Chapter Twenty-nine

Once off the hard, white-paved clamor of High Street the shady somnolence of residential Centralia set in.

At the corner of Sycamore Street, on the steps of the square white mausoleum of a “gift library,” a band of Boy Scouts was assembling for a hike. David knew some of them, slightly. His eyes flashed away from them in embarrassment. With a sense of ostracism. They were, for the most part, the boys with whom he would have grown up, had the family continued to live in the House on Sycamore Street. He was as conscious of them as they were unconscious of him.

Clabby’s confectionery-wagon was at the curb of the old Whittier-Neal mansion delivering a quart of peach-and-pistachio ice-cream for Mrs. Whittier-Neal’s bridge-party.

Donald Neal was one of the fellows who took girls to five-o’clock Saturday-afternoon tea at the St. Charles.

Donald had taken Dora on two occasions. David knew.

That made the Neal house seem part of the sense of ostracism. Four girls, all with intertwined arms, and in the bright sweater-coats and small knitted caps of the fashion, formed a solid phalanx down the shady street. The center one was Odette Juss, the eldest daughter of Max Juss, who boarded at Emma’s.

They were coming. They were coming toward him. With a mounting agony, David watched them approach, his tongue doubling in his mouth, and his hand clenched for the doff. Some fellows could do that naturally. Doff a hat. With Dave, it was like doffing his heart. Some fellows had a way about them in matters like that![46]

At the very moment of his elaborate détour to let them pass, Odette, who was sixteen, let out a spurt of a giggly into which the other four exploded through tightly-pursed lips.

It was horrible. It was so undeniably combustive, the outburst of restraint. They had burst out laughing. They were laughing at him. His glasses must be awry. They were awry. He could see a wisp of that horrible winding of cotton, as he gazed down the bridge of his nose.

Horrible! Horrible!

The impulse to turn around and look after them swept; overwhelmed him. Perhaps they were not laughing at him. At the craning backward of his neck, there were the four girls craning too! And then came another outburst of laughter that splattered the silence, like buckshot.

It was too horrible. A hot wave of nausea swept him. To have looked back! To have been the butt of their gibes! What was it? Why should the girls splatter into laughter at sight of him? The shortness of coat! Well, what of it? A new one would have had to come from Henry, in whose pockets the clink of the coins was so pitifully light. What else could it be? The yawn of the pair of Henry’s gray-cotton socks between his trousers and heavy-looking shoes? Wrists? There was something not quite right about them. They seemed suddenly like great, misplaced ankles, dangling.

Why had they laughed? These girls, who were only slightly younger than Dora. Dora, toward whom he was now directing faltering steps. Cold sweat sprang out through the fever of his body. The dry-rusk sensation of mouth screwed tighter still. It was the most devastating thing that could have happened, knocking his painfully mustered self-confidence out from under him like a pole from a tent.

Why had they laughed? Odette Juss was a shy girl, who stuttered painfully, as he remembered seeing her about his sister’s boarding-house. What was there in him to arouse this bold mob-hilarity? There had been moments, too, at lunch, when it seemed to him that the dry lips of Miss Simpson had been compressed against laughter. The same quality of suppressed merriment that had burst involuntarily from the lips of these girls.

Was it the spectacles? In the shadow of the Neal garage, he removed them, examining the frames, and feeling at the inflamed rut across his nose. The street swayed a little, and his belladonnaed eyes were quick to tear. Hooking them back on felt steadying and cool.

Why had they laughed?

What if Dora should laugh! Henry should have warned him if he looked ridiculous. Yet the spectacles hid the ridge. Better the spectacles than the inflamed rut across the bridge of his nose, especially now that it had cracked open. It was the cotton must have created the outburst. Spectacles might even seem interesting without the blamed cotton. The oculist had warned him, though, that the frame against the open sore might infect. And yet, to be made ridiculous by cotton! Standing there in the shade of the Neal garage, he unwound it and fitted the bare frame back across his nose. The metal bit in with a sting. It was a counteracting pain for which he was almost grateful. It made the ordeal ahead, that of calling on Dora, secondary for the moment. Tears of irritation blistered his eyes and kept him popping at them up under the spectacles.

What if Dora should still laugh. She was so pretty. The sides of her nose, rosy little flanges, had a way of quivering slightly before she laughed, like a small white rabbit’s over a carrot. If Dora were inclined to laugh, those pink little flanges would become signals. If Dora should laugh. Lord, don’t let Dora laugh! Amen, Lord, don’t let her!

The street stretched on to its leafy conclusion. A whirling hose spun fragrance from the clematis vines that clambered over the side of the Neal garage.

Down at the very end of Sycamore Street, the old Schuyler homestead, with a painter’s scaffolding swung across its face, suggested the one-time short cut to the Tarkingtons’, through South Meadow.

But all that was changed now. The present owners had sold off South Meadow in parcels of building-lots. Rows of bright, peach-colored semi-bungalows, with blue trim and false shutters, lined the new, treeless streets with the blurring rapidity of a deck of cards zipped through the fingers. They made you blink. The sameness. The hotness. The umbrella-shaped clothes-line racks in each back yard. Bright corrugated-tin garage, after bright corrugated-tin garage. Miles of granitoid gutters. Blue front doors. Even geometry of criss-cross streets, the new gravel uncrunched. Made streets intervened now, between the old Schuyler place and the Tarkingtons’. And of all things, a square, new cereal-factory, set in a swirl of railroad-tracks, annihilated completely the site of the precious old spring-house and hoarding-place of books.

There were blocks of hard, white, treeless asphalt now; and the creek where it used to flow dark and rich and plum-color, was under the streets now, filled in.

This district, just inside the city limits, was gravely known as Venice.

The encroachment of this “development” of the prosperous factory- and foundry-workers of the peach-colored semi-bungalows, one-Ford-car garages, and umbrella-shaped clothes-driers, up to the very edge of the still-bucolic Tarkington place, was another source of Len Tarkington’s resentment toward the Old Gentleman.

Fully acquainted as he was with the details of the enforced evacuation of the House on Sycamore Street,[47] there none the less smoldered within Len, each time a new smokestack splintered the serenity of Tarkington skyscape, or a row of workingmen’s paradises went up along the slick asphalt strips of ready-made street, the feeling that except for the Old Gentleman’s weakness of the flesh, the Tarkington Place would still be flanked by the beautiful serenity of South Meadow.

The farm itself, however, did succeed in keeping out a sense of invasion. The same rich undulation of hedge that had once divided it from South Meadow, now protected it by a full two feet of additional height from the geometric outlay of Venice.

Approaching it from down the long length of a mercilessly bright and surveyed street named Mark Place, it almost seemed to David that the old aperture through which he and Dora had bellied many an entrance and an exit, was still there. But actually the little body-worn tunnel, dear, warm, funny little tunnel, was filled in now by tight growth. That small, gone paradise of yesterdays.

It was a good three-quarters of a mile down to where the double rows of elms formed entrance and shrouded the old house in an enormous kind of shade that made it possible for Mammy, turned eighty by now, to still keep her newly-churned butter cool in a crock under grape leaves on a back porch.

Tarkington loved this old place with one of his only two fierce passions. The other was his daughter.

His acres flowed redundantly, because even with the indolence with which the Old Gentleman never failed to indict him, they reflected a certain absorption, on the part of their owner, in the grandeur of soil. The rotation of his crops was a rotation that implied thought. Trees on the Tarkington place were carefully forested, and their wounds filled in with cement. The sole bookshelf Len’s bedroom boasted was crowded with weather-colored volumes on the habits, the chemistry, the workability of the local soils that flowed in his state. In one corner of the dining-room, a fine old ceiling-high wardrobe was stacked with farm journals that no amount of house-cleaning seemed able to reduce in number.

They were good acres. The taste of them was to be part of the warm-pollen sweetishness that was to lie on David’s tongue throughout the crowded years.

At the foot of the road of elms, Nemo was screwing weeds out of the path. For five years, come rain, come shine, come winter, come spring, these two, Nemo and Dave, had curried, churned, calcimined, lugged, plowed, milked, through the dawns.[48]

There was a curious taciturn friendship between the old white-kinked black, and the boy, but at the sight of Nemo now, out in the light of a broad, soft day that made him seem unaccustomed, it was as if something inner, like David’s tonsils or his heart, had plunged suddenly down into hollow legs. The body seemed only a shell to contain breathlessness. Here was old Nemo, who had been in the actual, the corporeal presence of Dora that very day! Doubtless that very hour. It gave Nemo a luminosity that hovered over his kinks.

Well, here he was at the Tarkingtons’! By opening his stiff lips and emitting three words, he could find out from Nemo if Dora were home. As if, with his expert knowledge of her habits, he did not already know. On Saturdays, except for the occasion of a matinee or the once-a-month dancing-tea at the St. Charles, she did not go to town at all. The Opera House was dark that week. It was not dancing-tea Saturday.

What if—if Kenneth Chipman were to be there, with his long legs, in white flannel, drooping over the edge of the porch-hammock. On Saturdays, David’s furtive aching observation had taught him, Kenneth pretty regularly remained in the office, while his father, under peremptory doctor’s orders, went to the Middleton Country Club for golf. Except two or three times, along toward mid-afternoon, Kenneth had closed office and sped in his roadster out to Dora. Dave knew that! With his strained, sick heart Dave knew pretty nearly every external there was to know about these two.

Yet all odds considered, Dora was terrifyingly certain to be at home. And alone. Abysmal emptiness continued to clutch at him and cause the day to sway.

“What you doin’ roun’ this time o’ day, boy?” asked Nemo, scarcely glancing up from his weeding.

“Nothin’ much,” said David, breaking into a run and afraid to ask the question that might, by its reply, dash the fervent prayer within him that Dora be not home.

That was absurd, and once out of sight of the old black huddle of Nemo, he stepped off the cinder path, behind the hole of an elm, and shook himself. Shook himself literally and with a characteristic clamping of his square teeth. Struck an attitude. A sort of declamatory attitude, with his right arm plunging, as if he were striking down something.[49]

He was. The rising sense of his nervous frenzy. That rusk of a tongue cleaving so to the roof of his mouth. The body a vacuum for breathlessness. He was striking down, all right. Terror! After all, through every hour of the last twelve, the procedure had been so intimately, so privately, so fervently rehearsed. Nothing for a fellow to feel skittish about.

All there was to it. Calling on a girl. Look here, Dora! Look here, Dora! Gee! All there was to it. All you had to do—why—easy’s anything——Look here, Dora! Looka here—Dora——

Goose-fleshing ecstasy, that would send the old eyelids behind their new glass fronts batting. Heart banging out against torso. All there was to it. Looka here, Dora! You know! I know! All is not gold that glutters! Glutters! That would be a fine thing if his tongue slipped up on him like that! All is not gold that—all is not gold that glitters.

Then the figure, standing dallying behind the elm tree and mysteriously plunging out every so often with his right arm, jerked himself together and in a dash was up the cinder-road to where the swell of millwork and wooden rococo verandah came into view. And there, blotting out the horizon, blotting out the universe, on the patch of front lawn before the house, was Dora, crouched on her knees beside the open hydrant, an iron arrangement about two feet high, with a tin drinking-cup dangling from a chain, and engaged in the precarious business of holding a fox-terrier under the faucet with one hand and lathering him with a highly evasive cake of soap with the other.

How beautiful she was as she crashed upon his vision. The sun was all caught in her hair, and stood off in a little halo, like a soft-pencil mark when you smudge it with your finger. To David, swallowing his heart, there was something shameful and furtive, standing there with his eyes positively seared to the back of her neck. Her curls, with the single skewer of hairpins through them, were on top of her head, obviously impaled there with one soapy hand, when they interfered with the business of lathering her dog.

Her neck was like a beautiful river full of sinuosities. River full of sinuosities. Not bad. Or had it swung itself into his memory from a line on a page in Henry’s Oxford Book of Verse? Her neck—her neck was like the glide of one of those snakes, in his zoölogy, (the Pythono morpha, found in Europe, North America and South America), with the lovely power to move forward in paddling grace.

Her neck—her neck was like a shower of star-shaped clematis that covered the verandah.

Her neck was like—was like one of the unused white-silk handkerchiefs in Henry’s drawer, that were not borrowable.

There was something shameful, standing there appraising that loveliness of neck, and yet it was like—what new and as yet unplumbed beautifulness was it like? There were, of course, other beautifulnesses that clutched you by the throat like this. That time Stevey had swung past with his company. Lying on your back, in the sheep-pasture, watching Capella tremble in the heavens. Something about his mother’s face, when he opened his eyes suddenly and caught her regarding him above his bed. Yet not one of them brought quite this identical hotness into his throat and across his eyes.

Was it shameful to stand there tingling with this beautifulness of Dora as she soaped her dog? The sickening talk of farm-boys, which clung to his ear-drums now and then, made gazing upon the beauty of Dora seem something of desecration. The furtive snickerings of hired-hands, seated with their backs against the barn and nibbling at blades of grass and spitting tobacco in long streaks. It made of Dora something to enshrine for his own private, sacred adoration. Even the thought of Kenneth, to whom the sickening talk of farm-boys would have been equally obnoxious, gazing upon the beauty of that pale curve of neck, smote him like a blow, and choked an exclamation from him.

Simultaneously, Dora and her dog became aware of David. With a leap that sent him slick and quick as a watermelon-seed from Dora’s soaped and sopping clutch, “Prince Charley,” crony of Dave’s through many a star-specked dawn, met him with such a leap and a bound, that before he could dart back, the side of his face, from contact, was lathered with a burning brand of much-advertised flea-soap.

“Prince Charley!” screeched Dora, and darted after him with a great flapping old towel, as stunned David stood under the bombardment of suds exploding along his face. “Hold him, Dave! He’ll get himself all muddy if you let go. Hold him, Dave! For goodness’ sakes, Dave, if you love me, don’t let go! Prince Charley!”

Slippery, oozy holy-terror! Four soapy paws frantic for clutch. Licking. Leaping. Yelping. Splattering. His eye-glasses became flecked. And his mouth painted with suds, in a mustache that tasted and stung. A great slab of lather began to sing somewhere under his collar, so that his chin sank into soft, popping ooze.

It was horrible, and it was glorious. “Davey, if you love me, don’t let go!” Spat-splutter-plop. Davey, if you love me.

Spat-splutter-plop.

She had handed him the key of the world, and his eyes were full of soap. If only the blamed little old pup—weren’t so blamed old slippery——Down, you! Splup—Splu—p-p-p-p-.

The stinging taste of the soap. The splutterings of sud-flecked lips. Horrible!

“I’m so sorry, Dave! Just hold him—plee-ze Davey, while I lasso him with the towel. E—e-e-e. Don’t let go! Prince—Cha-a-arley.”

It was no use! The squirting, slipping ooze! Time and time again, clawing, grasping, snatching fingers all but released their hold upon pawing gyrations. Blinded now by the shower of lather up against his eye-glasses, lye-bitten, lye-blinded, and smeared even to a great erect peak of suds on top of his head, he held on bravely, to the screeching tune of “Davey-if-you-love-me!”

“Davey, if you love me!” Wilderness of snapping towel, spats of wet paw against eye-glasses, more taste of lye and ooze of more wet fur.

“Davey, if you love me, don’t let go, Dave. I’ve nearly got him. Bad ittsie Dora’s baby! Bad! Bad! Bad! Mama spank! Bad naughty baby darlin’ doggie!”

Spat! Yap! Guzzle! Ugh!

“Don’t let go!”

Spat! Yap! Guzzle! Ugh! Snork-k—and somewhere in the distance, the purr of an engine, the grinding of brakes, or was it only through the blindness, the roar of encounter.

“Prince Charley! Bad! Stop it! Mama spank! Um-m-m-m great big automobile wun over Prince Charley. That’s a good boy! That’s muvver’s good Charley Prince.”

Climbing out of the darkness, rubbing his spectacles clear of blur, digging suds from his bitten eyes, fumbling for a handkerchief that would not materialize, feeling out toward the direction of the confusion of laughter, of voices, of yapping, and the sound of the water still running from the open spigot, was a performance that took exactly one lifetime to accomplish.

There was Dora, with just enough of a smudge of suds across her curls to make her adorable, triumphant now, with Prince Charley captured and wrapped in the towel under her arm, and standing beside her, convulsed in the kind of laughter that gave them red, boiled faces from trying to restrain it, Kenneth Chipman and a newcomer to town whom Davey faintly knew by the name of Florine Kent.

They had arrived in Kenneth’s roadster, which stood by, chugging.

One glance through his lye-bitten, belladonna-tortured eyes, and Dave knew. They had arrived in the “hub” and the “bub” of the scramble. In time. In time for the ignominy of his encounter through the suds. In time!

And there was Dora, with her free arm helping him to fumble for his wretched handkerchief, that would not seem to be anywhere, and trying, through the boiled look of her own face, not to give in to that impulse to laugh. That look in her eyes! The same look of Miss Simpson when she bit her lips. Of five intertwined girls, down Sycamore Street, and Odette who had seemed suddenly, to explode of repressed hilarity.

Laughing world. There, Dora had exploded, too!

“Here,” said Kenneth, with what evenness of voice he could muster, “take mine, old man!” and tossed him a gray-silk handkerchief with a wide border of purple pin-stripes. He was in white trousers. The universe became a pair of white trousers. Silk handkerchief! Meany Henry, who owned six non-borrowable silk handkerchiefs.

“Thanks!” sputtered David, and tossed back Kenneth’s handkerchief, and with his hand still fumbling for his own torturously evasive one, bolted down the path.

“David!” cried Dora, and darted after. “You mustn’t go! We’re going to have lemonade and cake on the porch, as soon as I change into something dry. Please, Dave, don’t go!”

“Come on back, Dave!”

“Davey Schuyler, if you go, I’ll never speak to you again! We’re going to have lemon——”

“Mush go——”

“All right for you, Davey! If that’s the way you’re going to act, just because——”

“Mush go!” coughed David blindly. Blackly. Bleakly. “Mush!” And rushed off down the cinder walk, the one desire in his head for the relief of aloneness. A quick aloneness, into which he could crawl. For eternity.[50]

FOOTNOTES: