Chapter Twenty-eight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, David, isn’t this a surprise?”

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

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

“Guess they look kinda funny? Huh?”

“Not at all. Sensible!”

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

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

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

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

“Do they look all right?”

“Sensible.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’ll you have, boy? Quick!”

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

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

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

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

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

“Your rash, Henry!” said Henrietta gravely.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Your brother was speaking figuratively, Dave.”

“Yes’m.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My eyes—I—I—better not——”

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

“Sure I am!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Just kinda thought——”

“Certainly!”

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

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

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

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

“Sensible. Sensible, I’d say.”

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

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

“Sensible, I’d say.”

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

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

FOOTNOTES: