Chapter Sixteen

The most radical changes seemed to come so imperceptibly, that within the year it was as if there had never been a time when the spacious front verandah of his sister Emma’s, at the far end of Sycamore Street, had not been cluttered with boarders seated on round straw mats. A Max Juss, overseer of the Tallahassee Tobacco Factory, his wife, and two children. Old man Clotillo, a county-clerk. The Misses Breen, Daisy and Sachet, milliners, with a shop in the Renchler Block, and Miss de Lisle, who taught violin and guitar, a sign in Emma’s right parlor-window to that effect.

Even the disintegration of the outward appearance of the house had been too gradual to disturb the perception of youth, to whom years are long. The scarred, nicked places on the verandah-paint, where before the white and green had shone. Starchy lace curtains had become strings. Weeds and dandelions had cropped up between the bricks of the sidewalk, to say nothing of Emma’s once famous reception-hall, the first in Centralia, now always agog-looking with boarders’ letters stuck into its mirror.

In no time at all, it was as if Davey could not remember when his sister’s house was not the rather derelict-looking affair with the front shades all at cross-purposes and the Misses Breen’s handkerchiefs drying against the window-panes.

Claire, who taught kindergarten, and frequently came home with her tired, pretty hands filled with colored-paper mats and putty pigs, used to spruce bravely, after school hours, at the littered rooms, with the dining-table always half-set now, Mr. Juss’s bottle of iron-tonic and Miss Sachet’s box of Kay’s Komplaint Pills huddling around the catsup-bottle. But it was not much help to putter. The Millikens’ was an out-and-out boarding-house now. Emma served five prunes to the dish, and the sign over the bathtub read: “Please scour. Do unto others as you would wish to be done by.”

Poor Emma. It was hard to be a Milliken and a Schuyler. Morton’s mouth was bitter with it, too. The name of his father or of his brother never left his lips. Secretly, he wrote occasionally to his mother. After a while, what was practically inevitable happened. Morton, whose business connections had been solely with his father, lost his position as agent with a local realty company, and then one that Henry procured for him as collector for the Ice and Coal Company. Not through anything more than just mild inability. Gradually, Morton became just a putterer around home. Oiling locks. Mending rugs, fences, china, rain-spouts and pocket-book clasps. A handy-man-about-the-house. The Schuylers quailed over that; and as he lost subsequent position after position, just of mild inability, every time, they became extra nice to him. Emma most of all, who meticulously ended all household disputes and difficulties with boarders by stating that she would talk the matter over with “Mr. Milliken.” As a matter of fact, Mr. Milliken, as time marched on, could more and more frequently be found sitting in a basement room that had been fitted up as office, whittling on the wooden toys that Claire had brought home from the kindergarten, for some mysterious reason known only to himself, whiling away his time by making them leaner.

The change at Bek’s had come perhaps as more of a shock; and yet, in some ways, it had probably the least perceptible change of all.

Bek still strode the farm somewhat terrifically, with her skirts tucked into her boots. The perfection of cattle still stood in rows in her model barns of asphalt gutters, running water, and electric light. The clean-clipped acreage of yellow mustard, alfalfa, and grazing-land, scattered with salt-rock, silos, red roofs, stone hedges, flowed out to the horizon.

Winslow still smoked his pipe on the side porch and sketched his afternoons away down in the lower meadow. Steve strode about the farm now, doing such solitary odd jobs as breaking a colt or drilling for artesian water.

The great difference that was not on the surface was what changed the aspect of Bek’s farm so that about the entire place there was the feeling of something having died.

A dream had died.

Ex-Governor Howey now owned the Bek Renchler place. For the modicum of one hundred dollars a month, Bek remained on the farm as overseer, occupying the house as formerly, except during September and sometimes part of October, when the Warrington Howeys, from Washington, came on for their annual visit.

Then Bek and the family moved into the rooms over the garage. They were four, firm, square, bright rooms, with running water and clean new paper and yellow floors.

The Howeys were extremely nice about this, and urged Bek and her little brood to remain in the left wing of the house.

This Bek refused to do. The Howeys and Schuylers had never been on that sort of social plane. The Howey girls had been away in the East at school while the Schuyler girls were growing up. The Howey boys had been scattered since their days of Military Academy. Then, too, the family had lived in the state capital for eight years. The enormously wealthy old Ex-Governor himself, a widower for twenty years, spent two-thirds of his time in the East or abroad, negotiating all the while, by proxy of agent and telegram, in land and cattle deals back home.

Frequently, during his two terms, the Governor had called Henry to the capital for conference. Bek had stumped the country in behalf of his second campaign. The Ex-Governor, through his agents, had negotiated mortgages and sale of cattle and land with Bek.

The families mingled in this fashion, except, come to think about it, a Howey had never crossed a Schuyler threshold on social visit bent, and vice versa.

It is doubtful if Bek ever thought about it consciously. But the idea of remaining to occupy the left wing of the house, while Warrington and his French wife and three little girls flooded in, was unthinkable. She never batted an eye about the annual performance of that move into the flat over the garage; but from the first time that it took place, when she had sat up all night, placating Leslie, to whom the new sleeping-conditions were terrifying, some of the light went out of Bek’s face. The pages of her diary, into which she wrote with consistency, are blotchy in through here.

All this, the year that Davey was eleven and the World War broke out with a clap over what had seemed to all thereabouts, except Henry, the clear noontide of Peace on Earth.