Chapter I: Part 1

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A PRESIDENT IS BORN

_by_
FANNIE HURST

_Harper & Brothers Publishers_
NEW YORK AND LONDON
1928

A
PRESIDENT IS BORN
COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY FANNIE HURST
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

A-C

FIRST PRINTING, DECEMBER, 1927
SECOND PRINTING, DECEMBER, 1927
THIRD PRINTING, DECEMBER, 1927
FOURTH PRINTING, DECEMBER, 1927
FIFTH PRINTING, DECEMBER, 1927
SIXTH PRINTING, DECEMBER, 1927
SEVENTH PRINTING, DECEMBER, 1927
EIGHTH PRINTING, DECEMBER, 1927

TO
THE MEMORY OF
HENRY STEPHEN SCHUYLER

_The author takes occasion to make grateful acknowledgment to the Schuyler family, and to Senator Bettina Schuyler Sterling in particular, for the privilege of access to the diaries of the late Rebekka Schuyler Renchler._

_It has been a task requiring the utmost delicacy to step lightly through the aisles of her pages; and only because of the great interest that centers around even the minutiæ of the life of David Schuyler, has the author ventured to quote from so precious and so private a family-document._

_By virtue of this handsome grant of access to the diaries, the public again becomes beneficiary of the Schuyler family._

A
PRESIDENT
IS BORN

_All footnotes herein appended are excerpts from the private
diaries of the late Rebekka Schuyler Renchler and are quoted with
the permission of her granddaughter, United States Senator Bettina
Schuyler Sterling, in whose possession they are._

A PRESIDENT IS BORN

Twenty-two sat down to dinner on a Thanksgiving afternoon at four, 1903, in the House on Sycamore Street.

It might have been the house in Downing Street so far as its centrifugal significance was ground into the consciousness of the men, women and children gathered about its board.

For thirty years it had stood on the outskirts of a town that lapped out toward it like a constantly encroaching tide. It was then virtually the last house in Centralia. Always had been. As you drove into town, the two-story wooden structure of tower, ell, bulge and gable, marked the beginning of the principal residential street. As you left town, a half mile or so beyond the Schuyler fifteen acres of homestead, a city-limits sign was painted against a whitewashed slab of stone. Later, a large sign the shape of an open book announced:

YOU ARE NOW LEAVING CENTRALIA. THIS SPOT MARKS THE SITE WHERE
CELERON DE BIENVILLE IN 1749 PLANTED A LEADEN PLATE AND TOOK FORMAL
POSSESSION.

CENTRALIA OFFERS UNPARALLELED FACTORY AND FOUNDRY SITES AND PEERLESS
WATER POWER ADVANTAGES. SEE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE. WRITE FOR BOOKLET.

Six children and several of the grandchildren had been born in the House on Sycamore Street. The second-story front, a deep room with a bay window formed by a tower that was filled with an indoor vine of myrtle that grew in a flower box, held in its timbers the first squalls of Mathilda (deceased at two weeks of age), Rebekka, Clara, Henry, Phil and Emma Schuyler.

Two of Rebekka’s children had been born in that front room. Clara had come from St. Louis for the purpose of having her first-born see its first light of day in that room of double walnut wardrobe that reached to ceiling, hand-painted window shades, washstand with a pink-and-white bowl and pitcher, toothbrush-mug, and grooved soap-dish that had stood dry since the cedar closet had been made into a bathroom.

To open your eyes upon that room was to greet the retinas with a pair of china spittoons on the white hearth; oval portraits of Austrian Schuylers, in oval brooches or square-cut spades of beard; a pair of steel-engravings of “Washington Crossing the Delaware” and “Signing the Declaration”; a horsehair and walnut-backed armchair, in which the Old Gentleman always sat, and that by its shape was to suggest to Henry Schuyler, as long as he lived, the figure of his father crouched into it for his annual cold, a gray-striped blanket across his shoulders, and his feet immersed in steaming foot tub the shape of a kidney and with a tin bottom that plunked.

The solemn double bed with pillow shams the pallor and shape of headstones, was covered with a patchwork quilt of tulip-and-leaf design that Mathilda Schuyler had brought as dowry to Heinie Schuyler when she married him in an Austrian village called Holdstein. On holidays it was piled with the mufflers, the top-coats, the tippets, muffs, baby-leggings, small-boy sweaters, and the little-girl cloaks of the homecoming clan.

It was as if the walls of this house, which had been outgrown practically the first year of its occupancy, would burst its sides for need of expansion, on that Thanksgiving afternoon, for instance, when the Schuylers, twenty-two strong, sat down to dinner at four.

That meant that Schuylers from as far as Springfield and as wide as St. Louis, with their wives, husbands and children, were home for the holiday.

For two days the rich sweetness of mincemeat stewing in its sluggish juices had wound aromatically through the house. To even stir the colloid mass required Mathilda to grasp the long iron spoon as you would a broom, with both hands, and haul it around and around the pot. Sometimes Trina, who had come to the Schuylers a slim chip of a hired girl and, now twenty-five years later, weighed two hundred and forty pounds, helped. But at the period of this Thanksgiving, Trina was already entering the last seven years of her life, and varicose veins had set in, rendering her chair-ridden the greater part of the time.

And so Mathilda, who had weighed ninety pounds when she was married and now weighed one hundred and one, swung her heavy chores practically alone, importunings of the Old Gentleman and his children to the contrary notwithstanding. As a matter of fact, Henry often said of her that she seemed to take a sort of sadistic pleasure in flaying her endurance; in pulling her muscles at the dragging of heavy objects until she could feel the bones of her arms leave their sockets; in straining the wires of her tough little body at doing the lifting of a strong man. When Mathilda was forty-eight she was shriveled in the way that women no longer allow themselves to grow old. But she could carry a galvanized washtub of hot water or a one-hundred-and-ten pound sheep across a meadow and glory with fierce, straining eyeballs, as her very heart seemed to leave its moorings.

There were two hundred and eighty cookies this Thanksgiving, baked by Mathilda by lamplight before dawn. Pepper drops and cinnamon squares (especially baked because they were Leslie’s favorites) and aniseed. The sunshine cake was of a specially-prepared flour, and saccharine instead of sugar (son-in-law Sam Holly was overweight and obliged to reduce when his heart began to flutter), which everyone declared, for purposes of cheering Sam, was even better than if prepared with Mathilda’s usual and wickedly-rich ingredients. There were candied yams, candied apples on sticks, sweetbreads in individual ramekins, turkey dressing of citron, chestnuts and walnut meats. Cranberry sauce that had jellied the star-shape of the mold. Cider that stung like all of an autumn outdoors. A pitcher of eggnog with a fine peppering of cinnamon. Hot biscuit, the size of a silver dollar, that went into the mouth at one plop (the Old Gentleman smothered his in maple syrup). Kale boiled with bacon rind. There were six pumpkin and six mince pies alternating, standing in rows on the pantry sill.

Mathilda naturally alternated them that way. She liked making little patterns of her days and her quiltings and her procedures.

Rebekka Schuyler Renchler had sent over, from her farm, a gallon pail of apple-butter, a batch of _zimmtkuchen_ the shape of soldiers, camels, and stars for the children’s table, and five bushels of winesap apples, the yield of her own orchards that had come to be known locally as “Rebekka Wines.”

The Phil Schuylers, as usual, brought down a hamper of Mullane’s Taffy; Phil’s annual contribution to his father of a quart bottle of Kümmel, and more cookies, his wife’s specialty. Sugar ones with jam hearts.

There was a story abroad in Centralia that one Thanksgiving, Mathilda had sent these jam-hearted cookies to Annie Milliken, who in turn, with a Thanksgiving Day superabundance of her own, had sent them over to a school-teacher friend who had innocently completed the circle by sending them around to the Schuylers as a Thanksgiving Day offering.

Be that as it may, the circle of giving in Centralia was anything but a vicious one. Henry Schuyler used to say, in the dry fashion he had, that more glasses of jelly changed hands in Centralia during a holiday-week; more pies and tarts under snowy napkins; more batches of cookies and mincemeats in Mason jars, than there were stocks bandied back and forth on a busy day on the New York Stock Exchange.

Centralia loved to bite with careful front teeth down on its neighbors’ cookies, mince them finely until taste squirted along the tongue. And appraise.

One of Emma’s hazelnut tortes, tried and true to occasions of birthday, anniversary, and that chilled moment when the newly-bereaved family returns from the cemetery, stood on the sideboard beside the silver ice-water pitcher with sweating sides, that was mounted like a patent rocker and tilted in its frame for pouring.

Emma had baked it that morning in her white-enamel range, the first in Centralia, that had just been installed in her fine new red-brick Georgian house, that stood on exactly the opposite end of Sycamore Street from her parents. It was made out of double cream, that torte, and seemed ready to burst its steep sides and melt into a viscous pool of its own richness.

There was the kind of superabundance of food that palls before it tempts. That was why Henry Schuyler, who abhorred waste, never came downstairs on these holiday fêtes until after the mumbled grace, the fruit cocktail, the chicken soup, and the creamed oysters in pâté cases.

Just before the fowl was brought in, usually one of Rebekka’s eighteen-pound gobblers, with protruding legs in jolly white-paper caps, Mathilda rapped against her water-tumbler three times with her fork.

That was the signal for Henry, whose room was directly above the dining-room, to put down his _Leatherstocking Tales_, Carlyle’s _French Revolution_, or Fiske’s _American History_, knock his pipe empty into the coal bucket, remove his feet from the nickel-plated rim of the base-runner, and go downstairs to mid-afternoon dinner.

They hung on his digestion like leaden weights, these post-convivial afternoons, causing him to fall asleep later with a newspaper over his face, noxious dreams and the goose-fleshing memory of the sound of steel carving knife and fork, criss-crossing, crawling across his befogged doze.

At the coming of the fowl, the Old Gentleman began his invariable sharpening of the hartshorn knife against the rod, curdling the air in a fashion that gave Henry nervous shudders, and, ever since she was old enough to remember, had sent the goose-flesh flashing along Rebekka.

“Father, please!”

“Puppa, you know how Bek and Henry hate it. Trina sharpened them out in the kitchen.”

That was the signal for the Old Gentleman to wield the wicked knife, jerking a turkey leg backward and slithering into the soft flesh, with a rush of juices.

“Here, Mother, you want the part that goes over the fence last.”

The family was pretty well reconciled to this moss-grown overture. All except Emma, who would invariably pucker her pretty blonde brows and come out in no uncertain terms.

“Father, that’s not one bit funny! It’s disgusting! Besides, Mother doesn’t really like it. That’s her way of denying herself white meat.”

The small, bewildered face of Mathilda Schuyler, there in the midst of her five progeny of unusual heft, would begin to pale and wilt under the dicker. Their vitality sapped hers. Her daughters, with their heavy shoulders and strong legs and strong neck-columns. Phil, who in his late twenties was already so rotund as to know his watch pocket by touch rather than sight. Henry of brown brawn, but no fat.

It was a fluttery old face, that of Mathilda Schuyler. Like a curtain in a breeze.

It was a face which the Old Gentleman, sly, wry, bold, and humorous behind his own square trim of white beard, usually regarded with precisely the expression with which he now regarded his grandchildren.

Only, this day, there screwed itself into the old man’s eyes, as he observed her from his place opposite her end of the long table, something sly. The old man became a little faunal. A naughty old faun.

“Emma’s right, Mathilda! From now on I’ll serve you only with white meat. It’s good for what ails you.”

“Why?” said Phil, who made rapid, cracking noises up the stalk of a celery stick. “Isn’t Mother well?”

“I’ve never seen her look better,” said Rebekka into the flash of quick anxiety that went around the table. “Mother has gained pounds!”

Rebekka was five-feet-ten, weighed one hundred and seventy, and had no fat. Level of eye, level of strong, firm bosom. Level of brow, from which she wore the enormously thick brown hair coiled unstylishly on the top of the back of her head. Level of voice, too. One of those low, middle-register people. Without being masculine, there was something rather Socratic about the head of Rebekka Renchler. A brow that jutted firmly over the deeply-molded roofs of eye sockets. A fine, strong, fierce nose. Mouth brackets.

It was characteristic of the family to discuss any one of its members as if the individual under scrutiny were not present. It was particularly a family habit to discuss Mathilda over her head.

“Father!” said Rebekka suddenly, and then again sharply, “Father—what?”

There was no denying it. Above the square white beard that hung like a muslin curtain from the Old Gentleman’s chin, were two round dots of color. A shrewd, old, sly face, trying not to look abashed, and humorous eyes, twenty years too young for their weather-beaten setting that kept radiating lines.

That was the Old Gentleman’s method of laughter. Behind the beard, that was slightly yellow about the mouth, the lips, heavy and of a raspberry red, remained mobile. It was the sunburst of lines at the ends of his eyes that kept radiating a sort of heat lightning of laughter.

“Once a good strong woman,” said the Old Gentleman, letting his naughty old gaze spray over his wife, “always a good strong woman.”

“Not at all, Father!” said Rebekka. “Mother’s endurance at fifty-three is simply amazing, and see how frail she looks. Every one of us is big enough to carry her off single-handed, and yet she goes on from break of dawn until bedtime, slaving, slaving away as if things were no different now than when we were children growing up.”

“Ah, she’s a good one!” said the Old Gentleman, winking his two eyes simultaneously at his wife, who fluttered. “She’s a good one all right!” And, incredibly enough, made a screwing noise with his tongue and slid his naughty, bright-blue, humorous, twinkling eyes.

“Puppa, don’t do that!”

“Don’t do what, Mathilda?”

“That! That!” echoed Emma, who could cry from being made nervous by what she considered her father’s none-too-subtle sense of low comedy. “With your eyes, Father! It’s—it’s horrid! What is it, dear, makes you do it?”

“Your Mother’s a good one, Daughter! That’s all! Don’t we sit down to table, twenty-odd of us—Thanksgiving?”

“Yes, Father!” said Emma faintly, and regarded her mother for the moment as if she were going to cry now.

“Pass Mother the gravy,” said Rebekka, in her low, rather hoarse voice. It was her way of sparring off for the group of them a moment that threatened to become sentimental.

“No, serve the boys, Puppa.”

“No, the Mama comes first!”

“Please—the boys——”

There was something about the mere idea of her brood assembled, that could send the tremulous wavering along Mathilda’s voice. Probably the unbelievable precariousness of it. Six children into the world with perfect sequence except for the infant mortality of the first-born, Mathilda. Nine grandchildren without a casualty. Except perhaps Leslie. And yet Mathilda sometimes wondered, regarding the boy’s pale head and his eyes that looked tranced as if with enchantment at what they saw, if he could be classed a casualty.

Rebekka, though, who had borne him, must have thought so. Her eyes, when they looked at this boy of hers, seemed to pour inward, leaving them staring, like empty lake-beds.

Leslie, who was twelve, sat at the younger children’s improvised table under the stairway.

At the oval-topped table in the sitting-room, which ordinarily held the four-pound family Testament and a pair of brown porcelain pug-dogs, chipped from being hidden by this or that one of the Schuyler girls, only to be unearthed again by Mathilda, were Rebekka’s Steve, who at eleven looked like the young San Sebastian, and who, to his grandfather’s delight, could quaff cider like a sailor, licking his lips and drawing his arm across them; and Rebekka’s only daughter, a pretty, fair girl, whose dark eyes flashed a curious contradiction to her placid, taffy hair.

It was as if, on holidays, the family thus assembled, the old House on Sycamore Street must fairly burst its weather-colored sides of hubbub.

The Old Gentleman loved the hubbub. It flowed over him with the voice of a world he had peopled. The town, the county, and even the state bore testimony to Schuyler progeny.

Rebekka’s model stock-farm, High Ridge, was one to which the entire state pointed with pride.

Phil Schuyler was already, though destined for temporary defeat, a moving figure in what were to be spectacular land deals in the history of Springfield. Henry Schuyler, who coveted no man’s office, had twice been approached to run on a Republican ticket, once for Congress and once for District Attorney, and frequently, Cincinnatus-like, had been called from his small environment to his state capital, and twice to Washington, on a point concerning certain legalities of water control.

Yes, the Old Gentleman loved the hubbub of his progeny about him, and today somehow, with the two polka-dots out on his cheekbones and his eyes in that faun-like crinkle—there was something about the Old Gentleman——

Rebekka, who was fond of saying that she knew her father like a book, and who bartered heifers with him in the open cattle-marts, who housed his sheep for him in winter in exchange for the second crop of his South Meadow of alfalfa, and who carried a pot of her own concoction of cocoa butter in her great leather reticule, for his finger-tips, which cold split terribly in winter, kept sitting more and more stiffly at his right.

Even Henry, who had a way of looking at no one yet seeing everyone, threw his father an occasional glance. Emma was on edge. Ever since she could remember, there had been things her father did that affected her like the scratch of a gold ring across a slate. His way of standing her on the oval-topped parlor table when she had been a child and pointing out her blonde prettiness to visitors. “She’s a good one, isn’t she?” In Emma’s opinion, as if she had been so much heifer flesh. The Old Gentleman’s insistence, during Emma’s second year in High School, of driving up after her in a dirty old phaeton that barely escaped scraping the streets. “The Floozy Flump” they used to call it at school. “Here comes Emma’s Floozy Flump,” would reach her stinging ears. It was precisely the same way she used to feel later, in the days when her husband, Morton Milliken, had been wooing her and the Old Gentleman would sit on the side verandah evenings in his socks, sucking his atrocious meerschaum, just about the time Morton was due to arrive.

That whole group of grosgrained sensations was on a par with what her father was doing to her now. What made him squint so? The face of Mathilda kept fluttering, in the way it had when agitated.

There was undoubtedly in the air the charged quality of something of note about to happen in the Schuyler family.

A Schuyler must be about to be born. Another impending grandchild? Which of the girls was with child? Or, by a stretch of the imagination, was some one, a Schuyler, on the verge of being rebuked? Who?

The sisters and sisters-in-law felt along one another with their eyes. The bright, inquisitive, rather merciless eyes of women who suspect. Rita Schuyler, Phil’s wife, had had her last child. A recent operation had settled that. Well, that left Rebekka. Nonsense! And Clara. No-n-o. Slowly the women’s eyes swung to Emma, who squirmed and felt more and more irritated and could have sobbed her denial.

There came Phil’s dry little bronchial cough that always attacked him when he felt called upon to defend himself before his father. There had been many such stormy defenses. The troublesome time of Phil’s narrowly-averted bankruptcy in a land deal known as the Alleghany Subdivision, against which both his father and Henry had advised. There had been another jam, when Phil, on the inside tip of a street-car franchise, had formed a company to buy up two blocks of Hinshaw Street, only to have the street-car finally run two blocks this side of Hinshaw.

There could be high words between Phil and his father.

And yet the family’s outstanding events had had chiefly to do with celebration. To be sure, there had been family conclave and remonstrance when Rebekka had held out for marrying Winslow Renchler, several years her junior and a sickly fellow. Clara’s marriage to Sam Holly, a city salesman for the great wholesale firm of Hamilton-Brown Shoe Company, St. Louis, had also met a certain mild opposition. Sam Holly was an admirable young man in the good-as-gold sense of the word. He had no vices; and his virtues, although they made you yawn, made you yawn righteously. The name Holly in St. Louis was synonymous with a large dry-cleaning concern. But it was owned by Sam’s uncle, who had never done a turn for his nephew. Sam and Clara had met at the St. Louis Exposition. There was something handsome about Sam, who had iron-gray hair at thirty; and yet, as the Old Gentleman said after reviewing the rather patient-faced young wholesale shoe-salesman when he came wooing to Centralia, he had somehow the face of a man with no future.

Then there was that conclave of a winter five years previous, when Henry had refused the amazing and unsought opportunity to run for Congress on a strong Republican ticket. That had been a blow, even though the Old Gentleman had valiantly come to see his elder son’s point of view. And besides, even the sting of a secret disappointment was practically gone now, in the curious and palmy circumstance of the world finding its way to Henry’s little old one-horse law office up over Schlemmer’s Hardware Store on High Street.

The Old Gentleman had shone of eye like this, upon the occasion of the engagements of all Schuylers. Upon the announcement of every one of the impending births of the grandchildren. The day the honor of the request of Henry’s candidacy was announced. Always around this very same table. Only, somehow, never before so much so. This day his eyes went screwing around in his head. Of mischief. Making the occasion, to his children who knew him, seem more and more portentous. Of an ultimate solemnity.

Mathilda cut the segments of pie, alternating the lemon and the mince, until the children’s table had been served and the Old Gentleman’s match held to the suet pudding, so that the thin blue flicker of lighted cognac began to flit along it, and the children shouted and gouged unruly spoons into the fire-dance.

Candied apples, and persimmons for the game of pucker, and home-made taffy still in the greased pie-pans, were passed around to the youngsters, and after-dinner coffee in large cups to the elders. Curtains were drawn and a pail of coal tilted into the base-burner until it roared. A pair of old silver candlesticks on the two little curlicue shelves of the walnut sideboard were lighted by the Old Gentleman, who held each flame in the shell of his hand until the light grew round and steady. Then Henry, who was six-feet-one, and had arms that dangled to his knees, lowered the swinging-lamp that swung on chains over the table, and lighted the Welsbach. It had once been an oil-lamp before gas became everybody’s commodity. For thirty years, an old buckeye had dangled from it by a string.

Trina cleared the table, aided and abetted by the Schuyler girls, who were cocksure about withdrawing the additional leaves, passing in and out with stacks of scraped dishes, sliding napkins into their rings, crumbing, folding and laying away the tablecloth in its place under the sideboard, and spreading a red rep one with black fringe in its place. Mathilda had her own way of placing the silver fruit bowl, upheld by three silver cherubs and laden with “Rebekka Wines,” in the center of the cleared table. The cherub with the deepest dimple in his chin must always face the South Meadow window.

Then Trina drew the walnut folding-doors, shutting out the children. Against the plate-glass of the door that led from the dining-room to the small side porch, it had begun to snow. Big flakes that whitened the air, but darkened the sky. The slanting roof to the wood-shed was already lightly covered.

Through the heavy, closed folding-doors, the children could be heard making a scramble for leggings and reefers, and fumbling in the hall closet for rubbers and hockey sticks.

“Winslow,” said Rebekka, “hadn’t you better bring Leslie in here?”

“Wait a minute,” said the Old Gentleman, and brought his hand down on his son-in-law’s, pinning it.

“Father!” said Emma and Clara simultaneously, in a sort of bleat, and Phil began to cough in the way he had.

The group about the table tightened into the proportions of the table with the three leaves removed. Mathilda with her timid face and her timid lips lifted to simulate a smile that twisted Rebekka’s heart strings with its pitiableness. Twelve faces swimming up closer in concentration upon the old face above the spade of beard, at the head of the table, with the sly eyes of a naughty boy screwing in his head.

“Heinie!” faltered Mathilda, calling him faintly by a name she had not used since Rebekka had been born.

“Children,” said the Old Gentleman, simulating elaborate innocence of any realization whatsoever that what he had to say was about to splash over the occasion like a dash of ice-cold water from a bucket. “Children, it is a Thanksgiving Day for every Schuyler to remember.”

“Puppa!”

“For goodness’ sakes, Father,” cried Emma, the bright tears in her eyes drying because her eyeballs were so hot and angry, “for goodness’ sakes, Father, the idea of acting—so—horrid. What is it all about, Father?”

“Really, Father, Emma’s right!”

“If you’ll hold your horses,” said the old man on a strangely forced chuckle, “you’ll know.”

“Well?”

“Well?”

“Puppa!”

“Oh, for goodness’ sakes——”

“Sh-h-h, Em.”

“Well, Father?”

“Your mother, children, God bless her, is going to have a baby.”

“Winslow,” said Rebekka, in a voice that seemed to be running out of her like sands out of glass—“awfully silly—but—glass of water—please—I think—I’m going to faint.”

“For Heaven’s sakes, Rebekka, don’t do that!”

“Of course, I’m not! Give me a drink!”

“Puppa,” said Mathilda, and leaned forward to straighten the third cherub’s dimple further toward the window that looked out on South Meadow. “It—it is too hot in here, open—open the window——”

To cross that room, to open that window, was like walking through the buckshot of twenty-two glass eyes, that were looking at the Old Gentleman as if seeing him for the first time.

Chapter One

There was a game that David loved.[1]

He called it Indian in the Corn.

In autumn, in the field beyond South Pasture, when the husks were built into tepees around the cobs of massive, orange-colored teeth, it was his favorite pastime as he bustled up and down the rustling aisles, to slip into a tepee’s heart. Lie there. Crouch there. Feel sinister there. And then, deep in his tepee, over the yellow mound of corn that was like a camp-fire, beat his palm against his open mouth and let out yips. Henry, when reading him _Leatherstocking Tales_ up in his room beside the old base-burner, used to yodel thus, against slaps at his opened mouth.

Never by chance did a farm-hand encounter the particular tepee that concealed David. Sometimes, to the simply irrepressible excitement of the small crouching figure whose eyes shone like a cat’s through apertures in the husks, they rustled perilously near. But never, even though they could hear him breathe, would hired man be guilty of finding out Davey.

That made it perennially exciting. Even if one suspected, at times, an elaborate and almost too consistent immunity to direction of sounds on the part of the field-workers. Still, one could never be quite sure. After all, in a wilderness of tepees that reached from the sheep pasture to the creek, one Indian chieftain might easily throw puzzlement, even consternation, into the less wily white man.

Tecumseh, Chief of the Shawnees, who had been prominent in border warfare in that very region where the Old Gentleman’s corn-field flowed its mellow way, was a favorite rôle.

The War of 1812 could bang in cap-pistol shots among those tepees.

There was a colored picture in one of his brother Henry’s books; _The Lewis and Clarke Expedition_, of a solitary chieftain skulking in and out of ambush, and a score of white men from behind a barricade, lying belly low, aiming rifles at just the wrong clump of bush.

Sometimes Jacob, known throughout the valley as the best farm hand in the state (when sober), would throw a fit at these yips emanating from the tepees, and dance up and down on the balls of his feet and rub the seat of his overalls.

That invariably delighted David into a spell of the short, hiccoughy laughter of childhood, and out he came, still yipping, and leaping about in a tribal dance of no authenticity, while Jacob, at sight of the small figure in the yellow khaki-suit overalls, with fringed sides, and the band of porcupine-quills made into a head-crest for him by his sister Rebekka, took to his heels, still rubbing.

Long hazy autumns, the color of an apricot, and of a spanking kind of heat, these years that led up to Davey’s being seven. Slow days, even as they grew shortest, that lay in a little yellow mud along the tongue and tasted of pollen.

All of his life David was to remember the taste of those days of his first seven years.

Once, in the full prime of his future, standing on the observation platform of a special train that was draped in bunting, and addressing a group of townspeople who had crowded up around the tracks of a station named Vandalia, the smell of that hot autumn haze, drifting in apricot-colored sunlight from outlying corn-fields, caught him so by the throat, that he terminated his remarks almost on a gulp and retired into the car to the rather bewildered cheers of the crowd.[2]

Those with him, accustomed to his grim, unrelenting sort of vitality, were surprised at this show of fatigue; and his young personal physician, named Denny Kiskadden, harboring memories of Wilson, Harding, and Putnam finally exacted from him a respite from the whirlwind demands upon his time and energy, and the next few towns were passed with the shades of the car drawn, and the milling crowds about the stations met with a few brief remarks from the Secretary of State.

But it was not fatigue. It was a memory assailing him along the taste nerves of his tongue. The taste of the smell of Indian summer drifting in over soil that was the soil of his being.

The old house on the edge of Centralia was packed with that odor into the very plush and horsehair of its furniture. Hard coal from the base-burners, and the smell of winter apples, and a curious smell that was sweet, like the breath of a cow, mingled with it the year through.

For years, during a sustained hiatus in the growth of Centralia, due to certain water-power monopolies that held up a foundry-development which was one day to boom it, the House on Sycamore Street continued virtually to mark the very spot where the bob-tailed town faded back into the placid geography of the meadow, field, and brook from whence it came.

From its square brace of front bay windows, you glimpsed the roofs of the sedentary houses for blocks along the shady length of Sycamore Street. But from its rear; from Henry’s window, or Davey’s attic one, or Trina’s, there uninterrupted, plunged the sheep meadow into the corn-fields, and the corn-fields into the creek; and climbing out of the creek, as if the land were hurrying to be on its way, more sheep pasture, alfalfa, barns and stiles, and so on to the Tarkington Farm, whose buildings, with the exception of silo, were hidden by trees.

In Rebekka’s and Henry’s childhood, the creek that plunged through South Meadow had wound its way through the town so that every so often, as you drove, clump-clump, went hoofs over wooden bridges. The soft thunder of the loose flooring in these bridges reverberated down into Davey’s sixth year, then the town appropriation went through for filling in the creek.

Every Schuyler had reason to remember that rear of flowing pasture and farm-land, and had plunged and shouted away many a somnolent midsummer afternoon in this tramp stream that had, in rare fashion, wandered off the flank of a two-hundred-mile river, to rattle its way over the stones. While David was growing up, practically all the streets that it had intersected were filled in, doing away with the pleasant commotion of the wooden bridges. But like a rash, immediately beyond the town, it broke out again.

The South Meadow ran on beyond the creek to the railroad. A double row of persimmon-trees marked the edge of the Old Gentleman’s property. Sometimes, on the afternoons that were mealy to the tongue of the apricot haze, David lay flat on his back under them on the coarse, yellowing pasture-grasses. Sometimes a persimmon came down and spat him in the face.[3]

Mathilda Schuyler, who sewed a great deal in a large third-story sort of attic-room, with matting on the floor, and large blobs of unused blankets, comforters, pillows, and feather beds, tied into sheets and arranged around the room, could lean out of that window and yodel to Davey when she wanted him, as she had yodeled to the small Schuylers who had scampered before.

But somehow, after the interval of more than the score of years that separated her sixth from this seventh child of hers, Mathilda had taken on some of the nervousness of a young mother with her first-born. And an additional kind of self-consciousness, as if to Davey were owing some sort of an explanation for the circumstance of a curious isolation caused by years.

And yet, after a certain square little fashion, David was the sturdiest of her children, with his father’s tight kind of sinew that knitted him down into stockiness, and short heavy legs that were to remain that way until at fourteen they shot up, lean and over-lanky. A brownish little fellow with the blackest of pupils to his eyes, surrounded by the clear gold of syrup. There were three black dots in the gold of the left eye. “Faith, Hope, and Charity,” said Emma to him one day, and kissed the eye shut.

Maybe! But David wriggled. He was pretty constantly being kissed by the three big women, his sisters. And even by his nieces and nephews. It was a favorite pleasantry of Rebekka’s eldest son, Steve, who was fifteen when David was four, to address him as Uncle David and then pick him up by the seat of his small trousers and deposit him on top of a mantelpiece.

Emma’s daughter Claire was the niece nearest his age. When she was an adorable eleven, a blond Bavarian-looking doll with her mother’s bright, plump Teutonic prettiness, and dimples everywhere, knees, wrists, elbows, cheeks and chin, her Uncle David was six. It was the period when he was all square. Square, brown, straight bangs. Square, ragged front teeth. The squareness beginning to lock his chin. The eyes of clear gold syrup with the three brown motes in the left, that looked at you squarely, under the square brow made squarer by bangs.

“He’s a Schuyler every inch,” would say his Mother, placing cold, oldish hands on his young hair.

“Except the inches that haven’t come yet,” was the Old Gentleman’s chuckle. “Don’t count your inches before they’re hatched. And there’s no telling ... he may remain a little shorty....”

“No telling,” repeated Mathilda, with the thought racing across her eyes that could make them look about to tear. “No telling for us, that won’t live to see it.”

“We’ll live!” said the Old Gentleman, expanding as if to give validity to a remark that had none whatsoever, except what grand manner could contribute. “Never mind, we’ll live, to see everything.”

“Dave, what do you want to be when you grow up?” was a constant reiteration of the Old Gentleman’s, as if to jerk the future closer, so that he might cram some of this late son’s maturity into his lifetime.

For the first ten years of his boyhood, with a consistency that never failed to raise the family-laugh, David stood by a selection that was neither precocious nor unique:

“I want to be a policeman.”

FOOTNOTES:

[1] ... they christened this late-comer brother of mine David Whittier. David, a name which Mother had stored up all through the years like a squirrel its nut, bringing it forth each time a son was born to her only to concede it in favor of family-names like Philip and Henry. Whittier was father’s choice, after his beloved Whittier County.

[2] ... I think some of his most brilliant talks are the unrecorded ones made more or less extemporaneously from the platforms of trains, or I remember once, from the hangar of a roof just as he was stepping on board a plane and a few hundred had gathered to cheer him on his way. The out-of-doors seemed to clarify even that clear brain of his.

[3] A painting of my brother, done from an enlarged snapshot taken one Sunday afternoon in South Meadow by Miss Henriette Simpson, now hangs in Americana House, Philadelphia, the gift of the Midwest Junior Historical Society.

Chapter Two

The Renchler Farm stood three miles out of Centralia on a dip of state road that led in a quick, slick ribbon the three hundred and twenty miles across two states.

Two acres of it had been Winslow Renchler’s inheritance of his father’s small estate.

The house stood to the fore of those original seven acres. In the years since her marriage, and to Rebekka’s just pride, those acres had been added to by fifty-eight. The last buy-in had been a coveted acre-and-a-half of old man Algahr’s. For years, the Renchler holdings had curved around that plot like a greedy finger. When approached, Algahr, who at ninety had exactly the face of a white, two-weeks-old kitten, tooted around with his thin, high little voice and refused to consider. When he died, a sole relative in the form of a heretofore unknown nephew turned up from Shreveport, Louisiana, and sold it quickly to Rebekka for less than half of what she had been wont to annually offer old man Algahr. The catch was that the young scalawag demanded cash transaction. Even with the advantage to her of cash terms, Rebekka, whose acquisitions were all on mortgage basis, found the raising of two hundred and forty dollars no small matter.

Finally it was negotiated with Ephraim Howey, then candidate for Governor on a Republican ticket and whose stock-farm two miles along toward Middleton was by way of becoming a matter of state pride.

That gave to the Renchler farm a fine, unbroken acreage of flat land. You could stand on the verandah of the house exactly as if you stood on the deck of a steamer, with the surrounding country flowing out from you in ripples toward the horizon.

Gradually, with the years, as Winslow’s initial and feeble hold upon the affairs of the farm relaxed and Rebekka took firmer and firmer clutch, High Ridge came to be known as the Model Farm. For no more technical reason, perhaps, than the geometric outlay of its uniformly painted buildings and silos and the well-kept stone hedges, most of them with their top row of boulders whitewashed.

Rebekka’s eyes and mouth were grim with the purpose of living up to that appellation. It led her, in breathing space between meeting mortgages, to cast covetous eyes toward installations of machinery and modern devices which were ultimately to justify the term, “model farm.”

The Renchler place, with its perfectly square white frame house, its recent addition of wide side verandah, its front of closed shutters and green front door that nobody ever used, stood on a rectangular knoll that was entirely surrounded by sixteen handsome maple trees. In time, with its flock of outlying buildings painted a uniform green and white, its regimental silos, its heated and electrically-lighted barns, its plow-horses of enormous heft, fatted cattle, flowing loam of fields, it was to become second only, as a matter of local pride, to the Howey place, which after all was more of a hobby than an enterprise.

There were those who thought that Rebekka, in her concentration upon the singleness of her purpose, in the sure-footed, deep-throated, high-busted, and wide-hipped kind of magnificence, was too terrific with enterprise.

There was something about a woman—even at the dawn of a day when a suffragette was something that could happen in your own family—stalking about her house at dawn to the clanking of her keys and the swinging of her lantern; mingling in the open cattle-marts with men who never so much as doffed a cap or shifted quid when she swung up in flaring knee-boots, with her skirts crowded up into them, and, at season, standing atop a threshing-machine shouting orders, her skirts again, for want of knickerbockers, lashed in the uninterrupted winds against her great body-curves; well, there was something about it—a woman and all that—there was something about it went against many a grain.

It was common say about Rebekka that she could get more than a third again as much work out of her men as anyone in the county, because they were ashamed of an endurance that might not match up with her mighty one.

There was something too ignominious about so minor a discomfort as a cold, or a tooth- or an earache to be mentioned in the eupeptic presence of Rebekka.

It was not that she was unsympathetic. There was a shelf in a tool-house on her place filled with rows of arnicas, headache powders, antiseptics, and various first-aids, which she personally administered, calm and unblanched at the flow of blood, sure and firm at the winding of gauze. Once a boy-around-the-place had tripped against a scythe during haying time and cut his head in such fashion that a flap of the flesh hung down over his face in a great dripping mask, blinding and terrifying him so that he ran screaming through the fields to the house. Winslow, seated on the side verandah, scooping a very special brand of tobacco from a can into a rubberized pocket-pouch as the wretched boy ran up, reeled sidewise from his rocking-chair into a swoon that threatened, because of its duration, to be more a part of the emergency than the wounded boy himself.

It was Rebekka who held the flap of flesh in place and kept the blood stanched until a doctor arrived to sew it, giving orders the while about the resuscitation of Winslow, who lay like a board.

After it was all over, Winslow, feeling foolish, would have preferred to sit on the verandah until his legs got rid of some of their tendency to wobble. But there was Rebekka, back at her interrupted chore of the setting-out of hundreds of tiny asparagus-plants in frames under glass, and so with bluster, to likewise prove his fitness, Winslow, who detested the smell of lime phosphate, went down-cellar for a bag of it to sprinkle along a border of new-turned earth.

As a matter of fact, Rebekka’s legs were wobbling, too. She wanted to cry. She wanted Winslow to come and insist that she go indoors and lie down. She wanted “Doctor Dan” to offer her a quaff of spirits of ammonia, as he had the kitchen-maid and even old Jeff.

He did nothing of the sort.

It would have embarrassed Winslow to show the slightest concern for her. It was not until she was in bed that night that Rebekka let herself have a chill. A long, luxurious one that rattled her teeth and the bed springs.

Chapter Three

The distance from the House on Sycamore Street to Rebekka’s farm could be cut considerably if you went around by the creek and stepping-stoned it in the autumn or waded it in spring. That was David’s invariable way, although in spring, pants were sure to get soaked, along their edges, even if he crammed them halfway up along his upper leg.

Rebekka always kept an extra pair of trousers hanging in a closet under the stairs. Knee ones, long since outgrown by Stevey.

They fitted Davey, who never failed to rebel against them, in a comic hit-and-miss fashion, garment and boy seeming to evade each other at all usual points of contact.

A little later, when Steve was at State Agricultural College, his room, up under the eaves, was practically David’s, with a closet for extra bits of David’s clothing and a nightshirt for those occasions when, for one reason or another, David slept at his sister’s house.

Paula, Rebekka’s first, was nineteen when Davey was six.

That meant, as in the House on Sycamore Street, here was a forest of grown-ups. Except Leslie. Who had a face that was delicately hung on, like a pear from its branch. A face that quivered with nervous little ecstasies at what it saw.

You could lie on your stomach alongside of Leslie, even though the forest of years was between, and play with lead soldiers and try to make an A-shaped formation with them as Henry had read out loud from Carlyle’s _French Revolution_.

But never for long.

Suddenly Leslie would grab one of them out of formation and wrap him in a handkerchief and want to play a game called “Angel in Heaven.” Pshaw! That bored David. To him a soldier was a soldier.

Chapter Four

So it was that David had practically two homes. The House on Sycamore Street that had to get used all over again to a youngster clattering through its halls and nicking into its base-boards and sliding down its banisters, and his sister’s farmhouse with the big square light rooms of almost too many windows and the bright golden-oak woodwork and the brass bed and balcony-front bird’s-eye maple dressers and yellow hardwood floors and folding-doors on easy rollers that divided a dining-room done in golden oak and leather upholstery of the McKinley period, from a parlor of dragon-footed mahogany-and-green-velours, two-tone green rug and Victrola with wax cylindrical records.

Rebekka was not much on the details of interior decoration. Until Paula grew up and had sharp ideas of her own that conflicted with her mother’s, practically all of the ordering for the Renchler household was done by mail-order catalogue. Stacks of bulky pamphlets lay on Rebekka’s roll-top desk in the dining-room bay window beside a pack of stamped envelopes; and scarcely a day but what Rebekka, who wrote all letters on pad-paper in lead-pencil, jotted some such as these:

Please send me as per No. r358762 Two hose nozzles, brass finish.

Please send me as per No. 238996 One Pet Chicken-House Oil-Burner. All attachments. No. 60401 One box 100 sheets 8 × 10 water color paper.

Please send me as per No. 865438 three pair gentleman’s black cotton and wool socks. Reinforced toes. Size 10½. No. 456787 One garden-swing. Striped awning. Green and brown reversible seats.

Please send me as per No. 453973 one pair ladies blue felt bedroom slippers size 5½C. No. 5925596 One Mother’s Comfort Butter-Churn. Accessories. No. 49572530 One box, half-dozen Toothbrushes, Numbered one to six. Number 20e65 Six Sure-Fire rat traps.

Winslow, who squinted over the ridge of horizontal lead-pencils, held out at arm’s-length, and who belonged to a Water Color Society, was moved to occasional remonstrance at these catalogic tendencies. Not because they offended, but rather because, as Paula began to remonstrate, and substituted willow pattern breakfast china for the régime of granite coffee-pot, and theatrical gauze curtains for Nottingham lace, something in him, the languid something that made him want to paint, stirred and agreed.

“Bek, that four-tiered wire flower-pot stand is a fright! Thought they stopped making those things forty years ago. You can do better than that right here in Centralia without having to write five hundred miles for it.”

“Well, if that’s the case, Winslow, it would help a great deal if you would go shopping. Goodness knows, I’m not so in love with the catalogues.”

But, as usual, Winslow did nothing. It was easier just to sit and remonstrate, a little gently, a little ironically and with a charm that, as his days almost imperceptibly became more laconic, and Rebekka’s more dynamic, seldom failed to fascinate and amuse her.

“Fraud, you!”

But for outsiders, every manifestation of Winslow’s lethargies came under the benign heading of temperament. There was something magnificently creative in the way Bek had spun out of the mild figure of a mild man with a mild flair for water-colors, the variegated figure of the artist.

No sooner had the man she married developed indolences of mood and spirit against which her family had vainly tried to forewarn and forearm her during the period of their wooing, than assertively and unrelentingly, to the community at large, Bek became the wife of genius.

It was Bek who took out his membership papers and paid the initiation fees and annual dues to the Water Color Society. Bek who arranged his one-man show in the Auditorium of the Tallahassee High School. Bek who gave catalogue orders for the newest fangle in water-color equipment. Once Winslow had awakened to find a black sateen smock across the foot of his bed. That, as he put it, broke the back of his camel’s-hair brush. Winslow out-and-out refused to wear it. Bek, whose two feet were said to be on the ground more patly than any woman’s in three counties, put it in a dresser drawer, where Winslow, going for his shirts, would be sure to have it ground into his retina every so often.

“These artists!” was frequently a phrase on her lips, in the form of a sigh. A large, dramatic, sadistic sigh.

Steve’s room, where Davey frequently slept while its rightful occupant was off at Agricultural College, was an odds-and-ends of a room with half-finished attic rafters that Winslow had studded with nails for his collection of pipes. A fine mahogany chest of drawers, a high low-boy confiscated by Bek from the House on Sycamore Street, stood between two windows, and a spool bed with a pine-needle mattress that Stevey had loved and which David loved after him, jammed the room considerably. A shelf of books, with an assortment of farm journals, Henty, Scott, Defoe, Dumas, Hugo, Garland, High School text-books. A _Julius Cæsar_, with S.S.R. monogrammed in lead-pencil along its ragged edges. _Manual of Chemistry._ _How to Make Your Own Wireless._ _Literary Digest_ for 1902-03, bound. Above it, sprawled across the slanting ceiling, a large yellow pennant, Tallahassee High, ’09.

It had cost Rebekka some tears as secret as her midnight chill when Stevey left this boy’s-nest of his for State Agricultural. There had been reasons, frantic, private reasons, why suddenly, to the mild mystification of the family, he had been packed off to the first school whose division of semesters fitted in with the hurried arrangement.

Even after four months of Stevey’s absence, it was as if Bek could not become reconciled to that sense of the cold, empty room up above the bedroom she shared with Winslow. She loved having David there now, as many nights in the week as she could wheedle him out of her mother.

As a rule, he came over toward late afternoon, with the day’s lay of the fifty wyandottes which Rebekka, from an old-time necessity, due to lack of space, but since outgrown, kept on her father’s place.

David carried their lay in a chip basket with a cover that lifted from either end.

From one of her cow-sheds Rebekka could see him come up over the wheat-ridge, basket in hand, his stocky little figure mounted in a kind of important isolation against a semicircular wall of sky, his trousers forced halfway up against his upper leg and sure to be wet from the wade.

Rebekka’s first question was almost invariable: “Did Mother say you could stay all night?”