

“I won’t be bullied, Mother.”

“You won’t be bullied,” shouted the Old Gentleman. “You _will_ be bullied! Into honor.”

“Father,” said Bek, “I won’t be bullied, either. This situation has got to be talked out in calm, or Winslow and Stevey and Claire and Emma and I will walk out.”

“Oh, dear!” sobbed Emma. “Oh, dear! _oh_, dear!”

“For God’s sake, Pap,” said Phil, “can’t you keep your head on your shoulders?”

“At least,” cried Mathilda, in her fluty, dry-lipped tremolo, “Davey don’t need to be here. Shoo, Dave!”

“Davey,” said his sister Clara, who had a futile, rather antagonizing way with children, including her own, “run out with Leslie and play.”

“I want to stay,” said Davey stubbornly, and sat with his hands clinched into the sides of his footstool.

Suddenly Claire, collapsing from her imperturbability, began to sob violently, her aunts forming an immediate barrage around her.

“This is an outrage, Father!” said Henry, rising in disgust from the window-sill where he had been sitting looking out upon the bare patch of chicken-yard and puffing at his pipe. “Good Lord! they never did it this brutally, I’ll wager, when they used to settle tribal disputes by torture! What is it, Father, now that you have the tribe around the fire? On with the council-meeting.”

Poor Claire! At her uncle’s words, she crouched and sobbed the more, Emma fanning her with one of the Old Gentleman’s tape-bound, palm-leaf fans.

The Old Gentleman began to cry then, in dry sobs that split his voice. “A child of my family. A child of a family that has not so much as a speck upon its honor. Two children of my family.”

“Two children of your family what?” snapped Henry. “Swept off their feet by a law of life stronger than they are. Well, what’s to be done about it? Crucify them? Quit your crying, Claire. Come out here and face the situation. Come to a sane conclusion and end all this unnecessary and nauseating clan-panic. What’s on your minds about it all?”

“Answer Uncle Henry, dearest,” said Emma. “Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Open the window a little, Morton. I don’t feel right well.”

To Claire, whose worshipful admiration of her uncle Henry had long been a family-joke, the moment was simply not to be borne. Her lips shuddered up and down like window-shades sucked inward. Sobs came that made the noise of a window-shade flopping in high wind.

“I——can’t!”

“The thing in a nutshell is this, Uncle Henry,” said Steve, stepping forward and shaking the hair back from his sheet-white face. “It seems I’ve been a rotter.”

“You’ve been a low life,” screamed the Old Gentleman, breaking loose again from his daughter’s detaining hands.

“Father,” said Henry sharply. “One more outburst like that, and I’ll join Stevey and Claire and walk out, too!”

“Nobody’s to blame in this, Uncle Henry. But if the family insists otherwise, I’ll take it all.”

“You used to have her meet you secretly, Stevey,” sobbed Emma, “you know you did. I see it all so clearly now. My Claire away from home so much after her teaching-hours. You encouraged her to meet you secretly. Claire was not the girl to ever——”

“Oh, Mother, please! Please! Stevey never made me do anything I didn’t want to do.”

“Let’s not go into that now,” said Bek. “Whether Steve encouraged Claire is not the issue here, Emma.”

“But Bek—he did——”

“I take it that the point is,” said Henry drily, “Claire is going to have a baby. What’s to be done about it?”

At the brutality of that presentation, a series of bleats and short cries rose about the room.

“Henry,” said Clara, and made a dive toward Dave, “at least you might realize that a child is in the room. Davey, go out and help Leslie pick beans.”

“I won’t,” said Dave, and sat with his large, dark eyes on his nephew Steve, and his hands clinched tighter than ever into the footstool.

“Let him alone!” said Henry. “Good Heavens! why start out making shameful to him the most fundamental fact of life!”

“Oh! Hen-nery—son—shame—oh! oh!”

“You mean,” cried Emma, “you want to hold up to him the example of his elders as something noble!”

“No, I don’t mean a damn thing except that all this mewling makes me sick, and I don’t want to saturate the fact of birth for him with nastiness by being furtive about it.”

“Oh, Stevey, Stevey! Oh, Claire! How could you?” cried Mathilda suddenly, and began to clasp and unclasp her wisps of little hands, and to regard them with the tears running, “How could you?”

“Grandmother,” sobbed Claire, easily susceptible to the pitiable spectacle of the sobbing Mathilda, “we know it’s no excuse but we didn’t mean to—it’s not anything you think out, Grandmother.”

“God knows it isn’t,” said Steve, his pallor suddenly aflame, “or do you think we would have let ourselves in for this!”

“By Gad, if I weren’t hand-and-tongue-tied by women-folks,” shouted Morton Milliken, suddenly, the Morton who was so strangely subdued where a gathering of Schuylers was concerned—“if I wasn’t hand-and-tongue-tied, I’d horsewhip the cur who’s responsible for this—my daughter——”

“They get married,” shouted the Old Gentleman, wresting free of restraint this time, “before another twelve hours passes over the heads of this family. So help me God!”

“Father,” intoned Bek, standing like a mountain, “they’re _first-cousins_!”

“That’s what makes it so terrible, Father,” whispered Clara, to whom the situation was as fascinating as it was horrible, and her face with the scallops of chin seeming to shrivel into loose bags of flesh, “even if they want to do right—they’re _first-cousins_!”

“Cousins or no cousins, one sin has got to invite another this time. A grandson of mine who does wrong to a girl marries her, if she is cousin ten times over.”

“That’s terrible, Father,” said Bek. “That’s terrible.”

“It’s a sin, Puppa. A sin on top of a sin!”

“Cousins beget dwarfs—and monstrosities, and—and—oh, I don’t know what,” sobbed Clara.

“And hop-toads,” said Henry with solemnity. “And pollywoggles.”

“Henry!”

Seated once more in the window-frame, one knee high, the smoke he blew toward the kitchen yard curled off curled lips.

“Good Lord,” he said, and rapped his pipe empty, “one would actually have to sit in on this scene to believe it could happen. You people cling to a worn-out old superstition, when you could have a brand-new truth in exchange for it. Cousins! Suppose they are cousins!”

“Hennery!”

“Don’t you know that much of that is just old-wives’ tale! Go into any library and read even a fairly modern book on biology. Good Lord, what is so reluctantly accepted by the human brain as truth! Study your statistics on the progeny of cousins. Face facts. For a woman as up-and-coming as you are, Bek, and who’s had as much ordinary stock-breeding experience as you have, you amaze me. Poppycock, that’s what you’re all talking! I’ve no patience with old-wives’ science. Apparently the two youngsters love each other. It probably would not all have happened this undesirable way if they hadn’t been kept apart through ignorance and prejudice. Let them marry. There’s your problem solved. Come, I move that this unnecessary painful session adjourn.”

“But, Uncle Henry,” said Steve and shot to his feet—“but Uncle Henry,” his eyes rolling, like an ox in terror toward Claire—“I mean,” he said—“nothing”—and sat down.

“Why, Stevey, what?” cried Claire, her sweet, moist eyes roving and probing his face—“why, Stevey, what?”

“I—I—” said Steve and began half-rising again and wiping his dry mouth with the palm of his dry hand, in a way that was somehow horrible—“why, I’m nothing. I don’t want—I mean—we—not that!”

“Exactly,” said Claire by this time, whose blue eyes, as she regarded Steve, had grown suddenly black and round and flabbergasted, “if Stevey doesn’t want it—I mean if I—I—. If he doesn’t want it—I don’t want it either.”

“Doesn’t want what?” roared the Old Gentleman.

“Claire knows I’ll abide by any decision she reaches in this matter,” said Steve, standing very straight and very calm beside his mother. “And if Claire for one reason or another doesn’t want it—she—knows best. I understand——”

“Why, Steve,” said his mother, regarding him with her level eyes and her voice incredulous, “are you trying to let it appear that Claire is the one who doesn’t want—when—it seems to be you?”

“No, no, Aunt Bek. He isn’t. You see, Grandfather,” cried Claire, turning to him, her blue eyes very dark under the light tinge of her flaxen hair, “I—of course Stevey will go through with it if he has to—but, Grandfather—isn’t there some way—please—couldn’t I just go away? I could, Grandfather, if the family would only cut out the dramatics about it—us. Stevey doesn’t want—I mean I—I don’t love Stevey any more, Grandfather. I’m not afraid—alone——”

“You don’t what?”

“It’s a lie!” said Morton, rising with a stride toward Stevey. “She’s trying to save his damn hide.”

“It’s not a lie, Father!”

“She means, Grandfather,” said Steve, deadly white, “after all that’s happened—oh, what’s the use beating about the bush. Claire would rather go off and have the thing over without marriage, because—because—oh, I’m not hedging, Uncle Morton! When she came to tell me about it—I guess I—did feel pretty sick. I guess that scene down there in South Meadow the day she first told me about it—is what cured her of me—I’m a cad.”

“No, no, Steve!”

“I’m not the marrying sort, but not for a cad’s reasons——”

“By Gad——”

“Oh, hold your horses, Uncle Morton! I’ll go through with it. Simply trying to explain my position. I hadn’t wanted it to happen this way. Claire’s sake, more than mine. Mother and Claire know what else I mean—I’m not fit to marry any woman. Tell them, Mother.”

“Stevey! Stevey! I can’t bear it!”

“Aunt Bek,” cried Claire and beat her hands, “don’t you tell them _that_!”

“Yes, Claire, the time is here,” said Bek, in tones that were as monotonous as hoofbeats on wood, and pinioning Winslow, with that powerful, level gaze of hers into a huddle which might have been a faint. Whatever it was, it kept him crouched in a deathly pale silence back into his chair, until the scene wore itself out and Bek was daubing cold coffee on his forehead. “Steve and I have been fighting out something. We’ll win all right, but—in the light of events, best—you should know. You see, when Steve came home so suddenly from college—well, I guess a better way to put it is——”

“Oh, Mother, come out with it. I was fired from college for drunkenness, Grandfather! The dean stumbled across me under a bench on the campus one night—gollywogged. Spiflicated. Soused.”

“Steve!”

“First taste I got of it at college set me wild. Couldn’t lay off the stuff. Can’t always—now. Right here—practically under your very eyes, Mother has walked the floor with me night after night.”

“Bek!”

“Sister!”

“She’s written to Cures for me. She’s dropped the stuff into my coffee. I’m a rotten no-account drunk. I am. Now throw me into the gutter, if you’ve a mind to. I don’t care. At least, you must see now—Claire and I—can’t——”

With a cry that had been gathering in his throat as if to crack it, the Old Gentleman made a flying leap across the inert form of Winslow. “I’ll show him!” he shrilled, struggling again and again, only to be rudely pinioned backward by Phil. “He’s trying to think up a sniveling way out!”

“Good God!” said Henry, and rose slowly from the window-sill and stood looking at his nephew.

“Grandfather,” chimed Claire faintly, “if you go on like this—I can’t stand it. I’ve known that all along. It’s a fight he’ll win some day. I just can’t explain it, Grandfather, only—except that if he doesn’t want it—I don’t want it either. I just can’t explain.”

“I can!” shouted Morton. “I can explain. She’s showing him a way out. The damn white-liver. He’s resigning and she’s sheltering him behind her skirts—the God-damn——”

“And I tell you,” screamed the Old Gentleman, strangling, “that if he is fifty drunkards and fifty times more the low life that he is, no grandson of mine wrongs a girl and doesn’t right it!”

“And no son of mine!” sobbed Winslow, half under his faints as Bek daubed on the cold coffee.

“Before another twelve hours goes over his head, he rights it!”

“Are you mad?” cried Henry, “every blamed one of you!” his beetling brows drawing together like portières. “Here are two young people. One of them confessedly an alcoholic. And yet you want to tie them together under revolting circumstances to beget children that stand ten times the chance of being maimed that they would were they merely born of first-cousins. You dare to want to tie these two unhappy young people together for life?”

“Yes, by Gad, yes, just that! So help me, I’ll see them both dead, if they don’t make it right.”

“Then, Father, you and the entire family that countenance it are crazy criminals.”

“No Schuyler born out of wedlock comes into this world. We’re a family with strong honest roots down into the soil of this country....”

“Yes, yes, Father, we’ve been over that before. Don’t scream.”

“Let Father alone, Henry,” said Phil, trembling. “He’s right.”

“I _will_ scream,” screamed the Old Gentleman. “I know I’m right. Those two have got to marry. I don’t want to hear the ins and the outs. I don’t care that they love each other any more, or don’t love each other. They should have thought of that first. That’s something that they’ve got to work out after marriage. You two marry! You two marry! You don’t pull the name your Grandmother and I have built out of our blood and our sweat down overnight. You two marry! You two marry!”

“I guess Father’s right, Steve,” said Bek, standing pale as a statue. “If you’ve lost your nerve, that’s your misfortune. It’s all too late now.”

“Yes,” echoed Emma, Phil, and Clara, “Yes.”

“Yes, by God!” said Morton, who was all sweating, and then over and over again, “Yes, by God! Yes, by God!”

“And I say,” barked Henry, “that to make these two children marry under these conditions is just as criminal as if you took their lives in your hands and broke their necks for their mistakes. Break their spirits. Break their morals. Break their hearts. By God, you get away with that! But I say you are just as criminal as if you broke their necks.”

“Those two marry!” yelled the Old Gentleman, whose shaking finger never stopped pointing. “You with your new-fangled notions that don’t fit in with the world you live in, are responsible for where you are today. A one-horse lawyer in a one-horse town, where you should be first in the state. No new-fangled notions here now! Those two marry, if I have to drag them to it through the streets of Centralia to have the ceremony performed.”

Through the tenseness something snapped into the expression of that circle of faces. Relief. As if a verdict, dreaded, had none the less brought solution by the very virtue of being pronounced.

Even Claire, slipping back, almost as nerveless as Winslow, seemed to relax to the sentence. Even Stevey, who stood facing his grandfather without blinking.

All except Henry.

“Well,” he said finally, knowing how complete was his defeat in that circle of acquiescence and giving out one of his short, sardonic laughs, “maybe it’s for the best. Doubtless you two are sufficiently cowed to the yoke of the fear-of-living to adjust yourselves to the servitude you have just had sentenced upon you today. But this fact still remains. The scene that has taken place in this room today in this year of our Lord, is as mediæval as hell——”

“Hennery!”

“Excuse me, Mother.”

Suddenly David, most undramatic of youngsters, who had been seated crouched to his footstool like a bit of lichen, ran toward his nephew Steve, and pulling him by the wrist toward the languid figure of Claire, crouched back in her mother’s arms, tried to weld their clammy hands in a clasp.

“See!” cried Bek, struggling to keep her voice dead-level, and regarding Henry a little triumphantly, “even a child would lead them—together.”

“And a little child shall lead them,” said Phil, on a snigger. He had not meant to snigger. The sound had just jumped off his lips. Tension, perhaps, but to horrified family-ears the room seemed to roar of that snigger.