Chapter Twenty-four

To David’s generation of boys, the World War was little more than a remote, a magnificent circus, toward which perpetual parades were pouring the older fellows but which never, as a big tent, came within even brass-band distance of town.

All of the circumstances of life were to be altered by that war; and yet, to the generation who were children through the years of its duration, khaki, and gold-star mothers, and Huns, and Big Berthas, and hysteria belonged to the scheme of things, as waterfall belonged to Old Mill Road. Here was a generation born into a phraseology that was new only to the adult. Imperialism of Central Europe. World Safe for Democracy. Over there! Hoch der Kaiser. Russian Revolution. The Poppies Grow in Flanders Field. Conscription. Liberty Bonds. Argonne. Doughboy. Buddy. Transport. Treaty of Versailles. Patriotic cant of this and that propaganda-source, calculated to raise the nap of the flesh of a nation, even while the only palpable results were an impoverished and desolated world.

Many who marched down those languid streets of Centralia as Dave and Teddy ran after, were not to come back; but even that, to children who had seen it consistently happening, did not bring the catastrophic reality of war closer.

If a fellow came home with one leg—well, fellows were always coming home thataway. And still the circus of war remained strangely removed, except one day Pete came home, and a small and suddenly rather sickish-feeling boy, who was lugging a pail of sour clabber from Bek’s place to the Igrotte house, came face to face with him in the open road.

The lower half of Pete’s face had been blown away and replaced with sort of a nickel-plated jaw. And his eyes were still looking as if they had frozen there of what they saw.

“Davey, b’God! Hi, Kid!”

“Hi!”

For the first time war became a horror then, stalking with stiff eyes and rigid jaw through those lanes of peace.

David was sick that night, and feverish. “Upset stummick,” diagnosed Mathilda, and plied him with castor-oil.

Every Schuyler came home. Phil, who saw ambulance service. His eldest son, who drove a truck under bombarded skies for sixteen months. Clara’s boy, who lied about his age to qualify for enlistment and who saw service as far front as Amiens. Paula, who did canteen service in France. Stevey, who fought at Argonne, and whose eyes had seen the horror of the splashing of human entrails across fields.

The war, which had crashed with such terrific interruption into the more or less organized scheme in which David had spent the first few years of his life, came to its portentous conclusion, the world held the brief pose of a chastened, spiritualized humanity that had gone down in blood that it might be cleansed, and then relapsed.

In later years, there seemed to David to be a certain subtle demarkation in human beings. Those born before the Great War and who stood astride the chasm of it, as it were, with one foot in each world, and those born to the curious, old-eyed youth of a post-war world.

It was a fantastic phase of human experience to have lived through, even as a child.

Around Davey’s head, while he was a youngster, Russia cracked her shackles, France bled white, the Near East, the Far East scrambled and squirmed free of chains that carried the rust of centuries. His own country flung a faltering gesture. A man named Mussolini thrust his hand down into the throat of Italy, gagged and then rode her, magnificently. Czars and Kaisers galloped out of the human scene like Sancho Panza on mules. Forensic peasants came into world-power, their followers crawling like armies of worms out of darkness to live in the Kremlin. One fine day in Davey’s boyhood, Great Britain handed portfolio to its first labor-government.

Supper-table discussion between the Old Gentleman and Henry made the light along the lamp-wick buzz and flare in the gale of explosives. Tariff. Woodrow Wilson. Lloyd George. Reparations. Rasputin. Rheims. Stanley Baldwin. D’Annunzio. Irish Free State. Colonel House. Henry Ford. Prohibition. Joe Cannon. League of Nations. Mexico. Trotsky. Jim Reed. Muscle Shoals. Eugene Debs. Borah. Senator Moses. La Follette. Nicholas Murray Butler. Wells’ Outline of History. Fascisti.

Time and time again, off the rather weary sill of Henry’s lips, there dropped sparks that set the dry tinder of the Old Gentleman’s conservatisms leaping and flaming.

This was a curious tenacity to Henry. It bothered him to see the Old Gentleman darken and redden in apoplectic fashion. Sometimes it even terrified him. But for the life of him, he could not remain silent and let one after another of his father’s reactionisms die into the quiet of the evening meals.

“Well, sir, something, ought to be done about this here Red situation. The Boston police-strike, the steelworkers’ strike, the soft-coal miners’ strike and now this here railway-strike in England starting up. Race-riots out in Chicago. Bomb-plot trying to smash up Attorney-General Palmer’s home. Only way for a self-respecting government to handle anarchy is call out the troops. Shoot ’em down. That’s the way to cure these scalawag anarchists. Cowards at heart!”

“Father, every manifestation of social discontent is not necessarily a form of anarchy.”

“Like to know what else you call a lot of lazy fellows up-and-revolting against the finest government in the world.”

“Revolt is the soul of progress.”

“By Gad, not to my way of thinking. If you think a lot of lazy louts of fellows that think they can milk a living out of the Government instead of working for it are the soul of progress, then, by Gad, progress has got a rotten soul that I wouldn’t lift a little finger to help save. You and this here Emma Goldman they’re giving a free boat-ride to are the kind they drive out of this country and keep out! I.W.W. crowd—I-won’t-work-ers!”

“Father!”

“Puppa!”

“Well! I won’t have no anarchy talked in my house, where there’s a boy growing up to listen to it.”

“If it weren’t for that youngster, Father, and my desire for him to learn to look temperately at both sides of this troubled old world, I wouldn’t even argue the matter with a biased person like you.”

“I’ve worked hard all my life, earned an honest living, and I never had time to sit and criticize the government that——”

“Oh, Father, Father—won’t you try to think with your brain instead of with your prejudice? I hold no brief for anarchy, any more than you do. I’m merely trying to differentiate between——”

“You hold brief for shenanigans of I.W.W. fellows, who don’t mean no good by the country.”

“Don’t shout, Father!”

“Puppa!”

“I will shout! Anarchists! Anarchists—that’s what they are—by Gad, if I thought a son of mine was one, I—I——”

“I quit, Father! If you think I’m going to try and argue capital and labor with a man who sees red the moment a more equable living-scheme for humanity is broached, you’re mistaken. You see, Dave, what I was trying to say to your father is not that this strike or that riot is right or wrong. The point, David, I’m trying to make to your father is that without revolt against oppression, ignorance and illiteracy, there can be no human emancipation. Submission, throughout the history of the world, has begotten autocracy.”

“And what have such lazy-lout strikes begotten? I.W.W. anarchists. Anarchy——”

“You win, Father. I quit! God only knows how anyone can be so hidebound.”

“Hennery!”

“Excuse me, Mother.”

“You should have quit long ago, son. You know how excitable your Puppa is.”

“I know what Henry means. If the rich ones wasn’t so rich, and the poor ones wasn’t so poor, then there wouldn’t be so much to fight about, would there?”

“Exactly, Dave. But you can’t make your father be——”

“Can’t make—can’t make—I’ll break every bone in——”

“Puppa—Hennery—please.”

Turbulent evenings. Supper-table disharmonies that were to set into motion atoms in the boy’s brain that might never have stirred otherwise.

Off Henry’s sardonic lips were to glitter phrases of curious and significant prophecy. As if against the retina of his lusterless eye was imprinted the ultimate significance of empire toward which all these catastrophic events were scurrying a bewildered world.

World-unification. Annihilation of distance. Propinquity of races. Tolerance. Fraternity. Lonely phrases in a land that presently was to pursue its policies outside the League of Nations.

Presently, these phrases, dinned by Henry, came to be the only reality of war left against Dave’s brain.

The boys were home and settled now.

Even Pete’s mask was no longer terrible.

Here was Stevey as if he had never marched away to the rolling of drums, living in a semi-attached two-family house out on Tallahassee Street, within walking distance of the Giles Tool Works, where he had a desk job in the shipping department.

Something in the nature of one of those freak tornadoes that can seem to appear in a crazy spiral of fury out of the blue had happened to Steve. The craving for drink had been literally shot from him.

In all the hubbub of the prohibition which a returning army found awaiting it and with the nation lying prone upon its stomach and kicking its heels and squalling over a right that had been wrested from it, the mere sight of a bottle of Scotch on a shelf was enough to stiffen Steve, taut and squeamish with revulsion.

A kind of cure not without its rare precedent in medical annals.

The smell, or for that matter even the sight of spirituous liquor in any form, was to bring back to Steve the odor and smear of a human face in the act of becoming pulp.

One night, crouched down under a hill of wet mud, and guzzling from a flask with two companions in the trench, he had seen the face of his “buddy” literally torn off by shrapnel as he tilted the bottle Stevey had just handed him, to his lips.

The mess and the splatter were to remain irretrievably mixed in Steve’s mind with the taste of alcohol, the mere sight of it to recall the terrible sight of a friend’s face in the act of being blown to pulp.

Here was Steve, almost through no volition of his own, swept into the scheme of the little two-family house on Tallahassee Street, Claire, plumpish by now, awaiting him evenings, a normal youngster at her skirts, in a doorway that had his monogram embroidered in its lace curtain.

The Steve Schuylers at Number 1569½ Tallahassee Street, rent-payers, water-tax payers, seat- and presently pew-holders, had fallen into place. The Schuyler escutcheon had remained unviolated; and the Old Gentleman, as time went on, came more and more to cast prideful eye upon his first great-grandchild, Pauline, as she toddled out to meet him on his less and less frequent visits into Centralia.[39]

Another Schuyler rivet had tightened the impeccable family-machine. Respectability. Conservatism. Republicanism (consistently up to this time!). Law-abiders. Voters. God-fearers. Rotarians. Masons. Policy-holders.

Two years after his return from the World War, Stevey was carrying fifteen-hundred-dollars life-insurance, depositing one dime a day in a toy bank toward his daughter’s Vassar College education, lunching once a week at a Blue Plate Booster’s Club in the Renchler Block, voting the straight Republican ticket for Harding, and spending his Sunday mornings flat on his back under the Ford five-seater in the corrugated portable garage which he shared with the second tenant of the two-family dwelling.

In the shy coming-together of Stevey and Claire after the convulsion of their flying-apart, the bone, true to physiology, seemed to have cemented more firmly than before the break.

Years after, when the name of a Schuyler was up before the state for the highest honor bestowable upon one of its citizens, someone in opposing political ranks did attempt the moss-grown device of trying to probe out an irregularity in the social history of David Schuyler’s nephew Stephen. A far-fetched gesture at best, and one, even had it been successful, that was almost sure to have proved futile.

But to try to penetrate the Schuyler armor of social integrity was like trying to wound the flank of the Himalayas with a bow and arrow.

It was the year that Stevey, with what he considered the hindrance, rather than the advantage of an uncle the governor of his state, and a mother the first woman alderman of the town of Centralia, was elected second vice-president and treasurer of the Giles Tool Works.

Someone’s faint scent of something hurried connected with the marriage was too faint for even the political vandals to fasten upon. To be sure, Steve Schuyler and his wife were first-cousins. Scarcely a fact to unmake governors.

When Bek Schuyler heard of the feeble intrigue, she smiled. A skeleton, and not much of a one at that, and whose bones by now were soft with decay, could scarcely be expected to rattle for the political gentlemen.

So far as Dave was concerned, Claire’s little house on Tallahassee Street was to become the center around which an assorted set of his adolescent emotions were to dash themselves.

When Dora Tarkington was sixteen, and wore her curls in two round, flat mats against her ears, she attended what was then known as the South Tallahassee High School.

It was after a sharp attack of influenza, during one of the frequent epidemics that swept the country those first years after the War, that an arrangement was made for Dora to have her lunches hot at the Steve Schuylers’, instead of the cold snack she was obliged to carry with her the two miles from home.

Nowadays, when Steve returned from the Works for his midday meal, there was Dora, whom they had known since she could toddle, to swell the little family circle that drew up to table.

It pleased Claire to have special little daintinesses in her honor; and since Len Tarkington had bartered in vain for some kind of a financial arrangement to cover these lunches—Stevey withdrawing offended from the argument—every day Dora, who was incomparable at handiwork, arrived with some bit of surprise. A woolen chicken for Claire’s eldest little girl. A sheer pink underthing for Claire herself, or a plover-egg with a hand-painted face for the small boy who could crawl, and a tiny crocheted cap for the baby.[40]

Claire’s little house in Tallahassee Street had to it the agreeable untidiness of high, unevenly-drawn window-shades that admitted sunlight in glaring streams across the rooms, youngsters crawling through them and littering the floors with toys, building-blocks and noise-devices.

She was perpetual motion at stooping, snatching, admonishing, warning, a wisp of her pretty, taffy hair constantly blown across her flustered face; and in just such proportion as her activities seemed to increase, her pretty kind of plumpness crept up on her.

Sweet Claire. She had feathered her nest. At noon and at evening, Steve turned to it eagerly. Sometimes, at the corner, he consciously slowed his step, to seem, from some perversity in him that gave him periods of self-detestation, to enter the home she had made for him, a little less enthusiastically.

Like her mother’s before her, Claire’s ineffable sweetness was like a drug. It swam into the senses. It was into Stevey’s senses long before he knew it. It had him quelled, caught, stabilized. It made a Rotarian out of the rebel in him. It was sweet to submit to the little tropic he had married himself into. The tropic of warm, sun-drenched, or lamplight-drenched home, griddle-cake breakfasts, with the aroma of little-pig sausages; the cleanest, deepest of beds; the warm, sweet body of the woman who bore him warm, sweet children. Her intellectual languor was part of her sweetness, just as it was part of her danger. Along with the sweetness of those first years, there was just a little terror of them. Submission. Old rebellions dying. Cravings—old inchoate beauties—finally, just the sweetness.

The lace curtains in the front parlor of the house on Tallahassee Street came to have for Steve the living, breathing quality of Claire herself. She was so warmly behind them, at his coming. At his going. They stirred faintly of her breath. They were a badge of her.

Sometimes Claire, who was even then locally and affectionately known as a congenital match-maker, used to stand behind these lace curtains, tiptoe, to watch for the noonday approach of Dora, usually in the company of Kenneth Chipman, who was junior partner in his father’s law-office, just across the street from Tallahassee High.

Kenneth was a campus-looking young fellow, with the first thatch of patent-leather hair that had reached Centralia, and one of those figures shaped like the map of South America. Heavy, flaring shoulders, tapering off into slim, flat hips. He was a graduate of the State University, a winner of a state oratorical contest; pounded a wicked ukulele and already, his second year out of college, had his name on the ground-glass door of the offices of Chipman and Lare, Patent Attorneys.

His brother Lynn, killed at Amiens, had been the white hope of the two white-haired senior members of that office. After his death, the legend grew rapidly that Lynn had been the most brilliant young legal mind to ever take up practice in Centralia. Nevertheless, even with the precedent of this older brother, a capable enough young fellow, whom time and a warrior’s death were to canonize into genius, Kenneth, ukulele-pest that he could be of an evening, was regarded as one of the up-and-coming younger men of the town.

The third time Claire stood behind her lace curtains and beheld Kenneth raise his straw cady and walk briskly down the street with many a backward glance at Dora as she danced upstairs, and another lift of hat, and another, Claire remarked to her husband that night, as she was rubbing tonic into his hair before they retired:

“You know, Stevey, looks to me as if young Chipman is smitten on Dora.”

“Rub a little toward the center, dear. Getting right thin, there.”

“Today’s the third time he’s walked from Tallahassee High with her, noontime.”

“The way to massage the scalp, dear, is with a circular motion of the fingers. Don’t shove.”

“Henry says he’s a chip off the old block, and already handling some of his father’s cases, single-handed. Dora’s one darling girl.”

“’Fraid that’ll put Davey’s nose out of joint,” said Steve, hitching his collar open.

“What do you mean, Davey?”

“Well, haven’t they been smitten with each other ever since they were crawling?”

“Why, Stevey Renchler, what ever put that idea into your head? Those two children! I was saying to Aunt Bek the other day, bright as Davey is in some ways—you know sometimes—I—you know, Stevey, sometimes I—think, in other ways, Dave’s not so bright.”

“It’s his manner, Claire. He’s either the smartest or the dumbest kid on earth. Hanged if I can make out which.”

“The way he lies out there, day after day, herding his little old handful of sheep, stretched by the hour on the flat of his tummy, reading or mooning—I guess that’s what some folks call bright. He is smart, of course, in a school way. Henriette says he’s ’way ahead of any boy his age that’s had schooling regular and all—but in general—for Davey’s age—oh, I don’t know—just kinda funny, loony-looking sort of kid to me. Him and Dora! Why, poor Davey, I’ll bet he hasn’t more than laid eyes on her since the family moved from the House on Sycamore Street.”

“Why, you know better than that, Claire. The days when—when we—how often did we use to see Dave and Dora playing around south of the Igrotte house together. Kids, of course, but that’s all I’m saying. He’s been sweet on her since he could toddle——”

“I wonder,” said Claire, and sat down thoughtfully, in the middle of the act of unfastening the tiny pearl buttons of her pretty little home-made house-dress. “Davey is more her type—I guess.”

“The kid puzzles me,” said Steve and yanked hard at the rear button of his collar. “Can’t make up my mind about him.”

“Oh, I don’t mean I really think he’s queer, Steve. I didn’t mean that. It’s all of you nagging him, I think, that confuses him, as much as anything. After all, he’s only seventeen. Dave happened to come along in bad times. He’s never had the chance of mixing and schooling the rest of you had. First came the family-crash and then the War and all. After all, he’s only a youngster.”

“Old enough by now to know his own mind, you’d think.”

“Not a mind like Davey’s.”

“If you aren’t the greatest girl! Here you’ve been wondering why Dave didn’t get a move on and take a real job, and the minute I agree——”

“But I mean, Stevey, lots of times a boy growing up—alone-like in a big family—nobody much to talk to except Henry, who’s a pretty queer darling duck too—a boy like that gets to feeling around with his mind in every direction, and for all we know—some day—he may come out all right.”

“Something in that. Shame he’s had the least schooling of us all. In his way, Davey’s bright enough. Dave’s deep.”

“Maybe. Only it’s my observation that still water doesn’t necessarily run deep. Maybe it doesn’t run at all.”

“Things just didn’t break right for him, or for the family, about the time he came along.”

“’Course, he’s had Henry.”

“That’s something.”

“Something! Henry’s not appreciated in this town. A fellow like Henry can have a far finer influence over a fellow than all the schools put together. Look how thick they are. Always puttering together over books and ant-hills and maps. Let me tell you, Henry’s a liberal education in himself.”

“Yes, if he doesn’t go putting crazy ideas in the youngster’s head. You see how far his brains have gotten Henry, don’t you? Look at what his ideas on war got for him.”

“But there’s just one beauty about Dave. You can’t topple over that youngster. He’s that square on his feet.”

“That’s true enough. Remember that time, over at Bek’s, Henry was lecturing on the wrongness of making war possible, and up piped that youngster from a corner where he’d been lying on his stomach with his chin propped up in his palms, and says: ‘But, Henry, you can’t end war by not fighting in it when the war comes. It’s folks you’ve got to change beforehand, so there won’t be any war.’ Jove, I thought that about said it in a nutshell. That kid’s got the kind of mind believes in preventive medicines, so the world doesn’t get the measles. Not what to do about it when the measles have come.”

“That’s too deep for me.”

“Other evening, when I went out to the Igrotte house to help Grandfather and Dave lay those shingles, I was looking around for the kid, and finally I find him lying barefoot, in his overalls, up against a hay-rick, star-gazing. ‘Say, you’re getting pretty well along for this barefoot-boy-and-cheeks-of-tan stuff,’ I said to him, ‘How do you get that way?’ And what do you think he answered?”

“What?”

“‘You know, that fellow Malthus,’ he says. ‘Who?’ I asked. ‘Malthus.’ I thought at first he said Methuselah. Malthus, it seems, was a fellow who worked out that the population of the world doubles every twenty-five years!”

“My!”

“Well, Davey must have been lying there thinking about it.”

“Henry’s doings.”

“Because he said to me—‘Just suppose for argument, Malthus was over-stating, and the population only doubles every fifty or a hundred years. Where are we going to get food after a while? Eats and stuff. Where are we going to have room enough to grow enough grain and graze enough cattle, if the population crowds up the earth like that?’”

“Why, Stevey—working his brain on such stuff when we’ve plenty of pasture-land around here can be rented for a song. Of all things....”

“That’s the whole point, Claire. There’s a kid with a long head on him. That youngster, lying there, had thought out something for the future, where most of us only have the brains to see what’s right under our noses, and then only maybe.”

“You mean, Henry’s like that, and he’s making Dave like that?”

“No, sir. Henry had been reading to him about Malthus, all right, but darned if the youngster hadn’t worked the rest out for himself.”

“Well, he’s either right smart or right dumb.”

“A dummy doesn’t work things out for himself. He got me thinking, too. Just as the youngster said, if we can harness the air and electricity and water and sun to work for us, why can’t we get busy on the waste places of the world and make them produce for us. Hundreds of thousands of miles of desert and prairie and sand are waiting for man’s ingenuity to reclaim them—darn shame, Dave has seen leaner days than any of the rest of us. I think it’s put age on the Old Gentleman and Grandmother—just worrying about it.”[41]

“Well, you know the saying, Steve, you can’t keep a good man down,” said Claire, with her mother’s rather dreadful amiability, and mouthing her decrepit observation in the key of having discovered a truth.

“Well, I hope to heaven ‘good’ is the word. Certainly does seem a fellow his age ought to have a preference for something by now. I offered six months ago to chip in to pay the wage of a hired-man for the Old Gentleman, in case Dave might be wanting to scratch around for a job in town. The Old Gentleman himself keeps trying to oust him out of the nest.”

“You know, I think Isaiah Clark would be willing to give Dave a job in his Seed and Feed Store, seeing how Dave’s so interested in making things grow.”

“Oh, Lord, honey, you see the point about as readily as Grandfather’s old blind mare sees oats. Besides, Isaiah hasn’t had a boy in there since Joe Mintz was killed in the War. I’m not in strong at the shops enough to be asking any favors, but it looks to me as if I ought to be able to get Davey in at the Works. There’s a future there for a boy who’s willing to work up from the foundry. Look at Sime Giles!”

“So you think,” said Claire, still sitting in the huddle of her half-open dress, her pretty pink mouth a little open, “so—you—think—Davey’s sweet on Dora!”

“I don’t think!” said Steve, and went shushing off to the bathroom, in bed-slippers hand-scalloped by Claire, “I know!”

FOOTNOTES: