Chapter IX: Part 9

From his long, lean height, Henry stood regarding his small brother, a slow laugh shaking his shoulders.

“Maybe you’re right. The kid’s got the trick-combination of leadership. Imagination tempered by a level head and a level heart. Man-of-the-people stuff!”

“What’s man-of-the-people stuff, Henry?” piped Dave.

“You!”

_Chapter Twenty-one_

The winter America entered the War was a lean one on the farm, even in a neighborhood where foundries were changing their tunes from the production of safes, tools, and castings, to the grim grinding-out of arms and ammunition.

Young men were being conscripted or leaving the farms to enlist. A hoof-and-mouth disease was rampant among the horned cattle. Old man Igrotte, from the vantage of Iowa, raised the rent one-third on his mangy little place at the expiration of the first year of the Schuyler tenancy.

Frequently now, and with a bitterness that rankled him into constant and aggravated irritability, the Old Gentleman was obliged to cash one of Phil’s less and less frequently-sent checks.

He even accepted, with none too much grace, the gift of two sacks of corn flour from the Howey farm, which one of the overseers rumbled up with on a truck one afternoon with the compliments of the Ex-Governor who was wintering in Florida.

The Old Gentleman realized, with the terrible, gnawing bitterness which ate so at his heart, that word must have leaked, even as far as Florida, that the Schuylers were hard-put. One of the Howey girls, on a visit to the paternal winter home, had doubtless let slip that the Schuylers had fallen on bad times.

There was etched in acid into the Old Gentleman’s mind a picture of the portly figure of the Ex-Governor and the largeness of manner with which he must have given the orders for the distribution of the occasional offerings at the Schuyler door.

Every month, after a time, with galling and yet welcome regularity, there arrived these offerings. The impersonal kind of gift that stuck in the Old Gentleman’s craw, as he put it. Gifts that almost savored of charity. Commodities like a fat goose. A twenty-five-pound sack of coffee in the bean. Ham, smoked on the Howey place, sometimes the cuts off the very killings Bek had that same week sent over to the Governor’s place.

It helped. For instance, the barrel of corn flour meant that every morning, when the lanterns were swinging in and out of the barns for miles and miles around, Dave, as he started off on his lonely hike over to the Tarkington place to help Nemo with the chore of bran-mixing did so with a big, hot square of pone under his jacket for the heat it poured against him, and that later was to slide down into him in warm, grateful chunks.

Sleet came down many of the black dawns of that winter, slanted against him in long javelins, and made the roads and the roofs and the hedges to shine. Mornings filled with the glass music of hitting ice. Sometimes everything took on a crystal coating, making it a fairy-land of white, stretching arms of trees, the glitter of hedges, and the splendor of frozen breath.

Great, crystal chandeliers of morning, like the big one that hung in the Howey front parlor. It was warming to turn around, now and then, for a glimpse of the lighted kitchen window of the Igrotte house, against which he knew his mother to be moving at the business of preparing Henry’s breakfast and the collapsible tin box of lunch he now carried in with him to his office in Centralia.

Those were the shivery, silvery mornings all right, when the ice formed in a mask against his face, and the gleam of light from the Tarkington barn was something to stumble gratefully toward.

Old Nemo drove a close bargain as a taskmaster. It was scarcely ever before ten minutes to nine when he released the boy from his chore, allowing him exactly ten minutes to cover the mile to the schoolhouse. He had never failed, however, to arrive there before the first tick of nine, with his heart seeming to beat against his neck and up into his ear-drums.

There was a pride about never having been tardy, even though Miss Hassebrock knew the condition and offered to grant him fifteen minutes’ indulgence in the matter of arrival, as she did to other of the farm-boys.

That was the winter, too, of only half-day sessions for Dave. The class of Colonial History came in the afternoon. Dave was eager for that. It was one of the classes he was sure to shine in, the result of long evenings with Henry. Geography, too, came in the afternoon. Gee!

But the Old Gentleman fell ill about then of a sciatic torture that kept him chair-ridden all of that winter and that meant having to call half a session a day, in order to be home by noontime for the accumulation of chores.

It required a letter to the county superintendent for that special half-time dispensation, which Mathilda patiently, and to Dave’s dictation, penned through her tears.

Later, in that first month of the Old Gentleman’s disability, when, against every admonition, he was hobbling about sooner than his sciatica permitted, down he went on a slippery runway that led to the hen-house, and twisted a ligament in his thigh. That virtually laid him up the remainder of the winter.

Then Dave just remained out of school the entire session, secretly a little exultant over some aspects of it, and again hankering after the panorama of the Geography, the Colonial History, and the Physiology courses.

Poor Miss Hassebrock, sciatic herself, once and sometimes twice a week that long, dark winter managed to get a lift in the Ford truck of the farmer-family where she boarded, as far as the Igrotte house; and while the boy who drove her, great shy boob, waited in the kitchen, she would coach Dave in a gallant attempt to keep him up in his classes.

But usually, the boy was tired. So deadly tired that once, during a problem in square-root, he fell asleep with his cheek down against the page upon which her hand happened to be resting.

Bird-like little person, she sat there over an hour, with the Ford truck waiting and chugging at the door, before she could force herself to shake him awake.

Twenty years later, and in the most far-fetched, accidental fashion, David Schuyler was to learn that the little woman paid the farm-boy who drove her twenty-five cents for these trips and fifty, the evening that Davey fell asleep against her hand and kept her waiting the hour overtime.

It was the very next day that Miss Hassebrock’s annuity began. Poor dear, she lived only bedridden years to enjoy it.

That was practically the beginning and the end of any sustained schooling for Dave, those scant, war-ridden years, when Henry put up a partition down the lean-enough length of his office, and rented the other half to an osteopath, and the “Furnished Rooms, With or Without Board” sign flashed all too frequently in Emma’s window, and when Bek sat in Henry’s office, talking over Phil’s troubled affairs, every time she brought Leslie to town for osteopathic treatment in the office next door. Lean, hard days when, somehow, the faces of the Schuylers seemed to grow longer in actual bone-formation.

But with the end of the sustained schooling for Dave, Henry still read to him, and with him, through the long, quiet evenings. The great embroidered legends of King Arthur. _Canterbury Tales_, of a Knight there was; About Ben Adhem who awoke one night from a deep dream of peace! _Letters of a Self-Made Father to His Son_; _Boy’s Iliad_; _Wreck of the Hesperus_; _The Ancient Mariner_; _Bird Lore_; _Deserts of the World_; _Arabia Deserta_; _Faust_; _Our National Parks_; _Prisoner of Zenda_; _Compleat Angler_; _Golden Treasury_; _Peck’s Bad Boy_; _Canalse Interpretation of Perjury_; _Land of the Midnight Sun_; _Bee Culture_; _The Philippines_, _What of Them?_ Months of evenings, and years of months of these hours of Henry’s intoning beneath the green eye-shade. It was his way of resting. His way of relaxing. Sometimes the boy on the stool at his feet nodded and slept against his knee, as he carried him along beyond his depth. But more often, Dave, who was a good listener, sat with his small, square chin propped in his hands, staring off over the shoulder of the reader. Those were the years of magnificence, all right. Napoleon gazed from Elba in the small stuffiness of that room in the Igrotte house. And the island of Elba was an atrocity of a hearth-rug with the figure of a dog woven in. Leander swam the Hellespont of that room, and the Hellespont was Henry’s single cot, with Teddy usually asleep at its foot, with his nose tucked into his forepaws. A knight there was shivered the timbers of that room. Don Quixote tilted lance there. Through its eight-by-ten, the desert flowed into parched vastness, and William Tell stalked, and Catherine the Great.

These evenings stacked up into practically all three hundred and sixty-five days of the year, except the semi-occasional ones when Henry remained in town to attend a Bar Association banquet, or to escort Henriette to the rare musical event that found its way into Centralia’s Opera House.

His Ford runabout, along with the House on Sycamore Street, was a thing of the past, so that the evenings, in town, Henry spent on a leather sofa in the back of his office.

Twice a day for two years until he made an arrangement with the owner of a dairy-truck to carry him to town and back, he walked the three and one half miles from the Igrotte house to High Street. The actual distance could be lessened a half-mile by a détour that led past the House on Sycamore Street. But from the day he left it, bag and baggage, chattel and what not, Henry could never bear to look at it again.

Never once, in all the years he was to live in the vicinity, first in the Igrotte house and later back in Centralia, was he known to have been seen within seeing-distance of the House on Sycamore Street.

In Davey lurked no such ache. There came the day when the first contingent of Centralia boys marched the entire length of Sycamore Street, then back again halfway, to swing into Court House Square.

In the hours of waiting for the parade to take place, Dave, astride the cupola of the old front porch he knew so well, perched himself like the figurehead of a ship, directly in front of the window of the room in which he had been born.

The Kelsoes, who occupied the place now, were easy, good-natured folk of ready welcome. Tony Kelsoe had a large and paying wholesale fruit-store on Miami Street. The day of the parade, the lawn and the front of the House on Sycamore Street were thrown open.

The Kelsoes had improved the place, although Emma said it made her “positively sick” to pass its pinwheel flower-beds, its splotched old iron deer painted a bright chrome-yellow, and a triple coat of white paint on the house that smote and smote the eye.

For the merest second, it seemed strange even to the child, shinnying up the front porch that had been home to him, but a strangeness immediately to be forgotten in the strangling excitement of the spectacle of the boys in khaki marching down-street under the spreads of the elms of Sycamore Street. Bare elms now, with branches that rattled in the light wind like bones.

Why, those boys out there, practically every fellow of them, he knew by name. Spike. Minty. Jeb. Off to war. There was Joe Lowenstein, with his puttees wound crooked. And Ed Slayback who sold screw-eyes and rubber-tubing in the hardware-store under Henry’s office. Paul Koerber. Lynn Chipman, who lived in the largest house in Centralia, and whose younger brother, Kenneth, just two years older than Dave, had a whole wireless-set on the roof of his home. There was a long-legged fellow named Tad, who used to drive a dirt-cart out Bek’s way. He was much heavier than the run of the boys, and seemed to mind the weight of his pack. There was Gum Lewis and Bennie Cohen, and a fellow whose name used to be Berlin and who had changed it to Brayley since the War.

And there was Steve! He and Lynn Chipman carried themselves the straightest, and somehow with the most bearing of them all.

“Hi, Steve!”

From the vantage of astride the cupola, they seemed like so many pairs of animated scissors tramping down the street with a hollow sound that was crashed into every so often, by a small brass band that sent the spectators along the curbs into cheers.

It drove Teddy, down on the lawn, wild with excitement, and kept him yapping up at Dave and imploring his descent from the cupola.[32]

Every inch of the march down Sycamore Street, after the boys had passed Kelsoe’s the second time, Dave ran alongside.

There was Stevey, second from the end, with his white face set immobile to the front, and his shoulders flaring and his waist receding, and his puttees wound the tightest and the rightest of them all! Not a glance to the right or the left.

Hoh, and how Minty kept darting his head and neck in and out like a turtle. Not a glance from Steve though. Stevey marching off to war. The boys of Centralia marching off to war.

War was waste, Henry said. War was Nature’s bungling trick for weeding out the over-production of the race with the blindest kind of non-selection. But just the same, tramp-tramp-tramp, to sit as Henry was sitting, up in his office, with his eye-shade on and his fingers pressing against his forehead, while the boys marched beneath his very window, was impossible, if that curious rhythm of tramp-tramp-tramp had you by the throat. Tramp, tramp, tramp ... my country, right or wrong—Stephen Decatur was a hysterical woman. My country, right or wrong. Well, anyways—anyways—it was! No matter even what Henry said. It was a fellow’s country, right or wrong.

And Stevey, right or wrong, was going! “My nephew, right or wrong, is going to war,” shouted Dave to himself, as he ran on his short, squarish legs, breathlessly, alongside. Cæsar had crossed the Alps, Washington had crossed the Delaware, in the name of War! Well—well? Henry hated war. And Henry was always right except when—except when the tramp-tramp-tramp made “my country, right or wrong” sound right! Right, you bet your life!

Stevey was too front-face to know that Davey ran alongside, almost, it might be said, too stern-faced to care. Minty darted his head sideways and said, “Hi, Kid,” to Dave. So did Bennie Kohn, Beulah’s brother, who finished his words in “ink” instead of “ing.” “Hi, Kid, we’re goink!”

Tramp! Tramp! Tramp-tramp-tramp. Even in the cold, damp air the moisture formed rivulets and ran down Dave’s neck in his effort to keep up with the adult strides; and along toward the end Teddy, too, began to lope with his tongue hanging out sidewise.

My country, right or wrong! You betcherlife, Henry, you! To be as smart as Henry was to think too much and not to feel enough.

At the other end of Sycamore Street, in Emma’s house of the peeling paint and the “Music Teacher” and “To Let” signs in the window, were grouped most of the lodgers, and Mathilda, and the Old Gentleman, with a Paisley shawl draped across his remonstrating shoulders against the sciatica, and Bek and Winslow, and Leslie waving a banner, and Henriette Simpson, and Paula, home for the week. There they were all, out on the porch and along the steps. And in the parlor window, with the stringy lace curtains pinned back, was Claire, looking as white as a flower, clutching her beet-red nub of a baby, which she held up and dandled, as the automatons, hay-foot-straw-foot passed the house.

Long after the footsteps had died down, Claire stood there, waving her baby aloft, for the husband and father, Steve, who had not looked, to see as he passed by.

When they all came in, a few moments later from the porch, it was hard to coax Claire away from the dandling of the baby before the window that looked on the now-deserted street.

His perfectly-formed, beautiful baby that, as he passed, Stevey had not turned his head to see.

It was in vain that poor Emma, whose flaxen hair had developed wide gray streaks, tried to comfort her. A good soldier would not, could not, turn his head. Just see, there was Lynn Chipman’s little brother Kenneth, crying after him and sobbing, and not even a glance from Lynn. And see, old lady Mintz, poor old dear, reaching out empty arms after her boy. Shame, Claire—for shame!

Keyed to a pitch of pride that made him bumptious, the Old Gentleman stumbled about the house, with the Paisley shawl forgotten and dangling and tangling about his feet. Stevey was justifying some of the torment he had caused the family.

Stevey was going into war. For country. It was like paying a debt of gratitude with a coin that had been minted from the living flesh of his own side. Ecstasy of self-flagellation, as it must have burned in the eyes of early Christian martyrs, illumined the Old Gentleman. He stood by and watched, glorying in pain.

Besides, Steve’s going to war would make a man of him. Or as the Old Gentleman put it, would break him, by Gad! And even the latter was no worse than the mess he had made of things up to now.

A Schuyler was in the ranks that were marching from Centralia!

Bek’s eyes were blazing with that, too, and Winslow’s and old Trina’s and even Mathilda’s, whose, however, like Claire’s, were at the same time crucified.

And while Dave was running breathlessly alongside the moving phalanx of the khaki, up in his office, over the hardware-store, to the rat-a-tat-tat of the marching of feet, sat Henry, with his dry fingers pressed against his eyeballs.

FOOTNOTES:

[32] The day that my Stevey marched away, we drove into town for a point of vantage from Emma’s front windows. As we passed the House on Sycamore Street, there was our Dave astride its cupola, just like he still belonged there. I can see him now. Small and square and firm, as if the old house were a mare, and he were riding it, straight and sure and calm, into the maelstrom. And yet how little he suggested to any of us, as he sat there gazing thoughtfully into the confusion, that one day he _was_ to ride out into that maelstrom ... a leader of leaders.

_Chapter Twenty-two_

When Dora Tarkington was on the threshold of her ’teens, she was about an inch and a half taller than Dave, with long honey-colored curls that lay in a wide fan across her shoulders and a curved fringe of bangs. These bangs, old Mammy, whose hand quivered, invariably cut a little crookedly, because she kept one copying eye glued to a lovely daguerreotype of Dora’s mother propped on the washstand beside her.

Dora used to study that daguerreotype herself. The sweet, straight eyes, the elaborately high, honey-colored hair with the curve of bang that Mammy tried to imitate. The fitted basque, with the heavy festoonings of gold chains and brooches. The tapering waist, supporting the little, urn-shaped swell of bust and shoulders.

Dora was of sturdier heft than this mother who had died at her birth. There was more of her father in the molding of her longer, lither legs and torso. But at eleven, the bright gold prettiness of the mother, who had dashed through her youth on the spirited horseflesh of a Kentucky farm, lay over Dora like pollen, conjuring memories before her father’s eyes, in a hundred ways.

Every year Dora had a birthday-party and a cake with pink candles and colored-tissue caps that popped as they were pulled open. For these occasions old Mammy, relic from the days when the girl in the daguerreotype had ridden bareback through Kentucky grass, made large batches of cup-cakes with pink icing; decorated the round birthday-cake in “red-hots”; froze the vanilla ice-cream in a home-made contrivance of galvanized bucket and chopped ice, and then set about fluting Dora’s neck-ruffles and cuff bands, as well as the edges of her own cap and apron, with a hot-point iron.

Dave had attended these annual events, up to the time the Schuylers moved to the Igrotte house.

He had been meticulously invited to every subsequent one, in fact so meticulously that to Mathilda, unreasonably enough, the courtesy savoured of patronage.

Dave was never to attend one of these functions after the move from the House on Sycamore Street. To begin with, he had a particularly fierce kind of pride where Dora was concerned, and besides, his mid-afternoons, those subsequent years, were scarcely a matter of girls’ birthday-parties and candles.

Then, too, since the crash, the Old Gentleman had taken on what amounted to an unreasonable animosity to Len Tarkington. A resentment that the gentleman-farming methods of his old neighbor should lead to the gradual growth from the scrawny acres Len had inherited from his grandfather, to the present more than triple and vastly prolific pasturages.

It was the Old Gentleman’s contention, never beyond his own fireside it is true, that Len Tarkington was “God’s laziest white man,” working three hours a day as compared with his own fifteen.

Len’s doings rankled in the Old Gentleman. His politics! He had never forgiven him for voting Bryan in 1896. Len was a negligent farmer, an indifferent judge of cattle, and notoriously slow pay. One of those devilishly likable fellows who get results out of two-thirds personality and one-third efficiency.

Beware of a man who lets his rail fences go; who votes a mixed ticket; who will borrow your pipe off you; who could sit on his side verandah and whittle a clothes-pin into a doll for his daughter, with his hay still outlying, and clouds lowering.

It rankled to have Dave help at Tarkington early-morning chores, except that the deal was one strictly between old Nemo and the boy and there was no getting around it—that eighty cents a week helped!

That, probably more than any one other thing, was the realization that used to cause the Old Gentleman, lying beside Mathilda in the ponderous old bedstead that filled their room, to hide his screwed and suffering face into the crook of his arm and lie with his toes climbing over each other with the pain of frustration, until the crack of dawn, when he rose. Eighty cents a week mattered!

At the first of her birthday-parties that Davey did not attend, Dora had clouded up and cried tears all over her birthday prettiness, while Davey, with a throat that hurt him the long afternoon through, went about the business of leading a foal, for a consideration of fifteen cents, from one pasture to a two-mile-distant one, for a petty farmer known as Rocky Toe.

It was the following week that Davey, emerging from the Tarkington barn on Saturday morning, from helping Nemo at currying, beheld her making grimaces, by darting her little pink adder of a tongue in and out, as she stood on the safe side of her hedge, and struck outlandish attitudes at a boy called Desmond Riley, whose father was new superintendent of Giles Tool Works and who had just moved into the neighborhood.

There was, about Desmond, a precision both of manner and of dress that was antagonizing. That verdict, after his first weeks in the Centralia Second District School, was the cruelest of all for a child to bear.

What antagonism Desmond excited was the kind to relegate him to oblivion. Desmond became what you might call permanently unnoticed. The children shunned his selfish little moon-faced complacency. Not a boy offered to fight him.

The awful failure of obscurity was his.

Not so passive, however, was Dora’s animosity. His sleek, brushed, brown ball of a head sat in front of her throughout the school-day. He chose the best pen-points and wet sponges, just before the monitors reached her. Desmond had fat, soft little cheeks that quivered like jelly; and that too, infuriated her.

She was sticking out her tongue to the jell of those cheeks the morning that Dave beheld her across her hedge-top and paused, as if to study the facial contractions by which she achieved her magnificent effects.

“Dare you to wallop him!” cried Dora to Dave, as the small, square figure hove in sight. “Land him one for me! Dickery, dickery, docks, his mama makes him wear socks!”

So she did. Tan ones, with plaid tops that reached just below the knee!

“Dare you, Dave—wallop him! One for me and one for good measure.”

The wallop had its time and place. Somehow, Desmond, standing there hypnotized and not belligerent, offered neither.

“Aw—no!”

“Scared? ’Fraid-cat. If I was a fellow and afraid to wallop another fellow!”

Bitter. Bitter. Standing there, barefoot, his fingers curling into palms, anger smote Dave. A slow anger. Not at Desmond. But at the shrill little voice of his tyrant. If she were a fellow and afraid to wallop another fellow. What kind of talk was that? Why wallop Desmond? His animosity would not rise to it.

“’Fraid! Snidey! Poof! ’Fraid. Poof! Poof! Poof!”

Suddenly Dave’s arm shot out and banged Desmond one in the stomach so that he doubled and ran.

The wallop had not been for Desmond at all. But for the circumstance of naughty, adorable Dora up there, meting out injustice. That was the dreadful part. The blow had been for Dora.

And before he could rush to Desmond, to right it with him, there was the wonder and the glory of small Dora screaming upon him from her vantage. Having goaded him on to attack the stranger, and now turning on him with a fury that had probably never had counterpart in her small breast.

“You didn’t need to hit him thataway. In the stomach. Oh, you! Oh, you! Why didencha listen—I only meant—just to hit something. Not him. I meant—hit out against what’s no good—oh, I don’t know what I meant, but why didencha listen?”

Suddenly, in the blind rage of relief and the shock of the identical quality of their impulses, he was over the fence and pummeling Dora until her teeth shook. Until her eyes popped and saw twice.

“You—you!” she said on the breath that was jerked out of her, and sat down flat, like a doll-baby.

* * * * *

And yet, in the end, that scene confused David.

Dora had a mind of her own only where trifling things were concerned. She would wrest from him an inch of concession, and then, with her matchless capacity for sweetness, give him back an ell.[33]

The second time that Dave did not show up at her birthday-party, it was almost six of the hard and wearying months since they had met.

She had run out one lovely clover-smelling summer dawn, while Davey, in denim jumpers, and Nemo were currying down a filly which Tarkington sometimes still drove before a light gig.

She was in her nightgown and bare feet, and she and another girl, named Minnie Ryan, who had been spending the night with her, were tearing out toward the clover-field for the early-morning lark of a dash through the dew.

Walk, fair maiden, through the morning dew,
If you crave beauty and a sweetheart true!

That was the phrase Dora had drawn from a fortune-telling gypsy girl, whose green parrakeet on a stick had plucked the slip of paper from a box.

... crave beauty and a sweetheart true!

Dora and Minnie craved beauty and a sweetheart true.

At the sight of Dave, currying away there at the near flank of the horse, the two girls turned squealing and scurrying back toward the house. Dora last, her lovely long curls flying back in a banner, her body flashing, and the rosy soles of her feet repeating themselves again and again as she fled.

This was the most disturbing thing that had ever happened to David. His heart seemed to fly out of his chest, leaving him standing like an empty meal-sack. Then the rest of his body seemed to rise to his throat. To congest his breathing and blind him so that the currying became merely a series of strange motions over which he had no control.

Once, on that run down Sycamore Street beside the boys that were marching down it into the lanes of war, the blood had beaten that way in his ears. But to the roar of drums and of hoarse throats shouting.

It was probably the beginning of the normal adolescence of his awareness of Dora. Suddenly, just Dora, who was undoubtedly the nicest of all girls, but who could stick out her stomach and make ugly grimaces and slide belly-buster down a hill, was something as lovely, as remote, as an angel on the merit-card you received in Sunday-school if you were Desmond Riley. Flash of Dora in her sweet muslin nightdress, with her hair flowing and the lovely insinuation of her rosy young body flickering through.

And yet she was not as remote as one of those picture-card angels with trumpets and soaring bodies that rise on a slant through ether. Dora was warm and beautiful and naughty in an adorable way that was not angelic.

Dora was beautiful. The soles of her pink, flying feet that you saw over and over again as they flashed, were beautiful. There was something sweet and rosy about them. They were Dora’s.

That was the way his adolescence came in. A fastidious worship of the beauty that flashed to him that dew-drenched clover-smelling sunrise. It was to remain that. A curiously delicate and perfect love-life for a man born to a destiny of tempestuous and dramatic and world-shaping events. But withal, a man born into his time as snugly as a bug into his rug. Forward-looking. Backward-heeding. Un-neurotic. Normal.

Cross-currents aplenty were to riffle the course of the true love of David and Dora, torturous ones, but from the day that he was thirteen, and had looked upon that flash of the innocent sweetness of Dora-in-nightdress flashing from his sight, she was installed and remained the woman of his love and his life and his reverence.[34]

For a six-month after this morning apparition of her, with her loveliness across his eyeballs as he went to sleep nights, and his first waking-thought of her, he did not so much as again clap eyes on Dora face to face. Dodging her, if he happened to be errand-bent in Centralia and saw her coming down a street, avoiding the lanes she frequented and attending the little Sunday-school at Seven Mile, sooner than run the risk of encountering her in town.

Countless the asafœtida-bags that Mathilda hung about his protesting neck these days.

Dave, with the immemorial gesture of young love, paled, and secretly observed but outwardly ignored by Henry, retreated uncommunicative within himself. Took on a pinched look about the mouth that prompted Bek to comment privately and worriedly to Winslow, and acquired a nervous habit of cracking his finger joints that was enormously irritating to the Old Gentleman.

The change of Sunday-school was a matter of some argument, since, on fair Sundays, the Old Gentleman and Mathilda rode into Centralia in the phaeton, hitched to a pasture horse rented from Rocky Toe for fifty cents the morning, to Second Avenue Rock Church. For thirty years the Schuylers had paid pew dues there, and even now, when those dues were no longer sent by check, but sparsely dropped into the contribution plate, they occupied the same seats by the insistent courtesy of everyone connected with the church.

But Dave, privately conscious that his shoes, even when blacked, were nicked, had reached the stage where for want of long trousers, his legs felt long and gawky. Besides, Dora with her hair in the spread of curls and a red cap that had a pompon, rode to Second Avenue Rock Church, either in her father’s light spider-gig, or in the new Chevrolet roadster.

That in itself, made one feel more of a gawk than if she too had just walked.

So in the end, every day of the six-month that intervened, Dave, with the torment of the desire to see her hot within his heart, carefully avoided her.

Then one day, crawling out from under a runway in the hen-house which he had been whitewashing for Nemo, bespattered, even his heavy thatch of hair with a white smear across it, he came upon her, face to face as she came out of the kitchen door with a small pan of fine white-bread-mash for her sick pet of a hen, a prize leg-horn “Smooty,” which her father had once brought her from the Lexington County Fair.

It was ignominious beyond anything he had ever dreaded, her unexpected dashing out in this fashion from the house. Scarcely a day that he did not reckon with the possibility of her happening to rise at five of a mornning, timing his appearance meticulously to avoid its happening. And now here he was on all-fours, calcimine-stained, daub-faced, crawling out from under, like a rabbit from a hutch, into the very path of Dora, so fresh in her blue percale with three white bands of tape around her slim waist and the hem of her skirt, and all the morning-light there was, caught in the curls that lay along her shoulders.

“Smarty, Smarty, gave a party, and nobody came,” was the incredible, the panicky phrase that flew from his agonized lips, while Dora, with the pan of warm mash in her hands, toppled a little forward, of naughty, simulated surprise, as if she had not expected him there.

With what was more of a reflex than a desire, she shot her tongue at him in reply to this, and her stomach too, in the old absurd contortion. Dora, who was almost thirteen now and would no longer shinny trees, for fear of showing her panties.

“Smarty, Smarty, didn’t want you nohow at my party.”

There was a stunned flash of silence between these two, to whom David’s absence from that party had been, to each, a little agony; a flash of silence filled with the noise old Nemo made pouring water into a pig-trough, and with the floating fragrance of Mammy’s breakfast bacon, and with the echoes of Dora’s mockery. For six months she had been slowly gathering courage to burst this way upon David. And now, the whirlwind of that ruse accomplished, there she stood puckering, and trying not to cry.

“Out in county school, where I used to go,” said Dave, “you skip stocks and bonds and then go right from algebra to geometry.”

“Honest?” said Dora, as if his remark were relevant to her innermost thoughts.

It was a master-stroke. He was never to know, delving into his psychology later, just how he achieved it. This bit of floating information, springing full-grown to his rescue at the moment of his almost complete immersion under lime and humiliation.

It broke the ice. It broke the ice of Dora’s startled, frozen lips. It broke the ice of the long months that had lain chilled, without the sun of her presence, against his heart.

“We’re on the Monroe Doctrine,” said Dora.

“The Monroe Doctrine,” began David, his eyes focusing as they always did from his trick of visualizing the page from which he memorized, “is the principle of non-in-ter-ven-tion of European Powers in American af——”

“Oh lookie, Davie, you’re all tangling yourself up in Queen Anne’s lace handkerchief.”

Wretched David. It was his ruse, standing there spouting his erudition, to kick, as if casually, the frail, pale stuff growing in profusion outside the barn door, in an attempt to cleanse his bare legs of the lime.

Who could have thought, after the years of childhood they had played through together, Dave most of the time in a single garment of blue jumper and Dora with her neat skirts flying to reveal her little pantie-clad legs, that lime spattered across Dave’s legs could matter so to him. Matter so that his tongue began to dry and swell in his mouth like a rusk.

“I work.”

“That’s nothing.”

“’Tis, too.”

“’Tisn’t.”

“’Tis.”

“Puf!” She was still flushed with shame at the atavism of having stuck out her tongue and her stomach.

“I know something I could tell if I wanted to.”

“What?”

“About ants. Me and Nemo watch ants same as you and Henry.”

“Me and Henry have a red-ant-hill now! You know what, there’s a species of——”

“There’s ants in our pantry. Mammy can’t keep sugar there any more.”

All this, savoring doubtless to the uninitiated of slight irrelevance, had bearing upon hours they had spent in the days of the House on Sycamore Street, lying belly-flat, with their noses close to the performance of ant-hills. Sometimes Henry, who had a magnifying glass that stood on a little tripod, had come down under the grape-arbor and observed with them, and read aloud out of a book called _Communism Among Ants_.

Davey knew those ants to the habit, many a time remaining stretched on his stomach long periods after Dora had danced away home. Now it was her little device for wriggling her away back into grace on this particular one of his hobbies.

“The little ants in our sugar haven’t got any an-ten-næ at all.”

“They have so, Dora!”

“Well, anyway, none that you can see without Henry’s magnifying glass.”

“I work,” resumed Dave, stubbornly, and still kicking into the Queen Anne’s lace handkerchief.

The reiteration scarcely penetrated her conciliatory zeal.

“We’re on frogs in physiology, Dave. If you pull one leg, the other thinks it’s getting pulled too. Toads give warts, frogs don’t.”

“I work.”

This time, her sweet eyes glittered at him, making his eyes seem to smart, as they did when he stared at the sun.

“I work, or I’d ’a’ come to your party.”

“I’d rather had you at my party, Dave, than anybody.”

“Would you?”

“I cried.”

How sweet she was in the early morning of that beauty of hers; a freshness of beauty which the years were to find absolutely unquenchable. The sparkle of world-sweetheart was over her that day.[35]

“I cried, honest.”

“Dora! I—oh—last tag!”

Presently they were tearing through the Queen Anne’s lace handkerchief, as if into foam.

At home, in the Igrotte barn, a half dozen rather scrawny rams were pressing their none-too-finicky noses to the crack of a door, bleating and waiting for their young shepherd to release them to the joys of pasture.

Finally, the Old Gentleman, who was weighing a heifer on a scale, had to hobble and do it himself.

“Drat that boy, where is he?”

Davey was wooing.

FOOTNOTES:

[33] One afternoon, on my way home from an auction of shorthorns, I came across the two of them seated on a sort of stile that divided the southeast corner of Tarkington’s from the Rileys’. Even then, the future little first lady of the land was giving voice to some of those amenable qualities that were later to make her the most unrivaled of helpmates, as well as probably the most dashing hostess of the longest and most glittering régime in the history of the capital. Scraps of the overheard conversation across the stile, that day, ran like this:

“Lookie, I’ve got a Martin Schraft button to wear. Papa says vote for Martin Schraft.”

“Puh, Schraft nothing. Vote for Tom Connors for mayor. He hates mono-poly.”

“Wouldn’t vote for a mayor that hates mono-poly.”

“You would, too. Mono-poly’s not fair. My brother Henry says so.”

“Mono-poly’s not fair. All right, Davey, I’ll not vote for mono-poly.”

“Say, Dora, know what?”

“What?”

“Not so very far away from here, know what?”

“No, what?”

“The Wright Brothers flew the first aeroplane at Kittyhawk.”

“Kitty-who?”

“Kitty-hawk’s the name of a place. Don’t you even know that?”

“Davey, you know everything.”

“Not everything. Just nearly. Woodrow Wilson, huh, he won’t let Teddy go to war and fight.”

“Huh, he won’t let Teddy go to war and fight. I won’t vote for Wilson neither, if you don’t want me to, Dave.”

“Huh, Henry says he wants to make the world safe for demo-cracy.”

When my small brother mouthed the phrase then current the country over (I can see him yet, straddling that stile!) his words were absolutely devoid of any of the sardonic import Henry’s older lips gave them.

“Safe for demo-cracy! Yip! Yip!”

“Safe for demo-cracy,” repeated the blessedly sweet Dora, to whom they were just words. “Let’s make the world safe for demo-cracy!”

[34] I wonder if in the history of the presiding couples at the White House, from Dolley Madison who so brilliantly heightened the dark days of that régime to Angelica Van Buren, and on down through the devotion of the McKinleys, if one of them ever approached the beauty of the ideal love and compatibility that existed between my brother Dave and my sister Dora.

[35] There hangs a portrait of my sister Dora, enlarged from a photograph of her, taken when she was about twelve, in the drawing-room of the beautiful house, Phil Schuyler, Junior’s, in East Sixty-sixth Street, New York.

It is a favorite story of my nephew’s, that the first day it was hung, Dora herself, who was on a shopping tour in New York for the week, entered the room and exclaimed, “What a lovely portrait of Mary Pickford.”

_Chapter Twenty-three_

Farm-hands were scarce, that winter of 1917. By 1918, with ten thousand troops a day, for over a period of five months, being transported, it was practically impossible to get men to handle the heavy chores.

It was said of Bek Schuyler, and she did not deny it, that for want of herdsmen, she personally drove as many as a hundred head of Howey cattle to Ivorydale, which was within a dozen miles of The City, by night, appearing tailor-made and in the stern habiliments of the kind of togs she affected, at the Statfield Hotel for breakfast the next morning.[36]

Dave had accompanied her on several of these night-drives as far as Ivorydale, taking a local train back to Centralia, after he had given over his horse to one of the men who came from the Yards to meet them. Then Bek, and the small wicker suitcase which she had carried like a pack on her horse, continued via an early-morning trolley for The City.

Nothing to suggest in the big, tailored woman having a generous breakfast in the spacious dining-room of the Statfield Hotel, that she had ridden horseback the night through behind a drove of cattle.

They were memorable rides alongside his sister, those winters when the farms were stripped of men and the foundries were humming to the strange, new tune of the manufacture of munitions. Her great figure was like some heroic study in bronze of horse and rider, as she loomed behind the dark, moving cloud of the cattle.

She taught him to swing his whip lariat-fashion, and to curl, with a quick turn of wrist, the rope over the horns of a steer. She taught him the secrets of good points in cattle, how to estimate within a pound or two the heft of a sow or a bull, and some of the laws of breeding her observation had taught her.

It is doubtful if she had ever heard of the Mendelian theory, or of de Vries, but she expounded with beauty and accuracy to Davey, as they rode through those strange and often resplendent nights, to starlight, distant baying of dogs, lowing of cattle, and the dim, etherealized outline of farmhouse, hedge, and tree. Expounded, in the terms of her own observation, of certain pure breeds of live-stock; of mutations in the peach, the chestnut, the strawberry, the sweet potato, without her ever knowing, probably, the meaning of the word mutation, much less of its technical application.

Asparagus-cutting, reproductive cycle in the rabbit, analysis of certain pure breeds of live-stock, heredity and milk-yield, cross-pollination, inbreeding of dairy-cattle, inheritance of black-stripe in China-Poles, inheritance of shorthorns, elementary evolution, dairy-cattle, breeding, genetics, were the tune to which some of these night-rides were taken.

It was out of these long discourses with his sister, that his early inclination veered first toward biology, then natural history and for a brief while, medicine.

The great natural fount of Bek’s unerudite but accurate first-hand observations poured itself in long, lucid strain through these nights. Some of the glory that was the old Bek’s might have disappeared with her pride of ownership, but none of her kind of mental magnificence.

She sat on her idea as squarely as she sat astride her horse. It was generally said of her, and always refuted by Henry, who would never grant you that mentality had sex, that she thought like a man.

Be that as it may, restricted to the penny, stripped of every freedom of action that might have corresponded with the scope of mind, her mind’s eye continued to sweep the horizon in the manner of one who reckons in big stakes.

“If I could lay hand on five hundred or a thousand acres, Dave, then I’d show you a thing or two about stock-farming!” Or, “See old Conrad Gronauer’s place over there? Falling to pieces of dry-rot. I wrote in my diary about him last night, and I’ll say it to his face. Gronauer stinginess and lack of vision are to blame.”

“Does stinginess mean lack of vision, Bek?”

“Most of the time. If old Bek Schuyler had Gronauer’s place, mark my word, it would be a going concern in three years. I’d have five thousand bushels of potatoes off it the second year.”[37]

“Gee, all that in potatoes?”

“Never play small stakes, Dave. The reward is proportionately small, and a small loss hurts as much as a big. Play the game high and straight.”

Those were strangely exhilarating rides. Pearly, quivering horizons. The sense-of-power of his mount under him. The cloud of the cattle thundering softly to the crack of his whip and his will. Bek, seated so squarely on her enormous sixteen-hand-and-a-half chestnut.

It was as if the soil had its beginning in the heart, and then flowed through one, and then on out from the horses’ hoofs and became meadow and dale, hill and meadow.

Something in Dave, kinship of the flesh of his body with the flesh of the land that was warm with the thunder of their passing, would seem to unlock, and out of the secret and reticent places of his mind and heart would march the desires and unsaid things, made suddenly sayable.

“Geeminee, Bek—the stars! Those little fellows up there are as big—as big as anything! And we little things are more wonderful than they are, because they can’t think and we can.”

“That’s right, Dave. The stars never make me feel little and insignificant the way they do lots of folks. They just make me feel wonderful, for being made by the same divine hand that made them. Do you ever think of God, Dave?”

“Aw—yes. Sure I do. Say, if I could be a star, guess what star I’d want to be?”

“Don’t know as I even know the names of enough of them to venture a guess. Morning Star? Evening Star? North Star?”

“No, Vega.”

“Vega. That’s a new one on me.”

“She’s not out now. Vega’s the one toward which the whole solar system is supposed to be traveling.”

“Great human qualities, like strength and courage and loyalty and wisdom, can be lights that attract humanity just as much as Vega attracts the solar system, Dave.”

“That’s what I mean. I want to be wise. Henry’s wise.”

“Yes, but Henry is a little too wise for his time, Dave. To be a little too wise for the times in which you live, is as bad as not being wise enough. They crucify you for being too far ahead of your time, Dave.”

“Henry says most fellows would rather face the machine-guns over there than face a new idea.”

“It’s all right to be wiser than the fellow next to you, Dave, but just enough so as never to let him know that you are wiser.”

“Is Woodrow Wilson wise?”

“I’m afraid he is one of those whom they crucify for being too wise, Dave.”

“Is Teddy wise?”

“Just wise enough not to let the other fellow know how much wiser he is than the other fellow.”

“Know what, Bek?”

“No, what?”

“I’d like to see an elephant-stampede.”

“Kipling says it’s one of the sacred sights of the earth.”

“Know what, Bek?”

“No, what?”

“I’d like to be a policeman at Loop Square in The City.”

“What on earth put that into your head?”

“He stops everything with a lift of his hand. That’s more than Woodrow Wilson is doing. He can’t stop the War.”

At the mention of war, Bek’s throat had a habit of beginning to beat.

“Wish to God, dear, he could.”

“Stevey is in the Argonne.”

“Yes, Steve is in the Argonne.”

“There’s five Schuylers in the War now, counting Uncle Phil at training-camp.”

“That’s the law of war, Dave. To give.”

“If I was old enough, you’d give me.”

“Thank God you’re not.”

“I’d give myself.”

“Surely.”

“Is there a law of war?”

“It seems so.”

“Who made it?”

“Human nature.”

“Is it better to know the laws about human nature—or the kind of law in books, like Henry?”

“That’s one of Henry’s difficulties. He knows more logic than human nature.”

“Ain’t human nature—logi-cull?”

“You cannot build up theories, like Henry does, on the assumption that it is, because it never comes out that way. Everybody agrees with Henry that war is sin and evil. But there’s one big element in the way of making it practicable.”

“Human nature?”

“Yes.”

“Henry says....”

“I sometimes suspect your brother, Dave, of being a great person with his eyes gazing too far ahead of the ship to see the immediate reefs. Those kind of people don’t get anywhere in life.”

“How do you get yourself anywhere?”

“By being true to yourself, of course.”

“Henry’s true!”

“Yes, but don’t you see, Dave, Henry happens to have the kind of self that he can only be true to at the utmost pain and suffering to himself and those who love him. Henry lives in one kind of world and behaves as if he lives in a much more idealized one. A true leader of men, Davey, must be just far enough beyond the foibles and weaknesses of the average man to understand, not to despise him.”

“Say, Bek, you know what?”

“Don’t begin every sentence with that, Dave.”

“Well, _do_ you know what?”

“What?”

“When I’m big—I—when I’m big——”

“Yes?”

“Aw, I can’t say it.”

“Say it, Dave.”

“Well, when I’m big, you know what?”

“Didn’t I just tell you not to begin every sentence thataway, Dave?”

“Well, you know what? You know the way Ulysses rode at the head of the Trojan War and all in Henry’s _Odyssey_?”

“No.”

“Didn’t Henry ever read it to you?”

“No Davey, your brother never reads to me out of the _Odyssey_.”

“Well, anyways, when I’m big.... Oh, I dunno, I can’t say it—but when I’m big....”[38]

“Go on, say it, Dave.”

“When I’m big—I—aw—can’t. Lookie—oh, lookie, quick! There went one of those ’possums I was telling you about, Bek. That’s one of those woolly kind that have no pouch and carry the little ones on their backs. I think that’s pretty funny, don’t you? You know what, Bek? A ’possum is a marsupial. Know what a marsupial is? Well, Henry says——”

“Curve in those heifers, Dave. Here’s Ivorydale.”

The dawn began quivering up above the horizon in a fancy little shimmer of silver.

FOOTNOTES:

[36] ... we never referred to the great metropolis within thirty-one miles of us, in any terms except “The City.” It is surprising, even after the automobile had jerked us to its very flank, how seldom we visited it.

[37] Long years before the existence of the Lucy Stone League, which upholds the right of a married woman to still use her maiden-name, I continued to be known after my marriage as Bek Schuyler, except where it came to signature.

My brother was always to the fore in giving his sanction to the unrestricted legal privilege of woman to decide for herself the matter of name.

Theoretically, I agree that a married woman should have the legal right to the use of her maiden-name. But law me, it is one of those questions difficult to feel keenly about. As I always say, for the professional or business woman, whose name is her asset, well and good and fine. But for a plain country woman like me—don’t know as it makes much difference what they call me.

[38] ... one of these rides in particular stands out in my memory. We were six hands short on the farm, all of the second winter of the War. With the cry going out everywhere for conservation, forty head of my heifers were eating their heads off waiting for market, to say nothing of hoof-and-mouth disease, and shipping at a standstill, owing to quarantine.