Chapter Twenty-one

The winter America entered the War was a lean one on the farm, even in a neighborhood where foundries were changing their tunes from the production of safes, tools, and castings, to the grim grinding-out of arms and ammunition.

Young men were being conscripted or leaving the farms to enlist. A hoof-and-mouth disease was rampant among the horned cattle. Old man Igrotte, from the vantage of Iowa, raised the rent one-third on his mangy little place at the expiration of the first year of the Schuyler tenancy.

Frequently now, and with a bitterness that rankled him into constant and aggravated irritability, the Old Gentleman was obliged to cash one of Phil’s less and less frequently-sent checks.

He even accepted, with none too much grace, the gift of two sacks of corn flour from the Howey farm, which one of the overseers rumbled up with on a truck one afternoon with the compliments of the Ex-Governor who was wintering in Florida.

The Old Gentleman realized, with the terrible, gnawing bitterness which ate so at his heart, that word must have leaked, even as far as Florida, that the Schuylers were hard-put. One of the Howey girls, on a visit to the paternal winter home, had doubtless let slip that the Schuylers had fallen on bad times.

There was etched in acid into the Old Gentleman’s mind a picture of the portly figure of the Ex-Governor and the largeness of manner with which he must have given the orders for the distribution of the occasional offerings at the Schuyler door.

Every month, after a time, with galling and yet welcome regularity, there arrived these offerings. The impersonal kind of gift that stuck in the Old Gentleman’s craw, as he put it. Gifts that almost savored of charity. Commodities like a fat goose. A twenty-five-pound sack of coffee in the bean. Ham, smoked on the Howey place, sometimes the cuts off the very killings Bek had that same week sent over to the Governor’s place.

It helped. For instance, the barrel of corn flour meant that every morning, when the lanterns were swinging in and out of the barns for miles and miles around, Dave, as he started off on his lonely hike over to the Tarkington place to help Nemo with the chore of bran-mixing did so with a big, hot square of pone under his jacket for the heat it poured against him, and that later was to slide down into him in warm, grateful chunks.

Sleet came down many of the black dawns of that winter, slanted against him in long javelins, and made the roads and the roofs and the hedges to shine. Mornings filled with the glass music of hitting ice. Sometimes everything took on a crystal coating, making it a fairy-land of white, stretching arms of trees, the glitter of hedges, and the splendor of frozen breath.

Great, crystal chandeliers of morning, like the big one that hung in the Howey front parlor. It was warming to turn around, now and then, for a glimpse of the lighted kitchen window of the Igrotte house, against which he knew his mother to be moving at the business of preparing Henry’s breakfast and the collapsible tin box of lunch he now carried in with him to his office in Centralia.

Those were the shivery, silvery mornings all right, when the ice formed in a mask against his face, and the gleam of light from the Tarkington barn was something to stumble gratefully toward.

Old Nemo drove a close bargain as a taskmaster. It was scarcely ever before ten minutes to nine when he released the boy from his chore, allowing him exactly ten minutes to cover the mile to the schoolhouse. He had never failed, however, to arrive there before the first tick of nine, with his heart seeming to beat against his neck and up into his ear-drums.

There was a pride about never having been tardy, even though Miss Hassebrock knew the condition and offered to grant him fifteen minutes’ indulgence in the matter of arrival, as she did to other of the farm-boys.

That was the winter, too, of only half-day sessions for Dave. The class of Colonial History came in the afternoon. Dave was eager for that. It was one of the classes he was sure to shine in, the result of long evenings with Henry. Geography, too, came in the afternoon. Gee!

But the Old Gentleman fell ill about then of a sciatic torture that kept him chair-ridden all of that winter and that meant having to call half a session a day, in order to be home by noontime for the accumulation of chores.

It required a letter to the county superintendent for that special half-time dispensation, which Mathilda patiently, and to Dave’s dictation, penned through her tears.

Later, in that first month of the Old Gentleman’s disability, when, against every admonition, he was hobbling about sooner than his sciatica permitted, down he went on a slippery runway that led to the hen-house, and twisted a ligament in his thigh. That virtually laid him up the remainder of the winter.

Then Dave just remained out of school the entire session, secretly a little exultant over some aspects of it, and again hankering after the panorama of the Geography, the Colonial History, and the Physiology courses.

Poor Miss Hassebrock, sciatic herself, once and sometimes twice a week that long, dark winter managed to get a lift in the Ford truck of the farmer-family where she boarded, as far as the Igrotte house; and while the boy who drove her, great shy boob, waited in the kitchen, she would coach Dave in a gallant attempt to keep him up in his classes.

But usually, the boy was tired. So deadly tired that once, during a problem in square-root, he fell asleep with his cheek down against the page upon which her hand happened to be resting.

Bird-like little person, she sat there over an hour, with the Ford truck waiting and chugging at the door, before she could force herself to shake him awake.

Twenty years later, and in the most far-fetched, accidental fashion, David Schuyler was to learn that the little woman paid the farm-boy who drove her twenty-five cents for these trips and fifty, the evening that Davey fell asleep against her hand and kept her waiting the hour overtime.

It was the very next day that Miss Hassebrock’s annuity began. Poor dear, she lived only bedridden years to enjoy it.

That was practically the beginning and the end of any sustained schooling for Dave, those scant, war-ridden years, when Henry put up a partition down the lean-enough length of his office, and rented the other half to an osteopath, and the “Furnished Rooms, With or Without Board” sign flashed all too frequently in Emma’s window, and when Bek sat in Henry’s office, talking over Phil’s troubled affairs, every time she brought Leslie to town for osteopathic treatment in the office next door. Lean, hard days when, somehow, the faces of the Schuylers seemed to grow longer in actual bone-formation.

But with the end of the sustained schooling for Dave, Henry still read to him, and with him, through the long, quiet evenings. The great embroidered legends of King Arthur. Canterbury Tales, of a Knight there was; About Ben Adhem who awoke one night from a deep dream of peace! Letters of a Self-Made Father to His Son; Boy’s Iliad; Wreck of the Hesperus; The Ancient Mariner; Bird Lore; Deserts of the World; Arabia Deserta; Faust; Our National Parks; Prisoner of Zenda; Compleat Angler; Golden Treasury; Peck’s Bad Boy; Canalse Interpretation of Perjury; Land of the Midnight Sun; Bee Culture; The Philippines, What of Them? Months of evenings, and years of months of these hours of Henry’s intoning beneath the green eye-shade. It was his way of resting. His way of relaxing. Sometimes the boy on the stool at his feet nodded and slept against his knee, as he carried him along beyond his depth. But more often, Dave, who was a good listener, sat with his small, square chin propped in his hands, staring off over the shoulder of the reader. Those were the years of magnificence, all right. Napoleon gazed from Elba in the small stuffiness of that room in the Igrotte house. And the island of Elba was an atrocity of a hearth-rug with the figure of a dog woven in. Leander swam the Hellespont of that room, and the Hellespont was Henry’s single cot, with Teddy usually asleep at its foot, with his nose tucked into his forepaws. A knight there was shivered the timbers of that room. Don Quixote tilted lance there. Through its eight-by-ten, the desert flowed into parched vastness, and William Tell stalked, and Catherine the Great.

These evenings stacked up into practically all three hundred and sixty-five days of the year, except the semi-occasional ones when Henry remained in town to attend a Bar Association banquet, or to escort Henriette to the rare musical event that found its way into Centralia’s Opera House.

His Ford runabout, along with the House on Sycamore Street, was a thing of the past, so that the evenings, in town, Henry spent on a leather sofa in the back of his office.

Twice a day for two years until he made an arrangement with the owner of a dairy-truck to carry him to town and back, he walked the three and one half miles from the Igrotte house to High Street. The actual distance could be lessened a half-mile by a détour that led past the House on Sycamore Street. But from the day he left it, bag and baggage, chattel and what not, Henry could never bear to look at it again.

Never once, in all the years he was to live in the vicinity, first in the Igrotte house and later back in Centralia, was he known to have been seen within seeing-distance of the House on Sycamore Street.

In Davey lurked no such ache. There came the day when the first contingent of Centralia boys marched the entire length of Sycamore Street, then back again halfway, to swing into Court House Square.

In the hours of waiting for the parade to take place, Dave, astride the cupola of the old front porch he knew so well, perched himself like the figurehead of a ship, directly in front of the window of the room in which he had been born.

The Kelsoes, who occupied the place now, were easy, good-natured folk of ready welcome. Tony Kelsoe had a large and paying wholesale fruit-store on Miami Street. The day of the parade, the lawn and the front of the House on Sycamore Street were thrown open.

The Kelsoes had improved the place, although Emma said it made her “positively sick” to pass its pinwheel flower-beds, its splotched old iron deer painted a bright chrome-yellow, and a triple coat of white paint on the house that smote and smote the eye.

For the merest second, it seemed strange even to the child, shinnying up the front porch that had been home to him, but a strangeness immediately to be forgotten in the strangling excitement of the spectacle of the boys in khaki marching down-street under the spreads of the elms of Sycamore Street. Bare elms now, with branches that rattled in the light wind like bones.

Why, those boys out there, practically every fellow of them, he knew by name. Spike. Minty. Jeb. Off to war. There was Joe Lowenstein, with his puttees wound crooked. And Ed Slayback who sold screw-eyes and rubber-tubing in the hardware-store under Henry’s office. Paul Koerber. Lynn Chipman, who lived in the largest house in Centralia, and whose younger brother, Kenneth, just two years older than Dave, had a whole wireless-set on the roof of his home. There was a long-legged fellow named Tad, who used to drive a dirt-cart out Bek’s way. He was much heavier than the run of the boys, and seemed to mind the weight of his pack. There was Gum Lewis and Bennie Cohen, and a fellow whose name used to be Berlin and who had changed it to Brayley since the War.

And there was Steve! He and Lynn Chipman carried themselves the straightest, and somehow with the most bearing of them all.

“Hi, Steve!”

From the vantage of astride the cupola, they seemed like so many pairs of animated scissors tramping down the street with a hollow sound that was crashed into every so often, by a small brass band that sent the spectators along the curbs into cheers.

It drove Teddy, down on the lawn, wild with excitement, and kept him yapping up at Dave and imploring his descent from the cupola.[32]

Every inch of the march down Sycamore Street, after the boys had passed Kelsoe’s the second time, Dave ran alongside.

There was Stevey, second from the end, with his white face set immobile to the front, and his shoulders flaring and his waist receding, and his puttees wound the tightest and the rightest of them all! Not a glance to the right or the left.

Hoh, and how Minty kept darting his head and neck in and out like a turtle. Not a glance from Steve though. Stevey marching off to war. The boys of Centralia marching off to war.

War was waste, Henry said. War was Nature’s bungling trick for weeding out the over-production of the race with the blindest kind of non-selection. But just the same, tramp-tramp-tramp, to sit as Henry was sitting, up in his office, with his eye-shade on and his fingers pressing against his forehead, while the boys marched beneath his very window, was impossible, if that curious rhythm of tramp-tramp-tramp had you by the throat. Tramp, tramp, tramp ... my country, right or wrong—Stephen Decatur was a hysterical woman. My country, right or wrong. Well, anyways—anyways—it was! No matter even what Henry said. It was a fellow’s country, right or wrong.

And Stevey, right or wrong, was going! “My nephew, right or wrong, is going to war,” shouted Dave to himself, as he ran on his short, squarish legs, breathlessly, alongside. Cæsar had crossed the Alps, Washington had crossed the Delaware, in the name of War! Well—well? Henry hated war. And Henry was always right except when—except when the tramp-tramp-tramp made “my country, right or wrong” sound right! Right, you bet your life!

Stevey was too front-face to know that Davey ran alongside, almost, it might be said, too stern-faced to care. Minty darted his head sideways and said, “Hi, Kid,” to Dave. So did Bennie Kohn, Beulah’s brother, who finished his words in “ink” instead of “ing.” “Hi, Kid, we’re goink!”

Tramp! Tramp! Tramp-tramp-tramp. Even in the cold, damp air the moisture formed rivulets and ran down Dave’s neck in his effort to keep up with the adult strides; and along toward the end Teddy, too, began to lope with his tongue hanging out sidewise.

My country, right or wrong! You betcherlife, Henry, you! To be as smart as Henry was to think too much and not to feel enough.

At the other end of Sycamore Street, in Emma’s house of the peeling paint and the “Music Teacher” and “To Let” signs in the window, were grouped most of the lodgers, and Mathilda, and the Old Gentleman, with a Paisley shawl draped across his remonstrating shoulders against the sciatica, and Bek and Winslow, and Leslie waving a banner, and Henriette Simpson, and Paula, home for the week. There they were all, out on the porch and along the steps. And in the parlor window, with the stringy lace curtains pinned back, was Claire, looking as white as a flower, clutching her beet-red nub of a baby, which she held up and dandled, as the automatons, hay-foot-straw-foot passed the house.

Long after the footsteps had died down, Claire stood there, waving her baby aloft, for the husband and father, Steve, who had not looked, to see as he passed by.

When they all came in, a few moments later from the porch, it was hard to coax Claire away from the dandling of the baby before the window that looked on the now-deserted street.

His perfectly-formed, beautiful baby that, as he passed, Stevey had not turned his head to see.

It was in vain that poor Emma, whose flaxen hair had developed wide gray streaks, tried to comfort her. A good soldier would not, could not, turn his head. Just see, there was Lynn Chipman’s little brother Kenneth, crying after him and sobbing, and not even a glance from Lynn. And see, old lady Mintz, poor old dear, reaching out empty arms after her boy. Shame, Claire—for shame!

Keyed to a pitch of pride that made him bumptious, the Old Gentleman stumbled about the house, with the Paisley shawl forgotten and dangling and tangling about his feet. Stevey was justifying some of the torment he had caused the family.

Stevey was going into war. For country. It was like paying a debt of gratitude with a coin that had been minted from the living flesh of his own side. Ecstasy of self-flagellation, as it must have burned in the eyes of early Christian martyrs, illumined the Old Gentleman. He stood by and watched, glorying in pain.

Besides, Steve’s going to war would make a man of him. Or as the Old Gentleman put it, would break him, by Gad! And even the latter was no worse than the mess he had made of things up to now.

A Schuyler was in the ranks that were marching from Centralia!

Bek’s eyes were blazing with that, too, and Winslow’s and old Trina’s and even Mathilda’s, whose, however, like Claire’s, were at the same time crucified.

And while Dave was running breathlessly alongside the moving phalanx of the khaki, up in his office, over the hardware-store, to the rat-a-tat-tat of the marching of feet, sat Henry, with his dry fingers pressed against his eyeballs.

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