Chapter XI: Part 11

“Well? Go on.”

“There’s nowhere to go, Henry. That’s the trouble. A fellow just thinks and thinks, and then—he’s so busy thinking where to begin—he don’t begin—at all.”

“Doesn’t——”

“Doesn’t.”

“Henry, why did you give me that book called Spencer’s _First Principles_?”

“To make you think.”

“Do you believe in God?”

“Not as he exists in Testaments.”

“As he exists in these here _First Principles_?”

“Does he exist there?”

“Sure he does. Who made the First Principles?”

“I like your looking at it like that.”

“Was Ingersoll a great preacher?”

“A great orator.”

“Who was a great preacher?”

“Demosthenes.”

“But he couldn’t preach. He had to have a stone in his mouth.”

“His wisdom percolated through the stone, and even the stone heads of his public.”

“You know what? A good way to make people listen to what you’ve got to say to them, is to be a preacher.”

“Aha! _Now_ it’s the Church! This is the era of the decline of the Church and the rise of the State. Don’t climb a sinking ship.”

“You can’t ever sink God.”

“Wait and see what happens when human beings attain the perfect mind.”

“Then they’ll be God themselves.”

“Exactly.”

“I believe in God, Henry.”

“Of course you do. Even when you jump the track, your trolley stays on.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Up there, in the gloom of the room that came down on both sides like a book closing, they sat side by side on the edge of the cot, Henry hugging his knee and rocking, Teddy stretched flat on the strip of matting beneath the window, and the cool, washed night-air coming in boldly.

It was a habit of these two to sit in silence, out into which their thoughts could creep, timidly at first, then boldly, like mice at night.

“What’s the matter, boy?”

“Huh? Why?”

“You’re sighing like an exhausted pipe.”

“Roll over, Teddy. It’s him, snoring.”

“Oh!”

“Henry?”

“Yes?”

“Were you ever—kinda licked?”

“I’ve been licked from the start, I guess, Dave. In a way you’ll probably never know anything about.”

“Shelley, the poet, died young. Did you know that? In a boat. Bay of Naples. Sad—and grand—thataway.”

“That way. M-m-m. Not my style. The advantages of dying in bed can’t be overestimated.”

“Have you ever thought, Henry—is life worth living?”

“Depends a good deal, I guess, upon the—liver.”

“Y’know, if it wasn’t for Mother and Father, and you and Bek, of course, ’n’ all—it would be sad for them. Gee! But I don’t know as I’m so crazy about living. I could snuff out just like that!”

“Well, taking it all in all, guess there’s pretty much to be said on both sides.”

“You’re laughing.”

“Forsooth, no!”

“Well, I don’t expect anybody to understand——”

“Who is she?”

“How did you know?”

“I’m like that, sometimes. Intuitive.”

“Has anybody——”

“Nobody.”

“Has Claire?”

“I tell you, nobody.”

“Then how——”

“Oh, after a fellow has lived as long as I have, he comes to know a few things for himself.”

“You see, Henry, I wouldn’t mind it so terribly—yes, maybe I would, but maybe I wouldn’t, if it wasn’t one of those patent-leather lizards like him. That’s what’s eating me. His walking down Tallahassee Street with her every day.”

“Patent-leather lizard like whom?”

“Don’t you know?”

“How the dickens should I——”

“Kenneth Chipman.”

“What’s the matter with Kenneth? Nice enough fellow s’far as I know. Son of as nice a fellow and as good a lawyer as this county boasts.”

“He’s a lizard. Tea-hound. Sits in the St. Charles Hotel any Saturday afternoon around four, and drinks it with girls, with his little finger sticking out off the cup.”

“What in Heaven’s name——”

“I don’t care what he is, so long as he doesn’t hook his arm into hers walking along Tallahassee. Guess I’m what you call a single-track fellow, Henry. Can’t think of anything else but—but his walking down Tallahassee thataway—what’s the use of anything—with his walking down Tallahassee thataway.”

“Sounds like an acute case of the girl. Who is she?”

“You—don’t—know——”

“Half-dozen nice kind of girls hereabouts that you might get smitten with.”

“You—mean—you don’t know—everything?”

“Of course not, except a curl on a neck or a pair of blue eyes could be responsible for er—a—well, for your acute—er—a....”

“You’re laughing at me!”

“No, no, David!”

“You are! I can feel you—shake!”

“Well, if I am, the joke’s on me.”

“What joke?”

“Life.”

“It’s not like I was a moonstruck fellow, with eyes for every girl. She’s not like other girls.”

“I’m sure of that.”

“I—I’m not like other fellows.”

“I’m sure—of that——”

“You _are_ laughing.”

“Don’t be an idiot.”

“With me, Henry—oh, I know how fellows get moonstruck. Fellow can’t help hearing. The boys. The way, they talk—around the barns. Girls. Fellows and girls. I’m not thataway. I hate that—talk. Ugh! There’s only one girl I could ever want to—to—to—touch, Henry. I—oughtn’t say it, I guess—but—I do want to touch her beautifulness, Henry. To be the first—the only—is that rotten?”

“It’s the soundest thing in life.”

“Gosh—I—just do! Other fellows get moonstruck. I’m not like them. With me, it’s just Dora. Always!”

“Ah, Dora, old Tark’s daughter! That does complicate things. Our Old Gentleman and he have about as much use for each other as two cocks in a pit.”

“That’s nothing to Dora and me. Nothing’s nothing.”

“I see,” said Henry gravely, fumbling to relight his pipe, the match, in that fitful second, revealing the face of young David smeared with strain and pallor.

“She’s kinda outgrown me now, Hen. That’s the trouble. I don’t belong to the Centralia crowd that she’s gone to school with—and then that dancing-school business. We changed schools and Sunday-schools so long ago. She’s the prettiest little thing. If Kenneth gets Dora, he—I—dunno. I just dunno——”

For an overwhelmingly difficult moment, Dave’s tussle was chiefly with his Adam’s-apple, the puffing of Henry’s pipe helping to make the noise of the gulping seem less colossal.

“A first love-affair, Dave, is like the measles. A good thing to have and have over.”

“That’s what you say. You’re—old. But I know me, all right. She’s—why, she—she’s——”

It was intolerable that a jaw that was about to prick into its first beard should tremble!

“Where does Dora stand on all this, Dave?”

“She—where would she stand? Where could I—come in with her. Beautiful her. With her High School and dancing crowd and patent-leather-hair lizards crawling all around her. Where do I come in? Me? Huh, I don’t come in at all! Why—I haven’t even seen her, face to face, since—since one morning in her barn—I—where do I come in? Not at all.”

“Why?”

“Why do you keep asking me _why_? She don’t know I’m on earth—any more.”

“Ever asked her?”

“Don’t ask a girl that.”

“Why?”

“If you don’t quit asking me ‘why’——”

“Blamed little fool, why don’t you go get your dander up with her, instead of me?”

“If you—if you don’t quit shaking—if you don’t quit shaking—you’re laughing—” screamed Dave, suddenly in a low, tight kind of agony, and hurling himself against the bulk of his brother, landed sobbing there. Tears that laid him low on the rack of humiliation. Deep, wrenching sobs that he flung himself down into the mattress to muffle, and then, because they shamed him intolerably began to beat and try to tussle with his brother.

“You—what do you know about—about—caring——”

“You’re right, Dave,” said Henry. “I don’t seem to know how to care—enough. That way. That’s what I meant by being licked. If I—somehow—cared—more I wouldn’t be missing everything. Quit pounding me boy!”

“I tell you I can’t live in a world where somebody—else—has her. I can’t think of anything else. No wonder Father says I’m no good. I want to do pretty nearly everything there is to be done, and nothing’s worth doing because—I’m like a fellow that’s bleeding to death, Hen. All the life’s running out of me—and I don’t care who knows it!”

“Have you talked to Dora?”

“Talked to Dora? What’ll I do? Go to her and say ‘Looka here, you’re going with a patent-leather lizard if you ask me, but just the same, a fellow that’s up-and-doing, owns his own flivver and can take care of you and get you somewhere?’”

“Got to admit that about Ken.”

“Well, I’ll say to her, you drop him for me. I’m a farm-boy on my father’s place out on Pessimines Lane. Everything that I want to do, or be, is locked up in my head and can’t get out. But you go and throw over Kenneth and get yourself engaged to me. That will unlock me and I’ll start out to be something. That would make a hit with a girl like Dora, in that gay town-set she’s in, wouldn’t it? A girl that goes to Saturday-afternoon teas at the St. Charles, and holds out her little finger from her teacup, I’d make a hit going to her with these calluses on my hands, and forty cents in my pocket, and saying, ‘Dora, I’m the fellow.’”

“That’s about the only way you’ll ever be the fellow.”

“What do you mean?”

“Go find out. Maybe you are the fellow. If you aren’t, take your licking and shut up about it.”

The first light trembled over them, as they sat in the long after-silence of that. Henry, with his thin legs crossed, sitting on the edge of the cot and sucking at his cold pipe. Dave on his stomach, with his feet against the warm fur of Teddy and his eyes on the glimmer of dawn.

FOOTNOTES:

[44] It was characteristic of Dave, that on his world-tour he should find time to personally see to it that Denny Batch, the son of an old squatter out home, should be included in the secret-service corps of that memorable trip.

_Chapter Twenty-eight_

On a hot September day of apricot haze; crush of family-sedans along High Street, and a white-clad woman’s figure in the show-window of the Five and Ten shooting hot scones from a patent machine into the acquisitive hands of a sidewalk-jam; a gangling boy’s figure in long trousers that stopped as if affronted above the knobs of his ankles, and a short, black coat that hiked, strode along through the thick human treacle and turned down into Second Street toward the Blue Bird Restaurant.

He had just been fitted in the spectacles that are by now indissolubly associated with the square pallor of face, the wide, clear, slightly beetling brow, and the strong, high-bridged nose; a nose difficult to span with good fit of eye-glass frame.

That was the difficulty this Saturday. There was an inflamed ridge across the top of Dave’s nose, and the spectacles themselves were newly wound with cotton to relieve pressure against the abrasion. It kept him blinking his eyes and shrugging his nose. Every so often, he stopped before the mirror of a chewing-gum machine to his reflection in plate-glass, to ride them up and down into place.

The Old Gentleman’s youngest was not so well known on the streets of Centralia as the older children had been back in the days when the family lived in Sycamore Street.

The Centralia scene had changed since then. High Street had been widened, and there were double car tracks now, and hourly omnibuses started their cruise from Court House Square along a route that included Adalia, College Corner, Seven Mile and Middleton. The five-story Equity Building had replaced the old red brick Renchler Block; and the new St. Charles Hotel, with a florist-shop, haberdashery, and Western Union office flush with the sidewalk, occupied the old site of Wabischer’s saloon, that had been burned to the ground a few years after Dave was born.

Rows of parked cars stood in a long line down the center of High. A white-granite soldiers’ monument, twice as tall as a man, and with a pair of fern-fronds crossed on its inscribed bosom, stemmed the tide for a brief détour around it, as traffic flowed over the viaduct toward Middleton.

Spratt’s Dental College now stood on the saloon-corner where the Old Gentleman, in pre-Volstead days, had leaned many a clay-crusted convivial boot and swabbed down bock-beer, cramming his pockets with pretzels and Saratoga chips for young pilferers.

But the Old Gentleman’s phaeton and mare had long since ceased to sway their daily way down High Street, and Bek’s heroic figure seldom strode there now except on shopping-expeditions, when she carried two large oilcloth bags that she fed straight from the counters without benefit of wrappings. Henry still occupied his office up over Schlemmer’s hardware-store, but his deacon-like figure hurried along close to walls these days, and then mostly between the office and the Court House, with its sooty bunting-draped bust of George Washington over the imitation Greek-proscenium entrance.

So “the Old Gentleman’s youngest,” except to a few of a generation that still lingered in front of banks, feed-stores, and the sole livery-stable that survived, was scarcely a known figure.

Just another gawk of a farm-boy, attracted by the Strand Movie Theater, Clabby’s Billiard Parlors, half a dozen drug-store hang-outs, and Linden Amusement Park, which, in summer, plastered an artificial lake with swan-boats for hire.

High Street, of a Saturday, was pandemonium. Children with flat, eager tongues for the sticky pleasures of the lollipop. Window-shopping women, spry with the sense of surcease from the rigors of dishpan and diapering. Rattle of tin flivvers, mud to the hub. A graphophone in front of Smilley’s music-store braying to the din. The bright clutter of sunshine. The Tallahassee baseball-team doing a lockstep out to Linden Park. The occasional horse-drawn farm-wagon, with chairs in back to accommodate the family. The Chamber of Commerce windows on the second floor of the Equity Building, wide open, and filled with the click of typewriters. Women with net marketing-bags, crammed with spinach, and sprays of dill, pearl-fleshed spring onions, and an occasional live wretch of a chicken. Constantly recurring flashes of young girls, with long, revealing, flesh-colored legs, and bold lips, frankly penciled into orange and magenta bow-knots. Centralia’s telephone-directory list out in good store-suits, and the first of the new season’s straw cadies on their heads, and the fleshiness of canned foods, canned ideas, canned ideals, and canned music, in spangles of light sweat across pinkish faces.

A corn-fed-looking populace, which this boy, ambling slowly through that hottish Saturday, was one day to help swerve from the dangerous complacency of ultimate defeat.

Long before he was consciously aware of it, the quick antennæ of those perceptions which were to win him the ultimate sobriquet, “Leader of Leaders,” were at work.[45]

Every manifestation of crowds such as this “home-brew humanity,” milling, toiling, playing, was to sow seed in a clump of his fertile brain.

But on this particular Saturday, the crowds jostling him were just so much superfluous universe spinning around his egocentric figure.

At the Blue Bird Restaurant, the erstwhile brown little waitress, gray now, drew out his chair and handed him a stained menu, flicking it first with the napkin she wore at her belt. Here was a young man, now!

The strong light of the furiously sunny day, streaming in through the plate-glass front of the Blue Bird, showing up mercilessly the cotton palms, the cigar-counter with the waving blob of flame on the cigar-cutter and lighter, the oblongs of fly-paper sucking their toll into glue, the square white tables, with their slightly used cloths and geometry of silverware, made his eyes, still smarting of belladonna, blink even more, and burn.

The Rotary Club now held its weekly luncheons in an upstairs dining-room of the Blue Bird. Business-men, larger retail merchants, petty wholesalers, men whose names were written along High Street’s signs and show-windows, officials from the foundries, a banker, a merchant, a lawyer, a chief, began to drift in, practically every one of them wiping at an inside hat-band as he entered.

Five or six of the main dining-room tables were already occupied by single figures, most of them with the _Saturday Evening Post_ or the _Centralia Gazette_ propped up against the sugar-bowl. Even though they were unknown to Dave, and he attracted not their slightest attention, these sparsely scattered figures set him writhing. It was difficult, if you had previously been in a public restaurant only one or two times at best, to sit alone at a table under which legs felt too long to fit. The spectacles bit down into the inflamed place on the bridge of his nose, making it feel heavy and round as a potato. His collar twitched, and his eyes; and sidelong glances into a panel-mirror suddenly revealed the long, lean rods of his bare wrists.

It was not easy waiting alone in a public place, particularly since his legs would not seem to fit under. They had fitted under, the last time! Finally he did cram them in, but the edge of the table bit into him; and, when he moved, the table tilted.

Henrietta came first. The years had been at her in what seemed a rather subtle process of dehydration. She had dried, the skin powdery, a little tougher, a little tanner. Succulence all gone, but a brittle, bony, brightened look to her of nervous vitality. Rotarians, whom as boys Henriette had taught the rudiments of long division, passed on their way to lunch, some of them pausing for a good-day with an air of self-conscious juvenility that was never to wear off where “teacher” was concerned.

Even the brown foulard, with the gold bird-claw pinned onto the écru-lace yoke, had but slightly changed in cut. There had never been a time when to Dave, Henriette had not been precisely the cut-and-dried and kind Miss Simpson of that Saturday. A narrow, high-shouldered little person, indissolubly associated in his mind with the odor of arithmetic and the light powdering of chalk-dust across her flesh.

If her heart misgave her for a moment at sight of Dave there at the table, to break in upon the sanctity of her lunch-hour with Henry, she covered it immediately with the same small, kind smile that had coaxed hundreds of the youth of Centralia along the rocky road of the three R’s.

“Well, David, isn’t this a surprise?”

“Henry said I was to come here for lunch, from the oculist’s.”

“Spectacles? Let me see. Turn further. Astigmatic?”

“Guess they look kinda funny? Huh?”

“Not at all. Sensible!”

“Not—not so good-looking, though, I guess. Huh?”

“Anything that denotes common sense is good-looking.”

“I mean—you see, I just wanted eye-glasses. Not these old spectacle-things around the ears.”

“The foolish kind that wobble and inflame the eyes and fall and break at every provocation. Ah me, ‘Vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas,’ or is it ‘vanitates?’”

“Do they look all right?”

“Sensible.”

“I don’t have to wear them for reading. I’m near-sighted, you see. Guess this cotton wound around looks kinda snide, don’t it?”

“Most of my boys have that trouble the first few weeks.”

“Would you mind looking,” said David, uncircling the frames from his ears with a writhing difficulty, and his face emerging with the peculiar swollen look of the suddenly-unspectacled, “which way does it look best? With them or without them? Huh? With or without?”

Henry entered then, dabbing at his derby hat-band, and paring off the edge of a group of Rotarians.

“Hope you don’t mind the boy, Henriette. He’s been to the oculist, and I thought he’d want a bite of lunch afterward. How’s the eyes, boy?”

“How do I look, Henry? He said the frameless ones would only cost——”

“Nonsense. These are adequate and sensible. Feel all right?”

“Yes, but you see, Hen, he had some frameless ones there that looked great on me, only you said I couldn’t——”

“What’ll you have, boy? Quick!” said Henry, and regarded the speckled menu with gusto. His family was fond of saying that a prodigal host was lost to the world when Henry fell short of becoming a rich man. Himself a sparse eater, he loved the largesse of hospitality. Mathilda always maintained that his eyes were larger than his stomach. He loved to bestow. He was reckless and overabundant. If he stopped at the meat-market, at his mother’s bidding, to send home a leg-of-lamb, all her admonitions to the contrary notwithstanding, he was bound to select a far too expensive and extensive whole side of lamb.

Of late years, these commissions had been rigorously denied Henry.

“What’ll you have, boy? Quick!”

“I’d like some of that chile-con-carne and some of that cherry pie à la mode.”

“Not so good, I should say, for a boy with one fair-sized pimple and a couple of incipient ones.”

At that, David hauled back from the table, crimson.

“Don’t want anything,” he said and gulped.

“I’m sorry, Dave. Raw as the dickens of me. Here, Katy, chile-con-carne and cherry pie à la mode for the boy, and make it a double portion of ice-cream and a portion of that strawberry short-cake thrown in if his capacity is sufficiently elastic. Couldn’t tempt you to a bit of that short-cake, Henriette? Come, we’ll all three have strawberry short-cake.”

“Your rash, Henry!” said Henrietta gravely.

“We can afford to be rash for once, Henriette. We don’t have the young bloods of the town in on this party every Saturday.”

“You, strawberry-rash was what I had reference to.”

“Yes, I suppose that sort of rash is more my speed.”

It was exciting lunching with Henry and Henriette. The clatter of dishes rose with the noonday din. Sounds of applause clattered down from the Rotarian dining-room.

Lonnie Haskel, Middleton’s foremost lawyer, paused to consult with Henry for a few moments on a point of tariff-law in relation to a long-drawn case of his involving the Giles Tool Works and a firm in Sheffield, England, and then moved along.

“What’s tariff, Henry? I know what ad valorem is. Ad valorem is——”

“Tariff is the barbed-wire fence between nations, that keeps man’s activities nationalized. If you’re really interested, we’ll talk it out Sunday. The first four hundred and twenty-seven principles of tariff are the hardest.”

“Henry, I think it’s right remarkable, Dave’s interest in a subject like tariff. I find my boys just don’t seem right bright on the subject.”

“Dave’s got a good, healthy intellectual curiosity, and a good long head on him, when he chooses to use it.”

“Aw. My head—my head’s no longer ’n yours.”

“Your brother was speaking figuratively, Dave.”

“Yes’m.”

“Which reminds me, Henry, I very much want your advice. At the Saturday Morning Study Hour Club today, I was elected a member of the debating-team of the Political Science Section. At the October meeting our subject is to be, Resolved: That Prohibition is the greatest good for the greatest number. Of course, I shall choose the negative side. Yes?”

“Not ‘of course,’ Henriette. I’m afraid you are by way of becoming a disciple of my wild, strawberry-rash radicalism.”

“Nonsense, Henry! You have never won me over to a point of view with any coercion except the coercion of logic.”

“Good! Resolved then, that prohibition is the greatest poppycock for the greatest poppycocks.”

“Be serious, Henry! It’s for the October open meeting, and it’s our most important event. I hope you’ll come.”

“I may be serious at it, Henriette, but I could not possibly be serious about it.”

“Now, you’ve said yourself, Henry Schuyler, time and time again, that however vacuous and pretentious and presumptuous the American club-woman may be, at least she’s the bearer of a culture-banner that, except for her, would molder under moth-balls in the cupboard, along with the tired business-man’s Knights of Columbus uniform and Masonic apron.”

“Oh, there’s something to be said for the uniting of fair hands across the tea, hot-biscuit, and chicken-salad tables of the country, in the name of learning the difference between Owen and George Meredith.”

“I notice that two of your own sisters are active and helpful members of the very Saturday Morning Club in question.”

“Now, Henriette, the hatpin-jab is a method not worthy of you.”

“Well, then, Henry, do stop your fooling.”

“Give ’em light wine and beer, Miss Simpson. The greatest good to the greatest number.”

“Good for you, Dave. That’s precisely what I intend to do. Don’t you think so, Henry? Davey’s just said it right. You know, Henry, much as I’ve always regretted never having had Dave as one of my boys, I don’t know but what he could pass his High exams. I’d have to work with him on his mathematics, he’s never seemed right strong to me on square root, but——”

“You see, it’s thisaway. It is just as well to take everything away from them in the beginning. Then, when you give half of it back, like light wines and beer, they’ll be so glad to get it, they’ll forget the other half that’s been taken away.”

“Excellent points to make in my paper, but, Davey Schuyler, you’re reciting something you’ve heard!”

“I’m not. Henry, didn’t I work it out for you that night you said the Volstead Act was—was—aw, I don’t remember how you said it, but I remember what it meant and that’s what I said back.”

“I said, that if you judge a civilization by its laws, the Volstead Act will send us down to posterity as a nation of galley slaves, delinquents, and nincompoops.”

“Well, and I said that the Volstead Act wasn’t as dumb as it looked, because if you give ’em back the light wines and beer after you’ve taken everything away from——”

“No, he’s not reciting, Henriette. Leave it to him to reach just that safe-and-sane, greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number kind of conclusion. The boy is uncanny in his ability to jump to the one safe-and-sane spot on the trestle, if he hears a train coming.”

“If I was running this country,” began Dave, digging his eye-glasses out of the trench across the bridge of his nose, “I——”

“Think you’d better not tackle that second piece of strawberry short-cake after all, Dave. It looks right vicious after the cherry pie and ice-cream. Well, folks what say to the baseball-game?”

“Splendid, Henry! Tom Connors, one of my boys takes his place on the bench as substitute pitcher this afternoon. You know Jim Connors’ boy, Henry, from Third District?”

“Good! Come along, Dave! We’ll have to miss the last inning as it is, if we’re to catch the milk-truck home.”

A kind of purplish red, like the fruit-juice that dyed his short, square teeth, swept David’s face, giving his belladonna-enlarged eyes the look of being slowly choked out of his head.

“The sun on the bleachers—and all—these spectacles kinda—glare——”

“Nonsense! We’ve a lady along. We’re going grand stand.”

“My eyes—I—I—better not——”

“Look here, when you refuse a baseball-game, there’s something wrong! Aren’t you feeling tip-top?”

“Sure I am!”

“Well, then, if you don’t want to come along, why not come out and say so?”

“Just thought I’d loaf around town as long as I’m here——”

“Leave the boy be, Henry. He’s worked out his own way to spend his holiday.”

“Just thought—Saturday—loaf around—specs feel kinda new—squint—thought I’d just——”

“Sure,” said Henry, suddenly diving into his pocket for a coin purse and opening it by its little metal catch, “I understand. Saturday afternoon. Just loaf around. I see.”

There was something about Henry when he said, “I see,” through lips that clicked almost like the little coin purse, that sent the red in David’s face racing deeper and deeper.

“Just kinda thought——”

“Certainly!”

“Thanks, Henry, for the fifty cents. Just kinda thought—loaf around. These here specs. Give a look, will you, Henry? Now I’ve got them on. Now I’ve got them off. Quick! Which way looks best? Off or on?”

“Don’t know as one way doesn’t look just about as—er—a—well as another. I—er—mean—strikes me since you’ve got to wear them, strikes me they look more comfortable on.”

“But for this afternoon. If you were me—on or off, Henry? Look again. Now look. On. Off. That there cotton wound along the nose-piece. Gosh, that’s a fright, isn’t it?”

“What say you, Henriette? If you ask me, I’ll say he looks pretty intellectual.”

“Sensible. Sensible, I’d say.”

“You don’t think, Henry—just for this afternoon—look better without ’em? Guess that there red ditch across my nose shows up pretty strong without them. Huh? Yes? Look, when I turn thisaway.”

“I think the specs win, don’t you, Henriette?” said Henry with unwavering gravity, and covering her shoulders with the string of fur tippet.

“Sensible, I’d say.”

“Well, then, folks—so long. Guess I’ll er—stroll around town for a bit. I’ll catch the milk-truck out too, Hen. Or walk. ’By, Miss Simpson! S’long, Hen! Guess er—I’ll just stroll along—and all.”

With a gravity that continued to maintain itself until he was out of sight and hearing, they watched him, long, lean, and gangling, slip into the tide of High Street.

FOOTNOTES:

[45] “Leader of Leaders” clung to my brother from the occasion of his single-handed crashing through the Reedy Filibuster, which threatened to destroy the Schuyler Alien Bill.

Personally, I have never felt the phrase a felicitous one. While it is indubitably true that David from the start was a man to win the confidence and respect of the mighty minority, as a Man’s man, I know of no public figure, yes, including Theodore Roosevelt, who inspired a more deeply-rooted love in the masses than my brother.

_Chapter Twenty-nine_

Once off the hard, white-paved clamor of High Street the shady somnolence of residential Centralia set in.

At the corner of Sycamore Street, on the steps of the square white mausoleum of a “gift library,” a band of Boy Scouts was assembling for a hike. David knew some of them, slightly. His eyes flashed away from them in embarrassment. With a sense of ostracism. They were, for the most part, the boys with whom he would have grown up, had the family continued to live in the House on Sycamore Street. He was as conscious of them as they were unconscious of him.

Clabby’s confectionery-wagon was at the curb of the old Whittier-Neal mansion delivering a quart of peach-and-pistachio ice-cream for Mrs. Whittier-Neal’s bridge-party.

Donald Neal was one of the fellows who took girls to five-o’clock Saturday-afternoon tea at the St. Charles.

Donald had taken Dora on two occasions. David knew.

That made the Neal house seem part of the sense of ostracism. Four girls, all with intertwined arms, and in the bright sweater-coats and small knitted caps of the fashion, formed a solid phalanx down the shady street. The center one was Odette Juss, the eldest daughter of Max Juss, who boarded at Emma’s.

They were coming. They were coming toward him. With a mounting agony, David watched them approach, his tongue doubling in his mouth, and his hand clenched for the doff. Some fellows could do that naturally. Doff a hat. With Dave, it was like doffing his heart. Some fellows had a way about them in matters like that![46]

At the very moment of his elaborate détour to let them pass, Odette, who was sixteen, let out a spurt of a giggly into which the other four exploded through tightly-pursed lips.

It was horrible. It was so undeniably combustive, the outburst of restraint. They had burst out laughing. They were laughing at him. His glasses must be awry. They _were_ awry. He could see a wisp of that horrible winding of cotton, as he gazed down the bridge of his nose.

Horrible! Horrible!

The impulse to turn around and look after them swept; overwhelmed him. Perhaps they were not laughing at him. At the craning backward of his neck, there were the four girls craning too! And then came another outburst of laughter that splattered the silence, like buckshot.

It was too horrible. A hot wave of nausea swept him. To have looked back! To have been the butt of their gibes! What was it? Why should the girls splatter into laughter at sight of him? The shortness of coat! Well, what of it? A new one would have had to come from Henry, in whose pockets the clink of the coins was so pitifully light. What else could it be? The yawn of the pair of Henry’s gray-cotton socks between his trousers and heavy-looking shoes? Wrists? There _was_ something not quite right about them. They seemed suddenly like great, misplaced ankles, dangling.

Why had they laughed? These girls, who were only slightly younger than Dora. Dora, toward whom he was now directing faltering steps. Cold sweat sprang out through the fever of his body. The dry-rusk sensation of mouth screwed tighter still. It was the most devastating thing that could have happened, knocking his painfully mustered self-confidence out from under him like a pole from a tent.

Why had they laughed? Odette Juss was a shy girl, who stuttered painfully, as he remembered seeing her about his sister’s boarding-house. What was there in him to arouse this bold mob-hilarity? There had been moments, too, at lunch, when it seemed to him that the dry lips of Miss Simpson had been compressed against laughter. The same quality of suppressed merriment that had burst involuntarily from the lips of these girls.

Was it the spectacles? In the shadow of the Neal garage, he removed them, examining the frames, and feeling at the inflamed rut across his nose. The street swayed a little, and his belladonnaed eyes were quick to tear. Hooking them back on felt steadying and cool.

Why had they laughed?

What if Dora should laugh! Henry should have warned him if he looked ridiculous. Yet the spectacles hid the ridge. Better the spectacles than the inflamed rut across the bridge of his nose, especially now that it had cracked open. It was the cotton must have created the outburst. Spectacles might even seem interesting without the blamed cotton. The oculist had warned him, though, that the frame against the open sore might infect. And yet, to be made ridiculous by cotton! Standing there in the shade of the Neal garage, he unwound it and fitted the bare frame back across his nose. The metal bit in with a sting. It was a counteracting pain for which he was almost grateful. It made the ordeal ahead, that of calling on Dora, secondary for the moment. Tears of irritation blistered his eyes and kept him popping at them up under the spectacles.

What if Dora should still laugh. She was so pretty. The sides of her nose, rosy little flanges, had a way of quivering slightly before she laughed, like a small white rabbit’s over a carrot. If Dora were inclined to laugh, those pink little flanges would become signals. If Dora should laugh. Lord, don’t let Dora laugh! Amen, Lord, don’t let her!

The street stretched on to its leafy conclusion. A whirling hose spun fragrance from the clematis vines that clambered over the side of the Neal garage.

Down at the very end of Sycamore Street, the old Schuyler homestead, with a painter’s scaffolding swung across its face, suggested the one-time short cut to the Tarkingtons’, through South Meadow.

But all that was changed now. The present owners had sold off South Meadow in parcels of building-lots. Rows of bright, peach-colored semi-bungalows, with blue trim and false shutters, lined the new, treeless streets with the blurring rapidity of a deck of cards zipped through the fingers. They made you blink. The sameness. The hotness. The umbrella-shaped clothes-line racks in each back yard. Bright corrugated-tin garage, after bright corrugated-tin garage. Miles of granitoid gutters. Blue front doors. Even geometry of criss-cross streets, the new gravel uncrunched. Made streets intervened now, between the old Schuyler place and the Tarkingtons’. And of all things, a square, new cereal-factory, set in a swirl of railroad-tracks, annihilated completely the site of the precious old spring-house and hoarding-place of books.

There were blocks of hard, white, treeless asphalt now; and the creek where it used to flow dark and rich and plum-color, was under the streets now, filled in.

This district, just inside the city limits, was gravely known as Venice.

The encroachment of this “development” of the prosperous factory- and foundry-workers of the peach-colored semi-bungalows, one-Ford-car garages, and umbrella-shaped clothes-driers, up to the very edge of the still-bucolic Tarkington place, was another source of Len Tarkington’s resentment toward the Old Gentleman.

Fully acquainted as he was with the details of the enforced evacuation of the House on Sycamore Street,[47] there none the less smoldered within Len, each time a new smokestack splintered the serenity of Tarkington skyscape, or a row of workingmen’s paradises went up along the slick asphalt strips of ready-made street, the feeling that except for the Old Gentleman’s weakness of the flesh, the Tarkington Place would still be flanked by the beautiful serenity of South Meadow.

The farm itself, however, did succeed in keeping out a sense of invasion. The same rich undulation of hedge that had once divided it from South Meadow, now protected it by a full two feet of additional height from the geometric outlay of Venice.

Approaching it from down the long length of a mercilessly bright and surveyed street named Mark Place, it almost seemed to David that the old aperture through which he and Dora had bellied many an entrance and an exit, was still there. But actually the little body-worn tunnel, dear, warm, funny little tunnel, was filled in now by tight growth. That small, gone paradise of yesterdays.

It was a good three-quarters of a mile down to where the double rows of elms formed entrance and shrouded the old house in an enormous kind of shade that made it possible for Mammy, turned eighty by now, to still keep her newly-churned butter cool in a crock under grape leaves on a back porch.

Tarkington loved this old place with one of his only two fierce passions. The other was his daughter.

His acres flowed redundantly, because even with the indolence with which the Old Gentleman never failed to indict him, they reflected a certain absorption, on the part of their owner, in the grandeur of soil. The rotation of his crops was a rotation that implied thought. Trees on the Tarkington place were carefully forested, and their wounds filled in with cement. The sole bookshelf Len’s bedroom boasted was crowded with weather-colored volumes on the habits, the chemistry, the workability of the local soils that flowed in his state. In one corner of the dining-room, a fine old ceiling-high wardrobe was stacked with farm journals that no amount of house-cleaning seemed able to reduce in number.

They were good acres. The taste of them was to be part of the warm-pollen sweetishness that was to lie on David’s tongue throughout the crowded years.

At the foot of the road of elms, Nemo was screwing weeds out of the path. For five years, come rain, come shine, come winter, come spring, these two, Nemo and Dave, had curried, churned, calcimined, lugged, plowed, milked, through the dawns.[48]

There was a curious taciturn friendship between the old white-kinked black, and the boy, but at the sight of Nemo now, out in the light of a broad, soft day that made him seem unaccustomed, it was as if something inner, like David’s tonsils or his heart, had plunged suddenly down into hollow legs. The body seemed only a shell to contain breathlessness. Here was old Nemo, who had been in the actual, the corporeal presence of Dora that very day! Doubtless that very hour. It gave Nemo a luminosity that hovered over his kinks.

Well, here he was at the Tarkingtons’! By opening his stiff lips and emitting three words, he could find out from Nemo if Dora were home. As if, with his expert knowledge of her habits, he did not already know. On Saturdays, except for the occasion of a matinee or the once-a-month dancing-tea at the St. Charles, she did not go to town at all. The Opera House was dark that week. It was not dancing-tea Saturday.

What if—if Kenneth Chipman were to be there, with his long legs, in white flannel, drooping over the edge of the porch-hammock. On Saturdays, David’s furtive aching observation had taught him, Kenneth pretty regularly remained in the office, while his father, under peremptory doctor’s orders, went to the Middleton Country Club for golf. Except two or three times, along toward mid-afternoon, Kenneth had closed office and sped in his roadster out to Dora. Dave knew that! With his strained, sick heart Dave knew pretty nearly every external there was to know about these two.

Yet all odds considered, Dora was terrifyingly certain to be at home. And alone. Abysmal emptiness continued to clutch at him and cause the day to sway.

“What you doin’ roun’ this time o’ day, boy?” asked Nemo, scarcely glancing up from his weeding.

“Nothin’ much,” said David, breaking into a run and afraid to ask the question that might, by its reply, dash the fervent prayer within him that Dora be not home.

That was absurd, and once out of sight of the old black huddle of Nemo, he stepped off the cinder path, behind the hole of an elm, and shook himself. Shook himself literally and with a characteristic clamping of his square teeth. Struck an attitude. A sort of declamatory attitude, with his right arm plunging, as if he were striking down something.[49]

He was. The rising sense of his nervous frenzy. That rusk of a tongue cleaving so to the roof of his mouth. The body a vacuum for breathlessness. He was striking down, all right. Terror! After all, through every hour of the last twelve, the procedure had been so intimately, so privately, so fervently rehearsed. Nothing for a fellow to feel skittish about.

All there was to it. Calling on a girl. Look here, Dora! Look here, Dora! Gee! All there was to it. All you had to do—why—easy’s anything——Look here, Dora! Looka here—Dora——

Goose-fleshing ecstasy, that would send the old eyelids behind their new glass fronts batting. Heart banging out against torso. All there was to it. Looka here, Dora! You know! I know! All is not gold that glutters! Glutters! That would be a fine thing if his tongue slipped up on him like that! All is not gold that—all is not gold that _glitters_.

Then the figure, standing dallying behind the elm tree and mysteriously plunging out every so often with his right arm, jerked himself together and in a dash was up the cinder-road to where the swell of millwork and wooden rococo verandah came into view. And there, blotting out the horizon, blotting out the universe, on the patch of front lawn before the house, was Dora, crouched on her knees beside the open hydrant, an iron arrangement about two feet high, with a tin drinking-cup dangling from a chain, and engaged in the precarious business of holding a fox-terrier under the faucet with one hand and lathering him with a highly evasive cake of soap with the other.

How beautiful she was as she crashed upon his vision. The sun was all caught in her hair, and stood off in a little halo, like a soft-pencil mark when you smudge it with your finger. To David, swallowing his heart, there was something shameful and furtive, standing there with his eyes positively seared to the back of her neck. Her curls, with the single skewer of hairpins through them, were on top of her head, obviously impaled there with one soapy hand, when they interfered with the business of lathering her dog.

Her neck was like a beautiful river full of sinuosities. River full of sinuosities. Not bad. Or had it swung itself into his memory from a line on a page in Henry’s _Oxford Book of Verse_? Her neck—her neck was like the glide of one of those snakes, in his zoölogy, (the _Pythono morpha_, found in Europe, North America and South America), with the lovely power to move forward in paddling grace.

Her neck—her neck was like a shower of star-shaped clematis that covered the verandah.

Her neck was like—was like one of the unused white-silk handkerchiefs in Henry’s drawer, that were not borrowable.

There was something shameful, standing there appraising that loveliness of neck, and yet it was like—what new and as yet unplumbed beautifulness _was_ it like? There were, of course, other beautifulnesses that clutched you by the throat like this. That time Stevey had swung past with his company. Lying on your back, in the sheep-pasture, watching Capella tremble in the heavens. Something about his mother’s face, when he opened his eyes suddenly and caught her regarding him above his bed. Yet not one of them brought quite this identical hotness into his throat and across his eyes.

Was it shameful to stand there tingling with this beautifulness of Dora as she soaped her dog? The sickening talk of farm-boys, which clung to his ear-drums now and then, made gazing upon the beauty of Dora seem something of desecration. The furtive snickerings of hired-hands, seated with their backs against the barn and nibbling at blades of grass and spitting tobacco in long streaks. It made of Dora something to enshrine for his own private, sacred adoration. Even the thought of Kenneth, to whom the sickening talk of farm-boys would have been equally obnoxious, gazing upon the beauty of that pale curve of neck, smote him like a blow, and choked an exclamation from him.

Simultaneously, Dora and her dog became aware of David. With a leap that sent him slick and quick as a watermelon-seed from Dora’s soaped and sopping clutch, “Prince Charley,” crony of Dave’s through many a star-specked dawn, met him with such a leap and a bound, that before he could dart back, the side of his face, from contact, was lathered with a burning brand of much-advertised flea-soap.

“Prince Charley!” screeched Dora, and darted after him with a great flapping old towel, as stunned David stood under the bombardment of suds exploding along his face. “Hold him, Dave! He’ll get himself all muddy if you let go. Hold him, Dave! For goodness’ sakes, Dave, if you love me, don’t let go! Prince Charley!”

Slippery, oozy holy-terror! Four soapy paws frantic for clutch. Licking. Leaping. Yelping. Splattering. His eye-glasses became flecked. And his mouth painted with suds, in a mustache that tasted and stung. A great slab of lather began to sing somewhere under his collar, so that his chin sank into soft, popping ooze.

It was horrible, and it was glorious. “Davey, if you love me, don’t let go!” Spat-splutter-plop. Davey, if you love me.

Spat-splutter-plop.

She had handed him the key of the world, and his eyes were full of soap. If only the blamed little old pup—weren’t so blamed old slippery——Down, you! Splup—Splu—p-p-p-p-.

The stinging taste of the soap. The splutterings of sud-flecked lips. Horrible!

“I’m so sorry, Dave! Just hold him—plee-ze Davey, while I lasso him with the towel. E—e-e-e. Don’t let go! Prince—Cha-a-arley.”

It was no use! The squirting, slipping ooze! Time and time again, clawing, grasping, snatching fingers all but released their hold upon pawing gyrations. Blinded now by the shower of lather up against his eye-glasses, lye-bitten, lye-blinded, and smeared even to a great erect peak of suds on top of his head, he held on bravely, to the screeching tune of “Davey-if-you-love-me!”

“Davey, if you love me!” Wilderness of snapping towel, spats of wet paw against eye-glasses, more taste of lye and ooze of more wet fur.

“Davey, if you love me, don’t let go, Dave. I’ve nearly got him. Bad ittsie Dora’s baby! Bad! Bad! Bad! Mama spank! Bad naughty baby darlin’ doggie!”

Spat! Yap! Guzzle! Ugh!

“Don’t let go!”

Spat! Yap! Guzzle! Ugh! Snork-k—and somewhere in the distance, the purr of an engine, the grinding of brakes, or was it only through the blindness, the roar of encounter.

“Prince Charley! Bad! Stop it! Mama spank! Um-m-m-m great big automobile wun over Prince Charley. That’s a good boy! That’s muvver’s good Charley Prince.”

Climbing out of the darkness, rubbing his spectacles clear of blur, digging suds from his bitten eyes, fumbling for a handkerchief that would not materialize, feeling out toward the direction of the confusion of laughter, of voices, of yapping, and the sound of the water still running from the open spigot, was a performance that took exactly one lifetime to accomplish.

There was Dora, with just enough of a smudge of suds across her curls to make her adorable, triumphant now, with Prince Charley captured and wrapped in the towel under her arm, and standing beside her, convulsed in the kind of laughter that gave them red, boiled faces from trying to restrain it, Kenneth Chipman and a newcomer to town whom Davey faintly knew by the name of Florine Kent.

They had arrived in Kenneth’s roadster, which stood by, chugging.

One glance through his lye-bitten, belladonna-tortured eyes, and Dave knew. They had arrived in the “hub” and the “bub” of the scramble. In time. In time for the ignominy of his encounter through the suds. In time!

And there was Dora, with her free arm helping him to fumble for his wretched handkerchief, that would not seem to be anywhere, and trying, through the boiled look of her own face, not to give in to that impulse to laugh. That look in her eyes! The same look of Miss Simpson when she bit her lips. Of five intertwined girls, down Sycamore Street, and Odette who had seemed suddenly, to explode of repressed hilarity.

Laughing world. There, Dora had exploded, too!

“Here,” said Kenneth, with what evenness of voice he could muster, “take mine, old man!” and tossed him a gray-silk handkerchief with a wide border of purple pin-stripes. He was in white trousers. The universe became a pair of white trousers. Silk handkerchief! Meany Henry, who owned six non-borrowable silk handkerchiefs.

“Thanks!” sputtered David, and tossed back Kenneth’s handkerchief, and with his hand still fumbling for his own torturously evasive one, bolted down the path.

“David!” cried Dora, and darted after. “You mustn’t go! We’re going to have lemonade and cake on the porch, as soon as I change into something dry. Please, Dave, don’t go!”

“Come on back, Dave!”

“Davey Schuyler, if you go, I’ll never speak to you again! We’re going to have lemon——”

“Mush go——”

“All right for you, Davey! If that’s the way you’re going to act, just because——”

“Mush go!” coughed David blindly. Blackly. Bleakly. “Mush!” And rushed off down the cinder walk, the one desire in his head for the relief of aloneness. A quick aloneness, into which he could crawl. For eternity.[50]

FOOTNOTES:

[46] I can recall little in Dave’s boyhood that pointed to what was later to become his capacity for public life. On the contrary, he was a peculiarly diffident lad, never thrusting himself to the fore, unless impelled to do so by the violence of the urge of an idea.

He was stiff, even gawkish with girls. His encounter with Kenneth Chipman, Dora Tarkington, and the dog, told elsewhere in this willy-nilly journal of mine, gives some idea of his adolescent aplomb where the fair sex was concerned.

In a lifetime that was to be crowded with public addresses of the most portentous kind, he has repeatedly told of himself, in the privacy of a family-dinner, and to our reminiscent merriment, that he never approached any rostrum with drier throat or stiffer tongue than he experienced on a certain Saturday afternoon, when he directed his footsteps toward the Tarkington place for his first formal visit to Dora.

[47] AUTHOR’S NOTE.—The House on Sycamore Street has since been taken over by the state, and is open to the public three days a week.

[48] ... when Dora’s Nemo died, the Tarkingtons held funeral for him in their own parlor. David, who was then “spittoon and sawdust boy” for a wholesale-grocery firm in Springfield, sent six carnations.

[49] So far as any of us seem to remember, David as a child did not display propensity for public speaking. I do recall time and time again seeing him, under strain or nervousness, use his famous arm-plunging gesture. I particularly recall once, his running to me, over a really terrible incident that had to do with his dog Teddy and my son. His dramatic pantomime, as he tried to tell me that story, matches up with some of his subsequent performances from the platform. But as a growing boy, it is fair to say that my brother gave no prophecy whatsoever of the oratorical force which was to penetrate his country to the core.

It was with an amazement that bordered upon actual incredulity, that Phil and I sat in the little spectators’ gallery, the first year of his election to state senate and heard him deliver a ringing and inspired plea for a lowly sewerage-bill, that somehow, by his presentation, he made magnificent in its scope.

[50] ... at a dinner given at the State Mansion in honor of a legation about to depart for Russia on a tour of observation, Dora, telling this story to a group of old Middleton and Centralia friends, stopped short in the middle of it, heavy tears over her eyes, and regarded my brother, the then Governor, quite helplessly, unable to proceed.

With his usual alertness to emergency, and his unfailing understanding of her, he picked up the story where she had left off, concluding it in a gale of merriment shared by the entire company.