Chapter Fourteen

The Mark Millikens, Senior, lived in a twenty-two-room wooden house, with a tower at one end where Annie Milliken wintered her geraniums and rubber trees; a millwork “gallery” ran clear across the front of the house, with two hardy perennials of rocking-chairs, that in summer wore linen slip-overs and most of the winters a light ruching of snow.

Originally, the Milliken homestead had stood in the center of a square block of ground. Now the Opera House nudged it from one side and a gasoline station from the other. To complete the insolence of this last, an iron negro boy, with a hitching-ring in his fist, stood resting at the Milliken curb that was nearest the gasoline station.

Once, some town-wag, (Aloysius Chipman probably,) had hung a pasteboard tag about his neck, “TAKE A TUMBLE TO YOURSELF, JOE.” But Mark Milliken had unsmilingly broken the cardboard across his knee and crammed it into his pocket, to avoid its cluttering up the lawn.

It was estimated that Mark Milliken had made a quarter of a million, when suddenly the two next-to-the-principal streets of Centralia had elected to run along two sides of his property.

One of Annie Milliken’s great trials as this situation began to manifest itself, was the soot-balls that fell from the chimneys of the three-story brick office-buildings, so that the Milliken wash could no longer flap itself sun-dry on clothes-lines stretched between two fine plane trees. In fact, one of the trees had to make way for the Opera House and the other was jammed up against the gray-brick rear wall of a Woolworth Store.

So a steam-drier had to be installed in the Milliken basement.

“I know the days when her washing wasn’t fit to be seen on the line for her laziness about mending,” said Mathilda Schuyler, whose tongue could be trenchant where Annie was concerned.

A Schuyler had married a Milliken; there was a thirty-two-year-old staunch, if tempestuous friendship between the Old Gentleman and Mark Milliken, Senior. The two men, in fact had been business partners for eighteen years, and even after dissolution were more or less in constant negotiation; children of the two houses had grown up with the closest of interrelated interests, and yet, the thirty-two-year-old antagonism between Mathilda Schuyler and Annie Milliken remained just about intact.

An anniversary, an illness, or even a slight mishap in one or the other family was sufficient to bring about tearful reconciliation, after estrangements of sources too trivial to recall. The marriage of Emma and Morton had tided them over years of suppressed misunderstandings; but, at heart, both of them, women of tough endurance and patient noses-to-the-grindstone of large families; at heart these two old women were anathema to each other.

The drop of a hat could send them flying asunder. They could quarrel over the relative blondness of their children, the respective excellencies of spouses, the clarity of their respective apple jellies, the complexion of daughters, the fidelity of hired-hands, the relative consistency of the soft soap stewing in their respective iron kettles, methods of chicken incubation, the selling-price of butter, the buying-price of unbleached muslin, the this and the that of quilts, poultices, grandchildren, resemblances, giblets, sons, pip, county fairs, cheese-bags, and growing-pains.

Their men tacitly ignored these ructions, their own overshadowing them in proportion, if not in frequency.

High and terrific words had from time to time raged between these two. As a cattle-trader, the Old Gentleman despised the methods of his erstwhile partner. Secretly, Milliken had a contempt for the Old Gentleman’s virtue in the Fulton Market deal, which he regarded as virtue only because it had been applied to him. They were ultimately to disrupt partnership. First as cattle-dealer, later at those real-estate operations that were to alternately make Mark rich-man, poor-man. There was never a time when, at the bottom of his heart, the Old Gentleman did not doubt the Milliken integrity.

And yet, not entirely trusting intuition and the rather insufficient evidence, even when Milliken was in a position to buy and sell him, he was constantly in the Old Gentleman’s debt.

The Old Gentleman had been known to sign notes for Milliken that were up to the hilt of his holdings.

Mathilda cried bitter tears over this. It riled her to see Annie Milliken ride out in her surrey-and-two, and later in a Cadillac sedan, on moneys that she knew were made possible by financial cooperation and maneuverings of the Old Gentleman.

It was a tumultuous feud between these two houses. The women at their small bickerings, the men waging bitter if more infrequent wars of deeper portent.

On the day that the Old Gentleman’s sheep were wandering at more or less loose ends in the pasture that had been so precipitously deserted by David and Teddy, Mark Milliken, with his long, lean, leather face showing a peculiar pallor through its tanbark, was huddled opposite the Old Gentleman in a small room to the rear of the Whittier County Bank, where depositors were allowed privacy for conference and opening of safety-deposit boxes.

They were two stricken old men’s faces. Milliken had a long, lean, Yankee figure and a white goatee that turned up like a Turkish slipper. The Old Gentleman, looking actually atrophied, seemed to wither as he stood. Eye to eye, the two of them. Pretenses down. Lean, primitive fears out. Something vast, and all that vastness stupidly spreading across the Old Gentleman’s face, turning it into a rimless plane surface of widening and widening incredulity.

“If—I thought you meant what you are saying, Mark, by God—by God—I’d ram—your teeth down into your heart.”

The figure of Milliken, with the wattled brown throat throbbing like a peafowl’s above the soft, low collar, crouched back against the wall, after a fashion of a figure hugging for shade on a desert.

“I’d sooner be struck dead than live to see this hour, Schuyler.”

“You mean,” said the Old Gentleman, whose head was lowered like a charging bull’s, and whose breathing came up through his chest as if it were dragging heavy chains with it, “you mean—you can’t—ever!”

“I can’t, Schuyler! God forgive me! I can’t——”

“Can’t!” said the Old Gentleman. “Can’t!” He seemed to gargle the word around his mouth as if it were a dry old marble. “Can’t.”

“I could cut out my tongue rather than have to say it, Schuyler,” said Milliken in his whisper, backing and backing against the wall as if he would force it to yield and swallow him.

Suddenly the Old Gentleman let out a sort of yell of realization that banged into the quiet morning.

“No, no! Tell me I’m crazy! Damn you, tell me I’m crazy!”

“For God’s sake, Schuyler, hold yourself together! Don’t shout—don’t let them—know—yet—out there——”

“I am crazy! I must be! He stands there and tells me I am a ruined man for going on his notes. I’ve gone on his notes for the last thirty years. For bigger amounts than I would trust to my own blood and kin. Every cent between me and ruination lies in his hands,” cried the Old Gentleman, and began to dab, in the rather horrible fashion of the frenzied, against his face and his throat. “I am crazy. I am crazy! I am losing my senses. It can’t be true!”

“Schuyler, for God’s sake, hold yourself together. Don’t shout. Sit down, Schuyler. Don’t take on, Schuyler. It’s enough to give a man a stroke. Sit down, Schuyler. I—I can explain——”

“Explain!” cried the Old Gentleman, clasping and unclasping his hands. “Explain! What else is there to explain? I come to a man, that man my best friend, I come to him weeks ago, the day my notes are due. Not an hour before. I’m not worried. Only under a strain. Like a man will be when it’s the biggest loan he’s ever made and everything is in one basket. Only under a strain. I must have had the feeling in my bones. I see it now. Even this morning, you remember I said to you out at Dittenhoeffer’s farm, ‘Mark, you don’t look so well. Is anything wrong?’”

“I haven’t closed an eye for eight nights, Schuyler.”

“It is true, then? I can’t believe it. By God, I can’t believe it—if you’re fooling with me, I’ll make you regret——”

“Schuyler, you have sons.”

“Yes, I have sons. Clean-livered ones.”

“You’d have done as much for yours.”

“You-mean-to say-that you-placed collateral—my collateral—in the hands of that scalawag of yours in Toronto?”

“You would have done the same for one of yours!”

“Not with my best friend’s money. Not to save a thief!”

“Don’t say that,” cried Milliken as if pleading not to be goaded, while the right was not his to strike back. “Don’t say a thing you’ll regret, Schuyler.”

“Regret? What in God’s name is a man to say? Maybe I didn’t get it right, Mark. Tell me I didn’t?”

“I’m afraid you did, Schuyler.”

“What else—damnation—what else, then, am I to call him? Scalawag, good-for-nothing thief!”

“Schuyler!”

“Ran away from home twelve years ago to get into one scrape after another—and now—a thief—on my money—on everything in God’s world between me and ruination.”

“It’s the old story, Schuyler. But you’ve got sons. Think, if you found yourself in my terrible dilemma.”

“A son of mine who embezzles, God forgive the thought, would have to—I can’t think! I’m going crazy. I can’t seem to think.”

“Like a hundred boys before him, he meant to put it back. He saw great real-estate possibilities in Toronto, just as your Phil——”

“By God, take that back! Don’t mention my Phil in the same breath——”

“I only meant, Schuyler, the same impulse was behind him. He meant to put it back. Frank’s been a good boy, Schuyler. Wild in the early days, but married and settled in Toronto these ten years now and cashier in the town’s largest bank.”

“I see now. I see now. God! Good God! I denied it when Alf Dreffous told me he saw Frank Milliken and you walking along the railroad tracks night before last.—He must have stolen down to see you—sneaked into his home town like a thief in the night—a thief it took my lifetime of labor to save——”

“He’s desperate—Schuyler! Desperate a boy as ever kept himself from shooting his brains out to hell——”

“I see it now—I see it now—God! God! God! What is to become of me? Every cent I can count my own, put back into a Toronto bank to save the hide of a thief.”

“He meant to put it back. He kept drawing out good money to send after bad. A land-investment deal. He says he’s sure to realize on it in time. I’ll be able to meet things in time, Schuyler. But they wouldn’t give him time. They were watching him three months before he knew it. They closed in on him, Schuyler. If I hadn’t let him have it—mine—and your collateral—it would have meant—penitentiary! His mother—your daughter—and my son—me—my family—yours too, Schuyler—much as mine—your daughter bears my name—I had to let him have it to save your flesh as much as my flesh.”

“Why—” said the Old Gentleman feebly, this time like water spluttering onto a hot stove-lid, “why, I’m ruined. I’m a penniless old man with a family—my hard-earned—my life-earned thirty-five-thousand collateral—I’m a penniless old man with a family.”

“So’m I, Schuyler.”

“My woman, who helped me to scratch it together—she’s ruined—my children—who count on me to help them—cheated—my seven-year-old boy cheated out of his rights—growing up into a penniless future. God damn you!” cried the Old Gentleman, and lurched and struck with his knuckles into Milliken’s forehead above the left eye so that a spurt of blood jumped out and ran down warm and thick under the Old Gentleman’s cuff.

The red glue of it in the smear across his arm and his eyes made him rear back squeamish for the instant, and in that instant old man Milliken had fallen to his knees, and hooking himself to the table-leg, lifted his face with the blood on it and said:

“All right, Schuyler, hit!”

“No you don’t!” screamed the Old Gentleman. “You don’t get me thataway.” And as the figure hooked to the table-leg lopped forward a bit, the Old Gentleman’s arm shot out again and again, and they locked, the long, lean, Yankee figure of Milliken and the thick, squat one of his adversary. Locked. Swayed. Tottered. Panted through the noises that chairs made, scraping as they staggered themselves a path through the room.

And suddenly the Old Gentleman felt the flesh of his knuckles break and spout blood from hard steel into which his fist had crashed and there clattered from Milliken’s breast-pocket something shiny, the something the Old Gentleman’s hand had struck.

It was a cumbersome old model of a Colt .32, with a black hartshorn handle and a long pull-trigger of a twenty-year-old make. It made a clatter falling out of Milliken’s pocket. It struck against the table-leg and went off with a loud report and a shower of plaster began snowing down from a new scar on the ceiling.

“Shoot me with it, Schuyler. I hadn’t the nerve to do it myself——” In the confusion of feet running over the tiled floors of the bank, of the opening of doors, bustle, hustle, two old men, on the floor of the small room reserved for depositors, were sobbing arm in arm, the bleeding face of Milliken dragged up into the embrace of the Old Gentleman, whose spade of beard was riding up and down like a latch.

“It’s all right, Mark, it’s all right!”

“Finish me, Schuyler. Shooting’s too good. I’d have done it myself. I hadn’t the nerve.”

“It’s all right, Mark! Everything’s all right—crushed to earth—all righty—but by God—rise again——”