Chapter V: Part 5

“It’s not considerate, Phil,” said Emma, and dotted the back of her husband’s hand with little pats from the darning-ball. “Father’s always been only too happy to go Grandfather Milliken’s collateral. Grandfather Milliken would do as much for him.”

“Mort knows his old man stands all to the good with me. I’m just pointing out that Father’s only well-off, when he ought to be rich. Land-poor, when he ought to be pocket full. Nothing personal in what I’m trying to say.”

“You are not so wrong there, son. Land sucks the money up.”

“Look at Bek. Best business man in this county.”

“I’m just one of the Schuyler boys,” said Bek, drily.

“That girl’s working the best farm within a hundred mile radius. Runner-up to the Howey place itself. With capital, she could make the Howey place look like a dime. Capital. That’s what she needs.”

“Capital is right, but I’ll compromise for the moment on those eight Poland-China sows over at Pemberton’s I’m trying to make him take my sixty-day note on.”

“Well, be as funny as you like, pigs is pigs. I know the power of money. I know that if Morton here didn’t have his inheritance from his grandmother tied up, he’d probably be building bridges instead of laying out the sewerage of the back streets of this town.”

“We can’t complain, Phil. Morton’s doing well, and his father is paying off the house for us.”

“Well, just the same, with the right kind of pull, he’d be in on the big plums.”

“A fellow can’t crash through the politics of this town.”

“Exactly, Morton! What this family needs is the kind of political influence that gave the Whittier family the position it holds. You don’t think Ephraim Howey would ever be where he is if Zach Whittier hadn’t happened to be his father-in-law, do you? You don’t think Ryan Whittier cleared a cool million on that Light and Power deal, do you, just because it fell into his lap? Every member of the Whittier family owes where and what he is to Zach Whittier. He went out for political power. He got political power. Long before Howey ever dreamed he could do more than polish the handles of the big front door of the gubernatorial mansion, Zach was throwing this and that municipal and state plum in his son-in-law’s way, so that he couldn’t get past without stumbling over them. That’s how the Whittiers became what they are today in this state. Zach Whittier had talents, and he used them.”

“That’s exactly what I’m doing, Phil,” said Henry, swinging his long, lean lantern of a face toward his brother. “Using my talents, such as they are, to their best advantage. God knows I wish it were in my power to elevate the family fortunes. But it isn’t, Phil. I’m not the stuff of which rich men are made. It doesn’t worry me, either, except when it worries you.”

“I’m not saying it worries me....”

“You are, Phil,” cried Bek. “You’re saying it for all of us. Well, it doesn’t worry me.”

“Nor me.”

“Me neither.”

“It doesn’t worry me neither, son, so much as the waste of the smartness. Your mother and I have no kick coming. I’m better on my feet today than any loafer I employ on the place. We’ve got a good administration in Taft. I see good crops and good times ahead, if not this year, maybe next. We’ve got our health. Our children, God forbid we should ever need it, we have around us in case of need. All we are asking now is honor. Honor is about to come to one of us. We want to honor back the country that took in two immigrants, all those years ago, by giving the best we got.”

“And that’s you!”

“We’ve got a little fellow growing up in this family Henry. It would be fine if he should grow up in a family that has been honored....”

“Davey, go to bed! I knew he’d fall asleep there!”

Bek leaned forward. “Father’s hit the nail on the head there, Henry,” she said softly, with her face carefully averted from the small, sleeping form on the carpet couch. “Supposing he were to grow up into a great successful family like the Whittiers or the Howeys, family that has an Attorney General in it isn’t to be sneezed at.”

“Don’t worry about Dave, Bek. I’ll lay a red chip on him. There’s quite a few little fellows have managed to grow up into a pretty fine manhood, in spite of District Attorney in the family, too. Don’t worry about Dave. Dave’s all right.”

Dave. Dave. Dave. The name kept flickering against his eyes, as he lay half-asleep round and warm, on the sofa, while the carpet-nap ground in against his cheek. He had been dreaming, ever so lightly, in between the little pecking admonitions of his mother and his own mouthings-back. His mouth ached a little from grimaces. The snatches of dreams had a to-be-continued quality to them, like the newspaper comic strips that he devoured from day to day. They were of Minute Men in knee-breeches, and three-cornered hats trimmed with pen-wipers.

Rub-a-dub-dub. There was a line of them, with short, white stiffish plaits of hair, like a sow’s tail when you hold it out of kink, marching down an old street in one of the gray-looking pictures that hung in Henry’s room. The Minute Men at Charlestown. The two foremost rows of them carried drums and short fifes. Poised against the drums were short sticks ready to r-r-r-rattle. Henry knew forty stories about them. “I’ll lay a red chip on him.” Now why did Henry want to lay a red chip on him? Tiddlywinks. There was an old set in the attic over at Dora Tarkington’s.

The Minute Men in their three-cornered hats marching past an old state-house with columns down the front like Renchler’s house—the Minute Men at Lexington ... don’t worry about Dave—Dave—Dave. The name kept flickering like a match before his consciousness. Who? Me? When he forced open his eyes finally, stretching his small body so that it rose in an arch off the sofa, there was the family of grown-ups, down among whose knees he lived, regarding him.

FOOTNOTES:

[13] Possibly Henriette was plain in appearance. To know her was never to think one way or another about how she looked. It was what she looked. And what she looked was all the calm competence in the world. Henriette _was_ calm competence. A woman with a rare gift of knowing how to bide her time. How frequently and with what success, in the turbulent, stirring years that were to fall our lot, she imbued members of our family with some of that secret of hers, I shall not take time to record.... Suffice it to say that what this powder-dry little lady taught us out of her innate culture of mind and spirit, her wisdom-before-the-event, and her incalculable power of patience, no Schuyler can ever repay.

_Chapter Nine_

Warm gush of spring in spurts of living, bubbling mud up between his toes. Its ooze among the dog-violets and anemones flowed and tickled, and there was still hard stubble here and there that bit up into the soles of his feet and made him hop and screw up his face from the sting.

The soles of his feet, the first day of earliest spring that he went barefoot, were pink, tender things from shoes, heel and ball spanned by a thin strip of white arch that would tan soon enough, and toughen.

The sweet, flowing meadows seemed to rock a little of mud. It was like swimming, to run through the soft splash of grasses.

When Davey was only six, there was a five-o’clock chore expected of him three mornings a week. Carrying a pair of pails of sluggish looking cream over to Jessup’s Mattie, who did the churning for the Schuylers, now that Trina’s weight was rendering her more and more incapacitated every year.

Lean, agile, and wiry as a cat, and with an endurance that seemed to lodge somewhere in the steel wires of her nerves, butter simply would not gather under Mathilda’s churning. Something gray and curdled coagulated instead under her eager, thin fingers.

As a girl in Austria, they had used to chant about her, a farm-legend that translates something like this. “Maid whose butter will not churn, do not be downhearted. Unlucky at butter-making, lucky at love-making.”[14]

Sometimes the rod onto which the pails were hooked cut deeply into Davey’s shoulders. Then it was not so easy to swim through the meadows. One plunged, instead, with short, high, stabbing steps, and the cream in the pails swirled and sometimes slopped out.

It was richly sweet milk, that the Old Gentleman had pulled in long even strokes from his Holsteins. Its sweetness was part of the grand, teasing smell of spring.

Usually Mattie, who was all soft bulge of flesh through gray calico, came out of the gray, shanty-colored house in the hollow behind the Cider Mill, and waved to him, with arms that were exactly the shape of the rows of hams that hung in the smoke-house at Bek’s.

“Hurry—Dav-ee!”

Ugh! Whew! Mattie must not know how the ridges, where the pole across his shoulders dug in, were blazing, and that something heavy seemed hung onto his heart, making him so terribly short of breath.

There was always that blessed moment of heaving up the last lap of hill before the easy swoop of the descent into the hollow. Mattie lifting the rod out of the blazing ridges and depositing the pails upon a bench that stood against the rear of the shanty.

Mattie’s cookies had a spice-taste that came out best when you minced them finely between the front teeth. There came a time for David when, minus two front teeth, those cookies bit up sharp as needles into the gums. But when the flavor came flowing over the prick that was a magnificent kind of alleviation.

There was always the smell to these every-other-mornings in the spring, of Mattie’s bacon-cracklings sizzling on her range. Sometimes, after the cookies, there was a good tough piece of rind to chew on the way home. It had about the consistency of leather, but flavor that could be coaxed out every inch of the way, even if he took the long route, down past the hedges that skirted the Tarkington place.

Curious, the pungent tenacity of those days of his first years. Apricot haze that tasted and had a slow thickness of smell, like syrup. Bacon-cracklings. Warm uddery smell of sweet milk. Winding of smoke off burning leaves that writhed like human hands in pain. They were the unforgettable smells. The leathery one of Henry’s office, that was to persist through the years. The Old Gentleman’s short reefers that smelled of fertilizer. Dora Tarkington’s breath when she darted at him from the hedge, if he happened to take the longer road, and stuck out her tongue in a little flame of naughtiness. Dora’s breath was exactly the smell of a calf’s that has been chewing the yellow life out of a buttercup. Flower sweet.

Dora’s breath scented those days of those earliest years. There came a time when Davey never took a return-road except the longer one that led past the hedge that was apt to conceal her crouching little figure.

The Tarkington place had a red roof that showed through the battalion of maple trees and hedgerows that divided it from the Schuyler South Meadow. There was a new silo, too, with a red trim at the top, that remained pretty much in evidence from any two-mile radius.

Mornings, after the milk-lugging, to Dave’s whistle between the “V” of two fingers, Dora Tarkington, who was sure to be playing around the gunnysack-wrapped feet of Old Nemo, a black gardener, would scuttle her plump little body through one particular spot in the hedge. Their opening. Dora’s and Davey’s opening. It wasn’t much of an aperture, just a little dug-out, large enough to belly through.

Sometimes Dora, who started every day in a fresh blue-and-white apron edged in three bands of rick-rack tape, came through the aperture all smudged. That was the signal, even before they raced down the slope together, or started the morning sharply with a “Tag, you’re it!” for them to stand scraping at the mud-clot together; nor was Dora above aiding with saliva.

Dora’s old Mammy, who kept house for the widowed Tarkington, could be stern about mud-smudge on freshly clean aprons. Besides, Dora had a certain fastidiousness all her own. The dive through the hedge was one thing, but the damp, black earth clinging to her made her say “Ugh!”

Davey liked her to say “Ugh!” The pink cave of her mouth came open, all filled with the littlest teeth. One was missing now. In front. The front of Davey’s own mouth was an excavation. Two fingers could pass through the gap.

“Last tag,” though, was what set them into flame as if two matches had been struck.

“Last tag!” and off they were through the lush of meadows. Spring-lit mornings of tearing through dirt that smelled softly as it kicked up after them.

Dora Tarkington was a little terror. She sometimes seemed to go liltingly mad. “Last tag! Ba-a-a, you’re it! Lickety, lickety-split—I’m a kitten having a fit! Meou! Dare you to catch me! Catch me if you can! Davey’s mad, and I’m glad and I know what will please him. A bottle of wine to make him shine, and three little niggers to squeeze him.”

“Don’t say ‘nigger,’ Dora. Nemo’ll hear. Nemo’s got feelings same as you ’n’ me.”[15]

That was the signal for Dora to scuttle all the way back through the hole in the hedge and throw her arms around the white cotton head of Nemo, bent low and slow over his task.

“Nemo’s mine. Nemo’s my old Nemo.” That was pretty nearly true. Shaggy old Newfoundland dog was what Nemo amounted to in the affections of the child Dora. She rode him as if he were one, kicking her small heels into his tranquil flanks. “Giddy-app—you can’t ride my Nemo—giddy-app!”

“Don’t want to. Wouldn’t. Get off. Get off, I say.” Once David jerked her off so that she fell in a soft, little crab-like sprawl into a strawberry patch, her mouth opening to an outraged howl of wounded pride, and old Nemo floundering after David with a threatening gesture.

It hurt David for Dora to ride Nemo as if he were a pony. And his pain and his sympathy, as always, took the form of impelling him to action.

When Dora said “Nigger” in front of Nemo, or rode his delighted back and pummeled his flanks, when Davey did not knock her off or charge head-first and bump Nemo in the stomach so that she bounced off, he tore off homeward on scuttling legs to hack at wood in the shed, with an ax that was almost as tall as he was.[16]

It helped to hack wood after Dora had ridden Nemo as if he were a dumb beast. And Dora, who loved Nemo with a fierce inner ticking of her small heart, took wicked delight in seeming to beat him with her heels, which in reality slowed so by the time they reached Nemo’s flanks, that part of his pretense at neighing was laughter from the tickling sensation.

Dora was a tease, all right. And such fun. “Catch me if you can! Whoop—double-dare me to jump clear across the creek without getting my feet wet?” She could stick out her stomach and blow out her cheeks and make herself into a fright. She could somersault without so much as showing more than the ruffled rim of her panties, clasping her hands about her knees, and then, in a little hoop of herself, over! Over! Over! And climb! Dora, who was plump and full of curves, and with the round bisque face of the doll that sat in a small toy rocker in the Tarkington dining-room, could shinny up a tree on her toes and her finger-ends, turning furiously if you gave her so much as a boost from her rounded little legs. Sometimes Dora spiked all of her honey-colored curls on the top of her head with a meat-skewer, and pulled an old stocking-cap down over her forehead. Then it was precisely like playing with a boy. You knocked her down without feeling the foolish crawl of curls across your hand. You shinnied up a tree after her, prodding her pedaling body unmercifully from the rear. Sometimes, when she wore the stocking cap, you forgot far enough to clench in a wrestling-match, one kicking, panting, struggling little body grinding down the other into the tickling, tender grasses.

Warm, sweet mornings. Davey and Dora seven and six, fleeting through them. Oh, but Dora was nice! There were usually cubes of brown gingerbread in the patch-pocket of her apron. Sometimes still deliciously warm. She let you bite, holding her finger, just so far. Sometimes you bit at the tip of her finger, and she squealed. A warm, delicious squeal that went through you like a corkscrew.

The sheep in lower South Meadow scarcely bounded, as the shouting, running, children darted through the dusky snow-bank of them. The feel of their undismayed, curly flanks gave Davey a warmth at the pit of him. He could swing himself off the ground between two of them by placing a hand on each of their backs. Dora had rather a frightening way of throwing her arms too tightly about the necks of the nibbling creatures, startling them so that they shied back like broncos, in an effort to throw her off.

It was almost the only time she made Davey remember she was a girl. A fellow didn’t hug things thataway. “Aw, quit, Dora! You don’t do that to sheep. They don’t like it. Silly, you don’t do that to sheep.”

It was the sort of thing that women did. Like having one’s face tilted back, by women, for a kiss from a grown-up. The back of Davey’s hand was forever at streaking across his, wiping off Clara’s and Trina’s and Mathilda’s kisses. Bek seldom kissed. She had a way of patting a shoulder, that made one feel a man, every inch. Imagine Henry kissing!

Oh, yes, there was something else Dora did that made him remember fleetingly that she was a girl. Her way with kittens. There were constantly-replenished litters of them in the Tarkington and Schuyler barns. Dora clasped them to her in violent, gleeful hugs that drew small wails of misery.

Why, the way to handle a kitten, unless you were silly, like a girl, was to lift it by the scruff of the neck. Silly of Dora, gritting her teeth and squeezing thataway.

Dora herself was handled pretty much as she did the kitten. Jerked toward. Squeezed. Pinched. Her cheeks were so round and plump. The women were always pinching at them. The pinching, gritting women. Why? And the Old Gentleman used to poke his finger against the round little ball of her stomach and make a skewering noise along the side of his mouth.

Frequently, these mornings of Davey having delivered the milk, Dora turned a continuous string of somersaults down the slope of the lower South Meadow. David after. Usually they wound up in a heap at the salt-rock, staring at each other breathless and disheveled. Then suddenly, and by some hidden secret signal, up simultaneously, quick, staccato. Last tag! And off again.

Sometimes, by the time they reached the Schuyler summer-kitchen, Mathilda, at her baking, had already three pans of fluffy bread, which she painted by dipping a camel’s-hair brush into a teacup of water, making the loaves sleek and varnished-looking as violins. Usually there was a coffee-ring, sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar, and a crescent-shaped bun of the sort the Old Gentleman loved to “dunk” all steaming and smelling on the table. The cinnamon, and the sour, hot smell of dough, cut into the very grooves of the mouth, causing saliva to flow. Break that crescent in two, and its hot breath made little fountains of the pores of your mouth.

From the leavings of the dough, were two cookie-cakes sprawling in a pie-pan. A hunky little girl, with the spread arms of a semaphore, and currents for eyes and a current for a nose, and a mouth done by pricking it with a fork.

Dora, whose little incisors were as white and as sharp and as greedy as a mouse’s, beheaded her girl-cookie with a snip. Sometimes Davey, with little more than surreptitious rubs of his tongue over it, carried his boy around in his pocket all day, bringing him out at bedtime a crumby mass, and then trying to put him together like a picture-puzzle.

Long, sweet, innocent days, when Dora was barely turned six and Davey was seven.

FOOTNOTES:

[14] Curious thing about my Mother. Try as she would, butter would not churn for her. I can see her yet, standing on the flagstones outside the kitchen of our house on Sycamore Street, a plane tree throwing its mackerel shadows across her, and wielding the rod with all her might and main. The result was sure to be a fibroid, stringy mass. In later years, Mother developed a sensitiveness on this subject and sent the milk over in pails, which Davey lugged in on a rod across his shoulders, for Mattie to churn.

[15] In the light of the important rôle my brother was subsequently to play in the destinies of both the American Negro and the American Indian, it is not surprising that, all through his childhood, the boy had a most inordinate sympathy for the black man. In our small town, we had a colored population of about three hundred. Dave was known only to a few of them, and those the ones who occasionally worked about the place. I have seen him listen with a sort of pained quiescence to my Father’s flash-in-the-pan outbursts of temper toward some one on the farm. But let it break against a black man, and for some reason, as if he could not endure further humiliation for the race, off he would rush to some self-inflicted chore, such as water-drawing or wood-chopping. Anything to shut out the sound and scene. Once, it must be recorded, when he was only five, he fairly flew at my father and banged him in the stomach for screaming his rage at a negro farm-hand who had overturned a five-gallon bucket of soft soap.

The two Chinese laundrymen in town used to interest him too. He was forever standing against their plate-glass windows, watching them sprinkle clothes by holding mouthfuls of water and spraying it out.

I think one of the finest passages in H.T. Wayne’s preface to his three-volume work entitled _The Thirty-five Terrific Years After Roosevelt_ is the one Winslow loved, and which I am sure I can write down by heart.

“It was as if the Negro race, once it found its legs, thanks to the divine intervention of a Lincoln, found those legs, figuratively speaking, to be as spavined, as rickety, and as bowed as the children of squalid negroes could be.

“It was left for David Schuyler to lead the American Negro out of the more or less dazed eighty years following his emancipation.

“The Schuyler Housing Bill, as applied to the Southern States alone, stamps its author as one of the great social liberators of his time, to say nothing of the subsequent intellectual awakening of that race under the benign influence of his three administrations. The American Indian owes him territorial, civic, state and property rights that were to clutch him back from a precipice that overlooked the abyss of annihilation.

“‘The Yellow Problem,’ as handled in those three terms, will not bear elucidation here. The fourth and as yet unwritten volume of this group will treat of it exclusively.”

[16] ... except for the unique form of restraint Dave could exercise over his temper, I sometimes think he might have been subject to Father’s kind of outbursts of passion. But David literally worked off his rage. I have seen him run out of a room and chop wood or lug something heavy or go curry a horse when threat of anger began to rise in him.

In later life, he had a habit of abruptly leaving the room during a disagreeable conference. Usually, it was for nothing more than to gain control of a rising anger by pacing an adjoining room or indulging in a momentary and completely irrelevant task of stacking books or rearranging a desk, a power of restraint that was to stand him in good stead.

_Chapter Ten_

For sixteen years Henriette Simpson and Henry Schuyler, as the saying is, had been “going together.”

They had graduated together from the Tallahassee High School, Class of ’91. A framed photograph of that class of nine girls and three boys, with the brick wall of the school-building for background, hung in Henriette’s front hall.

Henriette herself, a long-necked, frail-necked girl, supporting a weight of pompadour which she seemed to balance as if it were a vessel of water, while around her feet swirled train, and against her breast beat a gold watch hanging from a gold fleur-de-lis pin. Held firmly upright against her lap, a framed placard bore in admonitive script the class-motto, “ANIMUS. FIDES. SUCCESSUS.” Eight more sweet-girl graduates flanked her on each side, interlarded with the three generous-wristed male members of the Class of ’91. They were a necky group, Henry’s characteristics of more-than-considerable of neck gangling above tall collar and stand-offish ears, holding for all of them. Henry’s hair, which at that time gave no sign of the premature horseshoe of baldness which was to beset him, was clamped in straight bangs across his brow. An enormously sober young man with a lantern jaw.

Henry and Henriette used to laugh over that picture. Only six out of the class, what with deaths and removals, were still living in Centralia.

May Kinealy, the third girl from the left, with the yellow Della Fox curl oozing from the center of her pompadour, had married Phil Koerber, the son of Centralia’s most prosperous grocer. The Koerbers had grown rich. Koerber’s Corner, where canned goods were piled in bins on the sidewalk and sold at slashed prices, was one of the thriving ones in town. May, who was fat now, and whose Della Fox curl had straightened from an interrogation-point into an exclamation-point at what she had become, had nine children. She still did her own work, however, and her own green-marketing at the farmers’ wagons, which gathered around Court House Square on three mornings a week, cramming purchases into two oilcloth shopping-bags, which bulged from beet, celery and carrot-tops.

Tom Powers, the exceedingly narrow boy, wedged in between Bleema Deifenbach and Ella Tarl, had married Hanna Quick, first girl on the left, and, at thirty, held what was to be a lifetime position as foundry-foreman with the Giles Tool Works, at a salary never to exceed twenty-four hundred a year.

Ella Tarl, the class beauty, with the small heart-shaped face hanging from her pompadour like a bangle, had died in a shameful childbirth, and the shooting and maiming of Judge Sloan’s son Tod by Ella’s brother, who was acquitted, was one of Centralia’s sensations of the decade.

From their first year in High, Henry and Henriette had paired off. That is, when there was occasion for it. Class functions, especially the senior year when Henry was class president and Henriette sergeant-at-arms. In the debating-society when teams were formed. Commencement hay-ride. The senior week-end excursion to the Etruscan Pottery Works and the Art Museum.

In the subsequent years that Henriette had been teaching fifth-grade, and Henry plodding his slow and thoughtful way into his curious sort of muted eminence, that friendship had ripened; indeed, there were those in Centralia who would have said, over-ripened—into one of those cases of courtship that never seem to come to anything.

“’Twan’t nice.”

“Henry hadn’t ought to.”

“Of course, just as abiding a pair of young folks as there is in town, but Henriette ought to have more pride.”

“Well, it might be abiding, so far’s anyone could tell, but why didn’t Henry marry her or leave off keeping company?”

“All those years. ’Twan’t nice!”

“Surprised the Old Gentleman would stand for such doings.”

“Now that Henriette was orphaned, too....”

“A nice pair.”

Centralia had its solutions. A streak of hypothetical and absolutely untraceable insanity that might lurk somewhere in the ostensibly nice, clean stock of Beebe Simpson and his wife, who had moved West from Edelweiss, Maine, years before. Then there was the old wives’ hypothetical legend of some streak of frigidity that might lurk in Henriette. Those high-shouldered, lean-necked girls. No telling! Or was it due to Henry’s just out-and-out failure to live up to his responsibilities of so long a courtship. Could that be? Henry, as fine a son to his family as ever breathed the county air!

For twelve years, at least, public opinion had wagged over this protracted courtship. The idea! High time! Here they were, Henry thirty-eight now, and Henriette possibly a month or two the older. Not that it mattered, where the difference was so little! For at least ten years of Friday nights, long before her parents had died and left her alone in the little, frame, two-family house on Primer Street, sure as fate, Henry had suppered at the Simpsons’. Every Saturday for at least the past eight years of her life, Henriette had lunched with Henry at the Blue Bird Lunch Room on High Street.

For those same eight years, Henriette had partaken of Tuesday suppers, Christmas, Thanksgiving, and birthday dinners at the House on Sycamore Street. The summer that Bek Schuyler stumped the state for Ephraim Howey, Henriette, who usually took summer-courses at State University, had accompanied her instead, distributing campaign literature during meetings.

“High time,” was the popular phraseology about it to everyone except those most immediately concerned. “High time” that they did something about it or quit. If they aren’t married, they ought to be! Oh, not that I mean it in that sense. Only, it isn’t fair to the girl. Henriette’s no spring chicken. Not fair to keep away others, if he hasn’t intentions. Surprised the Old Gentleman would countenance it. High time....

Fact of the matter was, Henry was not insensible to “high time.” At intervals of never less than a twelve-month, he was wont to open up this extremely delicate and periodic discussion with Henriette. Usually at the Blue Bird, where the privacy seemed less concentrated, than in Henriette’s own little front parlor, where two equidistant parental Simpsons, in crayon, looked down and bated one’s breathing.

Almost invariably at the Blue Bird, while Henriette broke up bread crumbs and squeezed them into dark-gray pellets, they discussed it. The Blue Bird was an ordinary room on a level with the sidewalk. There were two plate-glass windows that looked out on High Street, brown jardinières of artificial and fly-specked nasturtiums in each of them posed before lace curtains that were draped to shield the diners from the gaze of the passer-by.

Pasted against each of the plate-glass windows was the day’s menu. Hektographed. Twelve square tables, each large enough to seat four, formed three aisles.

Since the opening of the White Kitchen, one block down, there were those who contended that the old Blue Bird had deteriorated, to say nothing of the inroads by the Business Men’s Noonday Clubs. But all the old group from the Renchler Business Block still lunched there, the Giles brothers of the Tool Works and old Judge Wale, who brought most of his provender in a tin box from home and washed it down with hot coffee.

Henry and Henriette’s accustomed table was under a ceiling fan toward the rear.

Every Saturday, Henriette, who usually came directly from teachers’ meeting, arrived at five minutes to twelve, and did the ordering before Henry arrived.

Mock-turtle soup for herself; the Blue Bird Noonday specialty, _lamb with mint-sauce and mashed potatoes_, and a dessert also very special to the Blue Bird, known as “Berry Swim,” a concoction of noodles with stewed berries (in season) dumped over.

Henry’s lunch never varied, either. Poached eggs (eyes closed, please). Stewed corn. Glass of buttermilk (not too cold, please). Bowl of rice, for dessert, to be covered with cinnamon and cream (don’t forget his cinnamon, please).

They were, at their respective thirty-eights, a neat pair. Henriette in her tweed suit with fur tippet, or, in season, foulard, that she never wore in schoolroom, sprigged over with a small, coral, berry-and-leaf design. Henry in his gray sack suit of herring-bone pattern that he was never known to vary.[17]

If anything, the years had improved the angular Henriette of the Class of ’91 photograph. Her brown hair, graying now, was worn low enough to cover much of the high, narrow brow that the pompadour had flared to reveal. The current fashion of draped clothing concealed a certain spareness of figure. Henriette’s good eyes, golden, kind eyes, were capable of all sorts of humorous twinkles behind their pince-nez. The pince-nez, even though they dug in cruelly to the sides of her nose, far from detracting, gave importance to Henriette’s face. They shone like a pair of brilliant wings.

As is common enough among girls of her narrow-chested kind of youth, it could be said of Henriette that out of a girlhood filled with the agony of her awareness of her lack of so-called physical charms, in her thirties, a saving sense of humor had sprung full-grown to her rescue.

At thirty-four, Henriette, in her under-bodice, before her mirror, could smile and try to powder out the knobs of bones at the front of her neck, where at twenty-four she had stood and watched herself cry secret tears that coursed down her cheeks and splashed onto these bones.

After the first frightened months of pulling each gray hair out as it appeared, there was the solace of realizing that as they thickened and whitened beyond her control, they softened her face and became her.

The children, of her schoolmates, as they appeared from time to time in her classes, had for years been the source of her secret, gnawing pain. May Koerber’s (’91) two tow-heads might have been hers, but for accident of—of—everything. Little Jean Powers, child of Tom Powers (’91). Children to whose generation of mothers and fathers she belonged. By right! By right of—of—well, by the same right as the May Koerbers and the Tom Powers. The right of the secret places of her heart.

There had been years when carking yearnings lodged in Henriette.

Those particular years of the race were over now. And, with them, a letting-down. The fingers of the children to whose generation of parents she belonged no longer stabbed her with secret sense of frustration. There was something dry and brittle and no little efficient about Henriette now. Beside her, the May Koerbers looked and felt a little over-blown.

Henriette hadn’t let herself go. She attended summer sessions at State University, Morning Choral Society at Middleton, and, one summer, had taken a course in domestic science and English literature at Northwestern University. And why not, with no home ties to bind her? It was well known that Henry Schuyler considered her brainy and for years Henriette’s papers at the Saturday Morning Club annual had been outstanding. One had even found its way into print.

Some said they were written for her by Henry Schuyler. Be that as it may....[18]

The week that Henry’s proposed candidacy for District Attorney was being noised about, they met at the Blue Bird, come Saturday, in just the fashion they had been meeting there for the years of Saturdays. Henriette, in brown foulard and a mink tippet with a head that bit into its tail, already at table, and a heavy girl, named Katy, who had served them for all the years, spreading the unvarying meal.

Her orange pekoe tea, strong, the way she liked it, steamed up into Henriette’s face, softening the rather angular manner it had of thrusting itself into the light of a High Street midday.

“Are your eggs done enough, Henry?” For these years and years of Saturday noons, Henriette had asked that question. She was an excellent theoretic cook herself, and conducted a domestic-science class in the High School physics-laboratory every Wednesday evening. It was said of her that while she could direct the baking of a perfect cake, her own were apt to fall, sadly. And that whereas a pupil of Henriette’s could serve you up with an excellent meal, Henriette’s own meals were nothing to brag about.[19]

These solicitous little questionings of Henriette about his eggs, his cinnamon, the desired coolness of his buttermilk, the rightness of his stewed corn, apparently pleased Henry, although he never replied to them, shaking a bit of salt into his palm, mashing his poached eggs down into their toast, and drinking the buttermilk at one sustained tilting of the glass, even while she queried it.

“Here’s that Taine’s _Origin of Contemporary France_ I was telling you about last week, Henriette. Thought you might be interested in reading it.”

“That’s mighty thoughtful of you, Henry.”

“Don’t block-read it, Henriette. There may be some of it makes pretty hard sledding, but if you’ll read it slowly, you’ll be well repaid. I tell you, that fellow had the right idea. Revolution, he points out, didn’t destroy absolutism and set up liberty, anything of the sort. France was already a centralized country before 1789, and grew more so from Louis XIV onward. The Revolution merely gave it new form. Don’t mean to say I agree with more than two-thirds, but I’d like you to read that book, carefully—there’s food for thought in his point of view....”

Years of Henry’s intellectual fodder, carefully predigested by him for her, had strengthened Henriette’s powers of assimilation. She owned, quite frankly, that it was a privilege to be dominated by another mind, if that mind was of incalculably better caliber. Therefore she seldom dipped into a book, since he almost entirely prescribed her reading, without the crutch of Henry’s preconceived opinion to help her toward his conclusions.

“I wrote down and pasted in the back of my attendance book, Henry, something you quoted me from Taine once. ‘Every man and every book can be summed up in three pages and those three pages can be summed up in three lines.’”

“That’s me, I reckon, and all this hubbub about the attorney-generalship. If there’s any special job that I’m cut out for at all, it’s not to be out in the ring, acting out the three pages. I’m the fellow on the side lines, who sums it all up in three lines.”

A kind of light came into Henriette’s long, lean oblong of a face. A pinkness across the bony mold of it.

With no other person in the world, except his sister Bek, would Henry voluntarily have opened up this subject. Henriette knew that. Something clutched at her, a little excitingly.

“You know best, of course, Henry. Of course, it isn’t given to many, Henry, to refuse honors like that—one after another—alderman—assemblyman—mayor—and now this! Why, there’s no telling....”

Henriette’s voice slipped a little, causing her to clutch with an angular hand at her angular throat. It was seldom, indeed if ever, in all the years of their methodical allotment of so many hours a week together, that Henriette ever let slip an emotion. She caught herself up by the slow, measured manner which followed.

“I mean, Henry, you have already refused more honor than comes to most men in a lifetime.”

There was something particularly pathetic about her half-illumined face, as if she dared not let the light come, and it was Henry’s turn, stung by a consciousness of what she withheld, to make his conscientiously periodic observation.

“I’ve refused the greatest honor of all, Henriette.”

“I didn’t mean that, Henry, and you know it,” she said without the artifice of pretending not to understand, and colored a wintry, russet sort of not unbecoming red.

“That is what makes it hard, Henriette. You are above meaning that which makes the situation difficult and no less true.”

The subject was one which always induced a rush of blood against Henriette’s heart. She could scarcely breathe. There were head noises. Secret, raging tragedy of her sparse years beat in blood against her heart. Under it all, she invariably succeeded in speaking in slow, measured tones.

“We understand each other, Henry.”

“I could never forgive myself if I for a moment thought otherwise, Henriette.”

How solid he was. How stolid. Sometimes, as she cried secretly while she lay in bed nights, that stolidity was almost a presence in the room.

“You have nothing to forgive yourself for, Henry.”

“Maybe not, Henriette. You can’t blame a man who knows the fruits on the tree are luscious, and yet, by some devilish inhibition, cannot raise his arm to pluck them. He is the loser.”

“Nonsense. Life is like that. You’ve every reason in the world to be in love with me, except you aren’t! Now!”

There was an air of surprise to Henriette, as if from what she had just heard her lips utter.

“No, Henriette——”

“All right then, except you aren’t _enough_ in love with me. No, Henry, you have nothing to forgive yourself for. Except perhaps making life a pretty wonderful affair for me, with you to throw the light of your mind upon the world I live in. Think of the narrow, groping affair it might be for an old maid in a one-horse town. What would I be without this friendship, Henry?”

There was something of a cry in that question. The cry of a spinster’s dread of her loneliness.

“That is the question which sometimes torments me, Henriette. You have let the years pass by, when except for me, you might have been married by now and settled down to a home and children and the sort of life to which a normal, wholesome woman like yourself is entitled.”

“No, Henry, we have been over that hypothetical ground often enough for you to realize that in all probability things would not have been different.”

“Not even if no such person as me existed?”

“That, of course, is impossible to answer. But the fact remains that I am satisfied, Henry. In a way, quite happy. In any event, completely understanding.”

“I wish I were that—Henriette, about myself. Where you are concerned.”

“It needn’t trouble you, Henry. Ice-cream may be a nourishing and even a delicious food, and yet there are those who do not like it. There is not the slightest reason, merely because we have been friends all these years, for you to feel the responsibility of falling in love with me. Even granting, for the sake of our mutual amusement, that my friendship with you has kept off swarms of suitors, don’t fool yourself, Henry. My destiny in this town would have been just what it is, except without my friendship with you. And without it, I would be just one more old maid headed for the pension-list of our public-school system. I know what contact with a mind like yours has done for me. I’m the best appraiser of my own assets and liabilities.”

“You’re a thousand times too good for me, Henriette. I’m a fool.”

“If that explanation appeases you more successfully than any other, we’ll let it go at that. What’s our programme for the afternoon, Henry?”

“Thought we might drive out by the House on Sycamore Street and pick up Dave. Well, sir, funny thing about that youngster. Never saw the like, the way his mind runs to pretty nearly everything you put up to it. Napoleon, The Three Bears, sheep-breeding, and Gunga Din seem to interest him about alike. Got him all het-up now about his tiger-moth and its color-reaction to temperature.”

“I know it. I overheard him telling the Igrotte children about it last week when I took those Mason jars over to your mother. They didn’t know what he was talking about.”

“Speaking of natural history, other night, sitting smoking up in my room in the dark, along the time, I guess, when any well-meaning citizen should have been abed, thinks I to myself, is that something moving out there along South Meadow? Coyote? Dog? Stray sheep? Man? Turns out to be Dave, sneaking all the way from his sister Bek’s, where he was spending the night, to feed a sick lamb down in the kitchen, which, I figured out, he must have forgotten about. As a matter of fact, I had tended the little thing myself before going upstairs, and Trina had minded him too—but for a mite of a kid trudging all that way, dead o’ night—right queer, now wasn’t it?”

“He was telling me about the ant-hill you’ve made for him, his little old hiccoughy voice just heaving away and trying to explain their habits.”

“I think Dave ought to have a good hound-dog. There’s a fellow called Sweeney out along Pikes Road, breeds them.”

“Yes, I’ve had both the Sweeney youngsters in class. Ragged lot.”

“Thought we’d pick up the boy and take him out there and let him pick a puppy. Nothing like a good hound-dog to teach a fellow the decencies. A dog’s got about all of them—honor, loyalty, courage. Thought we’d take a ride out along Pikes Road to Sweeney’s, if it’s all the same to you?”

Henriette bit her tippet’s mouth into its tail, and rose from the table with a little backward kick of her long, full skirts.

“It will be the same to me, Henry, wherever we go—together.”

FOOTNOTES:

[17] ... there was something enormously stable and implacable about my brother Henry, that dates back in my memory even to his first long trousers when he was in High School. In spite of the dry cackle of his humor, my memory does not take me back to the time when a gray kind of reserve did not seem to powder over his entire personality. How we used to tease him about his suits! Jevey, our tailor up in the Renchler Block, used to buy the gray, herring-bone cloth by the bolt and put it away for Henry’s annual encroachments. Long after Jevey had died and his son, Big Jevey, had rejuvenated the business by catering to the campus-cut of the younger generation, that herring-gray bolt continued to lie on the shelf at my brother’s beck and call. I never remember seeing him in a day-suit of any other cloth, color, or design. These suits, made in Centralia, were delivered to him, whatever his whereabouts, arriving by express in a long, brown box, marked JEVEY, OF HIGH STREET.

[18] ... and the storm of innuendo it brought down on poor Henriette’s head from a local literary circle when she was invited to repeat her paper entitled “Whose Mexico?” before the State Federation! Of course, Henry helped her write it, and Henriette was the first to admit her source. How, I ask to know, could Henriette, with all her nice, bright mind, have been expected to contribute the peculiarly thoughtful and delightfully satirical quality to that paper, which, by the way, was later published in _Reedy’s Mirror_.

[19] ... funny, but something our town was never to understand about Henriette was the disparity between her own rather mediocre cookery and her ability to instruct others in domestic science, after she had taken work along those lines at Northwestern University. I myself used patiently to hold forth the example of Miss Lee, our town’s music-teacher, who could teach our youngsters to play a Chopin Etude to the note, but was never heard to perform herself. It didn’t help, though. In the mind of Centralia, there was something irreconcilable in the paradox of Henriette as a domestic-science teacher and Henriette’s own rather dismal culinary efforts. Henriette’s brown raisin-bread, for instance, was atrocious. So soggy! Her recipe for making it, on the other hand, won my raisin-bread first-mention at every food-show I entered a batch.

_Chapter Eleven_

The hound-pup was named Teddy. David called him that because, when he came loping out of the Sweeney kennel toward them, his lips tilted back in a flash of white teeth.

Teddy! Everything somehow tied up to the image that name made against the brain. Mark Milliken’s old slouch hat on a hall table when he came over for long-closeted interviews with the Old Gentleman. Dora Tarkington’s father’s ruddiness of complexion. The huge pair of eye-glasses in the optician’s window on High Street. The stuffed grouse on the oval plaque in Clara’s dining room. The drum Emma had sent him at Christmas. T-t-t-ted-d-d-d-d-dy! You learned to roll your sticks to that rhythm. T-t-t-ted-d-d-d-d-dy!

And now the little old hound-dog flashing across the Sweeney kennel yard. Showing his teeth. Batting his absurdly heavy paws by jumping up as high as Davey’s chest, his tongue dripping-wet, hanging out of the side of his mouth like a rag. If you were the sort of person who likes the trusting leap of a dog, it made you catch your breath, sort of. It did something more. It hurt a little somehow. Not exactly hurt—exactly, but—but kind of. It made you bat back a little too roughly. “Get away—you! Hey—get away, you!”

From that moment, however, Teddy was Dave’s, from his dripping-wet tongue to the wag of his tail. A funny old tail, shaped like a beckoning finger, and tipped with white. A curious mixture of Chesapeake retriever and spaniel, this fellow. Squat, long, low, short-haired, brown body, with rag ears and a sniffing, burrowing face.

A vociferous pup with an expression that yearned excitedly and an unquenchable eagerness that kept him wagging from the middle of his broad, low back to the tip-end of his tail.

The last of six, and Henry and Henriette were for holding off for the yield of a next litter. Strictly speaking, there were points to be desired in Teddy.

But too late. Dave and Teddy had already clapped eyes on each other.

* * * * *

It was a job, that night, in the face of admonitive orders from his mother to house Teddy in the cellar, to secretly lug him up to his room by way of the summer-kitchen, water-spout, and to bed with him.

Then, at midnight, didn’t Teddy begin to dig with his forepaws into the matting and yap so for the accustomed luxury of his straw bed at Sweeney’s kennel, that, finally, nothing would quiet him but to permit him to sit squat on Dave’s chest and doze off there.

For eleven years, except for scarlatina when David was nine, these two were never to fail to sleep together.[20]

FOOTNOTES:

[20] When Dave’s dog Teddy fell through a trap-door in the upper reaches of the Igrotte barn, where Dave had a secret reading-retreat in the hayloft, and landing on the upright prongs of a hay-fork, had to be chloroformed out of his misery, I think I have never seen so sick and blasted a face as my brother wore for weeks after. Some of that look was to remain. Not in expression so much as in the dawn of that later David to whom all pain was to be something as close to his own capacity for suffering as the nerves in his own body.

My brother Henry had the dog’s body stuffed by a taxidermist in Cleveland, Ohio. I confess that at first I questioned both the taste and the wisdom of this, until I saw the curiously comforting effect it seemed to have on the boy. Strange thing, but after the death of Teddy, I never heard my brother refer to him in any way, nor did he ever accept another pet, although dozens of them were offered and indeed sent to him, from the beginnings of his public life.

The stuffed Teddy, however, has always stood in every one of my brother’s offices, an unused pen-wiper dangling from his neck, as if to ward off the onus of any implication of sentimentality.

_Chapter Twelve_

The summer that Dave was seven was one of a drought; added climax of a late frost, and an absolutely unprecedented scourge of caterpillars had done for several acres of the Old Gentleman’s cabbages.

It was a crop that the old man by unusual arrangement had sold two weeks before the first seed of it was sown, on a several-hundred-dollar advance, to a commission company to whom his word was his bond.

It meant not only the loss of the crop, but the doling back, with interest, of the advance payment. In the end it was Bek who managed two hundred of the three hundred refund, Mark Milliken’s failure to meet a certain large note squeezing the Old Gentleman pretty terribly on cash. Then the forfeiture of the additional six hundred expectancy on that same crop put a crimp, so to speak, in the entire summer, so far as ready cash was concerned. Not that there was any crisis, it simply meant the old land-anomaly of all outgo and no income. Acres of potential values, but for one reason or another, without yield enough to pay their taxes.