Chapter Fifteen

When Mark Milliken went down, it was a case of the tent-pole toppling pretty nearly everything with it into a muddle.

And there were more Schuylers to pitch into the maelstrom than there were Millikens. There were only Mark and Annie and Morton Milliken. But Morton, who had never known a day’s financial independence of his father, was, after all, married to and therefore half a Schuyler. So there it ended for the Millikens. Except, of course, for Frank in Toronto, who was ultimately, some twelve years later, to build a twenty-room Tudor mansion on a Toronto boulevard, with a wing for his parents, who, shortly after the crash, left Centralia to take up residence with him.

There was, to be sure, an old maiden-aunt Rebba, who had lived with the Millikens for half a century in dual capacity of cook and poor relation, but who died half a year after the crash.

In the shadow of quick, cataclysmic events, there crept into furtive existence a rumor about this old woman. She had really been Mark Milliken’s half-sister. She had moved with them to the county forty years ago, under the guise of distant relation. There were certain stocks and holdings in her name. Rebba, who during her life had no significance, came, upon her death, to have a sinister one, builded on rumor that was never to be either justified or discredited.[23]

With the Schuylers it was a matter of interrelationship of affairs that pulled them all down into a heap, a sprawling, bewildered heap, that for a time could not be jerked to realization because of the dust of collapse.

When the Old Gentleman went down, practically to the last acre of his holding (counting some grazing-land up behind Middleton), every plan of Rebekka’s, land-acquisitive ones, and the paying-off of mortgages on her present holdings that were chiefly dependent upon loans from her father, went up in a puff of appalling smoke. Overnight, as it were, the Model Farm and hopes for its future slipped out of her hands.

With Phil, for a moment that struck terror to the house of Schuyler, it looked perilously as if his only way out of the crimp his father’s catastrophe had put into his affairs, was to let himself slide non-resistingly into a state of bankruptcy.

For weeks he had been tuning up his courage to approach his father for the loan that would forestall that already impending event. And then on the very day that he had steeled himself for what was sure to be a bitter wage of war with the Old Gentleman against speculative land-methods, the crash!

The peregrinations by which that bankruptcy-act was ultimately avoided bear not the telling here.

It was said around town that the Old Gentleman attempted the incredible device of trying to sell his son Phil’s next five years in clerking-service to his old friend, Tom Wexler, who ran the Red Trunk. And on the same principle, his own services to Wexler, capacity and remuneration to be determined by Wexler.

That news of the Old Gentleman thus peddling about five years of his son’s and his own future spread like wildfire.

Henry Schuyler, upon hearing it from young Simon Wexler, who retailed to him the fantastic and embarrassing proposition, was reported to have cried out, shortly and sharply, as if some one had struck him, and then, without a word, to have walked over to the peg for his hat, unhooked it and walked out of his office, leaving young Wexler to his somewhat stupid self.

In any event, it did not come off that way. Smudgy account-books of Henry’s saw the light of day. Bills were rendered to clients for legal services that dated five, six, seven, eleven, even twelve years back. One statement sent to a Solomon Hilp, Esq., Middleton, Whittier County, for legal services tendered in the successful settlement, out of court, of an involved damage-suit, was returned to sender with “party dead four years” scrawled across the envelope. An expert accountant was called in to dredge into the dusty, profitless tomes that had lain moldering along two shelves in Henry’s office for year’s end on year’s end.

The Howey estate alone was rendered an accounting of six thousand dollars for legal services extending over years, and because of its incredible moderation, was paid with alacrity. The Giles Tool Works met a similar presentation of statement with similar alacrity, for similar reasons.

All in all, Henry collected a little less than one-fifth of his claims. And he went about it shamefaced. Not as a man claiming his due.

It netted him out of the twelve years, something less than sixteen thousand dollars. It made a single purchase. It bought Phil out of impending insolvency.

Even Clara, off in St. Louis, had for years been looking warily to her father to make possible that two-story, pressed-brick, seven-room, Georgian house in University Heights that she had begun to desire from the day her children crawled their way out of rompers.

The plans for the house, a fanlight over the front door, hardwood floors throughout, and a bit of formal garden with a bird-bath, were to repose in Clara’s top dresser-drawer until they curled and yellowed there.

The Holly children were also expecting a Shetland pony from their grandfather. A brown, with a cream-colored mane and a basket phaeton with side seats, like some of the youngsters in Vandeventer Place went bobbing about in.

Last, but not least, something that had sprung eternal in the narrow breast behind the spotted foulards of a lean and earnest little lady engaged in teaching the sprouting minds of Centralia that “we, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union ...” died that year the Schuyler fortunes were swept asunder.

Henriette, who had hopefully told herself for years on end that there was no hope, stopped hoping.

To the boy, David, trudging his way in winter to a one-room country school, instead of the two-story brick structure on Second Street, herding the sheep in South Meadow through the long, baking, fructifying summers, only no longer his father’s flocks, but those of a newcomer from Middleton, named Gus Kelsoe, who now occupied the House on Sycamore Street, the change had come sharply at first, but certainly not in the nature of a catastrophe.

Indeed, to the unrooted nature of childhood, there were thrills and the adventure of disorganization in the move from the House on Sycamore Street to the bald-faced frame house where Judd Igrotte used to live.

A bald-faced, packing-case of a structure, with its windows distributed in the pattern of two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, that stood flush to the road in a one-acre patch one mile and a half south of South Meadow.

Pictures came down during the weeks of that move from the House on Sycamore Street, that left great pale squares against the walls. Window-shades, the front ones with painted ovals and lace edges, dropped rotting right off their rollers, when it came to removing them. The mahogany sofa of great floriated curves had sunk so deeply into the parlor-carpet that there were four caster-shaped holes in it; and since the sofa could not even be moved through door or window of the Igrotte house, two of those holes, arrange and rearrange as you would, were to sprawl themselves out, mended two tones too dark, into the center of the small, square front room of the Igrotte manse.

They were a pair of friendly patches. You were forever aware of the presence of the two dark objects to trip over, and the consistency with which you did not trip was something to be perpetually surprised about.

The Igrotte house, as a matter of fact, faintly within David’s memory too, had once stood on the Schuyler property as a sort of auxiliary summer-kitchen. Hams, bacons, peppers, packs of dill, hanks of raffia, drying mushrooms, hung in its upper story; and the downstairs, entirely laid out in benches, was a wilderness of jars, crocks and casks of meat salting, corning, and pickling. Cucumbers in brine. Pigs’ feet stacked into cool jars of vinegar. Brandying peaches. Spiced pears. Stuffed mangoes. Blackberry-cordial. Grape-juice.

Len Tarkington had finally bought the little building from the Old Gentleman, and moved it bodily onto his own property, to be used as a granary.

All that week of the moving of the building, as it had ridden grotesquely and in scarcely perceptible jerks along the open road, causing horses to shy, tiny Davey had ridden in its upper-story window, shouting, grimacing, and wild with the novelty of it.

Then Judd Igrotte, known thereabouts as a squatter down near the Cranberry flats, up and purchased it from Tarkington, and moved it still another two miles down that same road, using it as a dwelling until his daughter Helga had married out of it and into a prosperous Iowa farming-country, and taken old Judd to live with her.

It was to the Igrotte place, then, that the Old Gentleman, disdaining every proffered scheme of combination-living with his children, moved with Mathilda, Henry and Dave.

The rehabilitated old box, with Helga Igrotte’s choice of wall-paper plastered to the wooden partitions, and with neither plumbing, nor gas, nor electricity, had a set-on-to-land look, as if it had been deposited there very gingerly, like some one sitting on the lap of another, without letting his weight relax.

There was a bony look to the land, probably from the way the rocky ledges ran through it, breaking the flesh of earth and showing in mica-streaks. A lean, meandering acre, for which the rental consisted of the yield of its potato-crop.

The day that Mathilda arrived to stay, riding in a rocking-chair to the rear of the van that bore her household chattels, she just sat on in that chair, frozen from misery, long after the last of the objects that surrounded her had been lifted down and carried into the house.

It was hard to begin life in the wooden box. The rocks surrounding it gleamed up so through the earth. To a woman who loved shade and the benign, grand bosom of fruitful farm-land, the scene before her was as lusterless as a lead nickel flung out there under the sun. Not so much as a maple tree or a plane tree or an arbor to relieve the glare.

What a move it was! The yield of that attic in Sycamore Street. It spoiled it a bit to have Mathilda sit most of the days with odds and ends and bits on her knees, crying over them. And the girls too, poking in among chests and trunks and hampers, and then sitting down to let a tear fall onto an ordinary afghan or a bit of unearthed muff, all mangy and moth-eaten, or one of the Old Gentleman’s buffalo-robes from sleighing-days, or a thread-lace baby-cap, stained yellow.

It was strange. The wet kisses that were suddenly mumbled against his neck, or the quick embraces into which they caught him, as he darted in and out of the wealth of those chests brought suddenly to daylight.

Smell of old harness. Rifle with a rusty lock, that hung broken. Pleasantly-chilled pungency of camphor-balls. A brown gavel that had been Henry’s in the days when he was president of the High School Debating Society.

“Ladies and gentleman!” cried David, when he came across it, banging against the window-sill that opened out from under an eave out upon the chicken-yard, “—out there—world, you! Listen! Listen, world!”

“Stop that banging, Davey!” said Emma, who was shaking dried rose-leaves out of the foot of an old white-lace stocking she had worn to Clara’s wedding.

“Let him be,” said Bek from the depths of two huge feather-beds crammed onto the top shelf of a closet. “That’s right, Davey. Make them listen. Gracious, listen to the quiet—even that big, gray rooster stopped crowing—I do declare he’s made all outdoors listen.”

“Bang! Bang! Bang!” went David with his gavel, from the pulpit of his window-sill overlooking the world of summer farm and fowl, and then paused again for the fancied silence, “Bang! Bang! Bang!”[24]

“Davey, stop! That’s my old golf-cape. Oh dear! Remember, Bek, when they were wearing golf-capes and rainy-day skirts? I’ll never forget, Mother, how I prayed for rain the first day it came all the way from Montgomery Ward and then because it really did rain you wouldn’t let me wear it, for fear of spoiling it. Oh dear——” cried Emma; and because tears were too close to the surface, the three women worked in silence, among the yesterdays.

To Dave it was like Henry’s picture of “Washington Crossing the Delaware” to stand in the center of the billowing old horsehair sofa, wrapped in golf-cape, and peer off into a corner that contained the stooped figure of Mathilda dragging gunnysacks of hickory-nuts out from under the old washstand that used to stand in the girls’ room before they married and left the House on Sycamore Street.

There was another cape, a black-plush one, with shaped shoulders and chenille ball-fringe, that Emma cried into. Then came along a boxful of albums, with tin-types of the girls, their panties showing, and Henry and Phil, with their ears very large, standing on either side of a small table, with a toy steam-engine on it. One of Mathilda, when her face was much rounder, holding the infant Bek against a black-brocade basque. There was another of her, when her face was rounder still (“Mother dearest, in this daguerreotype you’re beautiful!”) a small, black-velvet bolero spanning a swell of timid young bosom. Mathilda, in her teens, in the Tyrol.

More and more clothing tumbling out of trunks and bags. Every possible graduated size of trousers. Little-girl frocks. Yellowed. Two more rifles with rusty locks that would not budge. A fine old hand-carved musket filled with shot. A carpetbag crammed with the identical costume of an Austrian peasant-girl that Mathilda wore in the picture. That was the day pretty Claire plaited her taffy-colored hair into a braid over each shoulder and slid into the voluminous skirts of her grandmother’s dress, and Mathilda laced up the black-velvet bodice; and when she stood there with something of Mathilda’s gone prettiness to her, Mathilda began to cry feebly, and then Emma, and finally Bek, who did not cry, but held the two of them in the fine width of her embrace.

Strange days to the boy David, when even through the incomparable thrill of the move, his throat was somehow aching most of the time ... mostly when he looked at his mother. She ran hither and thither so. As if doors had been closed against her and she wanted to go in.

Those were the days of a suddenly-promoted sense of importance and a sturdy sense of standing by. Days home from school to help hammer cases closed, rip off the tops of barrels and boxes for the adventure of seeing them yield their strange content of feather beds in striped tickings. Family albums. Plush panniered dresses. Basques.

Boxes of the Old Gentleman’s papers. Deeds. Bills of sale; bills of lading. Packets of canceled checks. Notes. Stubs. Cattle-pedigrees. Henry’s high-school diploma rolled in a tubular tin case. Clara’s certificate of election to the Girls’ Good Deed Club, dated 1891. A group-photograph of the family, when Bek was in pigtails and Emma was in arms, taken against the side of the House on Sycamore Street. A riding-crop. A small pair of antlers, unmounted. A half-finished piece of embroidery, on linen, of Betsy Ross at making the flag.

There never were such days of loot. The unpacking of the cases of Henry’s law-books and miscellaneous collection, and of sitting beside him in the clouds of dust while he solemnly sorted them over, pausing for full half-hours at a time to pore. Once he read aloud, sitting there in shirt-sleeves, hunched under an attic-eave, part of The Letter to the Sheriff of Bristol. It was blunt reading, the words like hammers from a sledge. Some more of Burke’s books Davey had spelled out on a shelf in Henry’s office, a labeled History of Political Philosophy. Sometimes, in his room, evenings, Henry had talked to David of Burke. Thinking out loud, Henry called it. When Henry told you about Edmund Burke, or read parts of the conciliation speech, his eyes, under their deep eaves of brow, brightened. “Here was a man [Burke] pass-ion-ately and un-theatri-cally for freedom and justice.” That was a heavy phrase Davey had memorized from Henry. When Henry read Burke, as he unpacked him in the attic, there was something fine and rolling in his voice, that even, when David did not understand the lugubrious text, held him fascinated.

Henry must be like God. Henry knew everything. It would never do to say that out. Henry would begin to laugh. Silently. In the way that rumbled through him. And laugh. And laugh.

There were hundreds of these books of Henry’s to be pounded free of dust and stacked, tied with twine, into sixes, and then carted down to Henry’s office in Bek’s car. There was not room enough for them in the Igrotte house.

When Henry explained this to David, he kept his eyes averted as if he were guilty of something. There was not to be room in the Igrotte house for books to live under the same roof with them. Why, in books there lurked some of the great thrills that had come into seven short years of a life. It made Davey feel the elusive sort of tightness at his throat. For himself, but mostly for Henry, who handled books as if they were live things.

The Old Gentleman was the stoic of this move. He stalked among the upheaval of things, some of which had lain quiescent under thirty-five years of dust. There was the ax, rust crusted, with which he had hewn the first timber for the roof over his head. The roof that was no longer his. There was a large carpetbag into which his sole earthly possessions had been crammed the day he first set young eyes on Centralia. An old lantern he had swung through the dawn-darkness of the terrific winter of ’88, when his cattle sickened and froze in his barns, and his credit gave out about the same time as his winter-supply of feed. Bitter days that had crawled in wrinkles across the Old Gentleman’s face, to remain there. And now that the chimera of those old, lean days was lifting its head again, the Old Gentleman was unbroken, or so nearly simulated it, that there was something a little terrifying about his stride. The women dried their eyes and made wide détours at his approach. He barked with his manner, and the members of his family, eager not to seem to notice his over-emphasis, barked back. He was full of bluster, those days, moving men scurrying up and downstairs to his order. Bek’s light two-seated Ford, laden with such intimate chattels as chip baskets filled with dishes, boilers, crammed with percolator, awl, clothes-wringer, soup-tureen, hose-nozzle, vinegar-cruet, lamp-base and coffee-mill, rattled under the Old Gentleman’s orders, back and forth along the rutted three miles from the House on Sycamore Street to the Igrotte place in Pessimines Lane.

The Old Gentleman clung to his huge baize-top desk that had to be forced in through a window and placed under the stairway in the first-floor hall where the sole light and ventilation came from the transom above the front door. It was more of a closet than a room, scarcely larger than one of those under-stairs affairs for goloshes and wraps. In vain Mathilda expostulated, and Henry proffered the room over the rear porch that was to be his.

No siree! There, under the front-hall stairs, the Old Gentleman caused to be installed this baize-top desk of his that had stood for thirty-odd years in the window-embrasure of one of the towers of the House on Sycamore Street, adapting himself at once, by the vehement gesture of hanging above it a colored lithograph of the 1901 Cattle Fair at Sandusky. And if it must be admitted, providing his usual cuspidor of a cigar-box filled with sand, and hammering-in his pipe-rack of nails, which he drove into the wall himself at carefully-calculated distances to correspond to the respective sizes of the bowls of his meerschaum family.

It was a dingy hole of an office, that was to immediately become foul with smoke that permeated the entire lower floor. To the Old Gentleman, who for the years he could have afforded better, had swayed through town in the mangy phaeton and the chewed-looking old reefer with the dangling lining, it might not have been so much of a hardship. Except now, suddenly, and with a pathetic streak of the psychology of the needy, one of the first acts of the Old Gentleman, under the new régime, was to furbish up the phaeton, paint it a livid ochre, jack up old Jennie’s twine-tied harness, and venture forth into town in the brave trapping of a man who could no longer afford to be shabby.

That almost broke Mathilda’s heart. Her needle repeatedly jabbed into her fingers as she sewed up the reefer over which she had vainly expostulated during the well-to-do years, and which he now voluntarily handed over to her for repair.

The Old Gentleman was sprucing up to meet vicissitude. Not one of his adult children but what nursed secret heartache over the pathos of that.

Once, when she came across the refurbished reefer hanging in the hallway, Bek secretly smeared it with some dry dirt out of one of the potted geraniums Mathilda scrupulously kept on either side of the one front step that led to the hallway. Foolishly enough, she admitted to herself, the Old Gentleman’s reefer, mud-streaked, made her ache for him a little less.

And yet, to Davey, fickle with youth, filled with the wild, shy imagings of a mind vigorously and unprecociously beginning its unfoldings, the bald-faced house took on almost immediately, all the aspects of home.[25]

David’s room, where originally the garlic and peppers had hung drying, was little more than a pocket up under the slant of roof, that you reached by ladder. A snug enough little pocket, with a soda-pop bottle on the table beside the cot, and a candle stuck in. The candle in the bottle always ran down over itself in elaborate blisters. It was a flickering light to lie on one’s stomach and read by. It gave the page a crazy, breathing quality.

Down in Henry’s room, with a reproduction of a bronze bust of Benjamin Franklin by Houdon on the bookshelf, and a steel-engraving of a naval engagement between Paul Jones’s Bon Homme Richard and the English man-of-war Serapis against the wall, there was a student-lamp and a gouged-out armchair and a carpet hassock upon which to squat while Henry read aloud. There were long hours spent thus at the feet of his brother. But even longer and rather curiously dreamy ones spent alone in the room with the walls that were scarcely taller than he was. Teddy, who slept at the foot of the cot, usually snored through the flickery gloom. It left the boy alone to the crocheting shadows which, as the book in his hand might suggest, were armies, or navies, warriors, maidens or red-skinned Hiawatha, who was full of wrath when he came into the village.

The printed page loomed with him and stalked, and the soft hiss of the candle was the roar of Marathon over the plain where Miltiades saved Greece.

Henry’s telling the saving of Greece by Miltiades! It was something to listen to, and then, word-for-word, to store away like nuts, and later, up in the privacy of his attic, take out in the flickering shadows into which Teddy snored, and lo, the attic was the plain and the plain was Greece! A blazing Greece, because, in summer, the tiny room up there gathered heat unto itself like a sun-glass. Evenings, with the rolling meadows breathing out as if in an enormous sigh of relief, the room could seem to spin of the heat-waves. But the roll of the heat over the small nude body of David as he lay on his cot was, mysteriously enough, life-giving to him. He loved the thick and plushy quiet. The pulling mysterious sense of growth through the hot, black silence. The sun-soaked, vast outdoors of meadow-land and field, fructifying. Sense of squirm of life.

All of his life he was to carry that immunity to heat.[26] Those summers, drenched in the heat of that attic-room, were baptism of fire all right, his square boy’s body, as he lay there, pouring from every pore.

Yes, it was smaller and meaner in the Igrotte house. Even Davey, while the sense of novelty and adventure were still high, sensed that. It was something else, too. Something sad in the Igrotte house. And yet, within a month, every stubble in the lean little pasture, every lark’s nest, every winding of Pessimines Lane, every hidden spring, every rabbit-patch, was home to him. A home into which his adaptability fitted him with the same perfection that his bare boy’s body slid into the swimming-hole.

Author’s Note: See David Schuyler, the Man, the Statesman, the Geographer. Athenaeum Vol. XXX. Timothy Tyker, M.A., B.S., Ph.D., Fellow Magdalen College.

FOOTNOTES: