Chapter Twenty

There were seldom family-conferences now, at least not in the old sense of the word. Except when Phil came down, (never with Rita or the children, because of lack of space to put them up) he spent the night on the curlicue sofa in the Igrotte house.

When Paula came home, she stayed at Emma’s and slept on the day-bed in the dining-room alcove, and always left her board-money under the fruit-bowl on the sideboard, over which Emma wept.

Phil worked for an automobile concern in Springfield now, on a commission basis, and lived in a little two-family bungalow at the opposite end of town from the one where the boom was taking place.

Every month or so, Phil sent the Old Gentleman a check for ten or twenty dollars. These, knowing to what extent the Phil Schuylers were reckoning to the penny themselves, his father never cashed, causing confusion in Phil’s small banking-matters. Incredibly enough, however, on the margin of income that forced him to reckon in terms of car fares, he was already manipulating on the side again, and one month along with another automobile salesman, had turned over with profit, two hundred dollars in a speculative land deal.

But the gathering of the clan, even for the festal purpose of Thanksgiving dinner, was no longer comfortably possible in the little house in Pessimines Lane. Eight people would have jammed any room in the house to capacity, and the kitchen range, bought from old man Igrotte because the one from the House on Sycamore Street would not fit in, had a top scarcely large enough for a pot, a kettle, and a skillet.

Mathilda, who was accustomed to six and eight pots seething at once!

And yet, by the mysterious sounding of some sort of a clan-cry, there did crowd into the stuffiness of the little old Igrotte packing-case, more Schuylers than had convened together since that evil day brought down on them by one Mark Milliken.

A little over a week after Davey had helped Stevey carry the limp and fainting body of Claire from the edge of South Meadow to the Model Farm, there gathered, in rather muted fashion, most of the family.

Even Clara, who made a great ado about leaving Sam, who was sure to play penny-ante poker in her absence, arrived this time from St. Louis.

A good baker’s-dozen, counting Dave and Leslie and Stevey and Claire, were crowded into the Igrotte dining-room that Sunday for the plate-lunch that Mathilda, with the aid of her daughters and Trina, who came out to help on her every day off, passed in and out among the company.

The smattering of grandchildren on an occasion which ill-befitted them, complicated things a bit. Leslie was there, mild and patient, but a little timorous even among his own. Grown to the great gangling height that had not yet reached its full development, it was difficult—it was grotesque, to seat him among the children. And yet.... Finally Bek, with the most drawn look anyone there had ever seen on her face, placed him on a chair between the open folding-doors, so that from every vantage, as she hastened about with a coarse, white sort of butcher’s apron the Old Gentleman used to wear into the smoke-house on Sycamore Street, she could observe him.

Indeed, this austere occasion revolved around grandchildren. A dark, defiant-looking one, who sat out on the stoop, smoking cigarette after cigarette, and throwing them away only half-puffed. In a corner of the dining-room, seated white and silent and absolutely impassive, sat Claire. A flaxen-haired snow-maiden of imperturbability.

It was a wretched “lap lunch” of restraint, ill-balanced plates, and buzzing noonday heat that crowded into the little clapboard house. The Old Gentleman, whose face could be so sly with humor, clamped-looking and grim now, seated like a troglodyte at the end of the table.

There were no preliminaries. Before Mathilda, followed by Emma, had carried out the last plate of Brown-Betty-with-hard-sauce, the Old Gentleman came out like a cannon at his grandson, pointing him out as he sat twirling his spoon around an untasted dessert-plate.

“A Schuyler,” he boomed at him, “has disgraced us!” and began shaking his pointing finger and beginning at once to rise to the dreaded climax of his dreaded wrath.

“Oh, Father,” called Bek, “don’t begin it that way! Not before the children——”

“Dave, run along.”

“Leslie, darling—come, Aunt Emma will take you out and get you a pail and let you pick some string-beans for grandmother’s and grandfather’s supper.”

“If Grandfather does begin that way,” said Steve, rising and kicking his chair back savagely, “I’ll walk out of the house in the very beginning and stay out. I was a fool to let myself be dragged here anyway, like a head of cattle.”

“Stevey,” said Bek, and walked over and placed her palm against his forehead, “what did you promise me?”

She was a mountain of calm, standing there between her son and Winslow, who had receded into his chair as if it were sucking him in.

“I won’t be bullied, Mother.”

“You won’t be bullied,” shouted the Old Gentleman. “You will be bullied! Into honor.”

“Father,” said Bek, “I won’t be bullied, either. This situation has got to be talked out in calm, or Winslow and Stevey and Claire and Emma and I will walk out.”

“Oh, dear!” sobbed Emma. “Oh, dear! oh, dear!”

“For God’s sake, Pap,” said Phil, “can’t you keep your head on your shoulders?”

“At least,” cried Mathilda, in her fluty, dry-lipped tremolo, “Davey don’t need to be here. Shoo, Dave!”

“Davey,” said his sister Clara, who had a futile, rather antagonizing way with children, including her own, “run out with Leslie and play.”

“I want to stay,” said Davey stubbornly, and sat with his hands clinched into the sides of his footstool.

Suddenly Claire, collapsing from her imperturbability, began to sob violently, her aunts forming an immediate barrage around her.

“This is an outrage, Father!” said Henry, rising in disgust from the window-sill where he had been sitting looking out upon the bare patch of chicken-yard and puffing at his pipe. “Good Lord! they never did it this brutally, I’ll wager, when they used to settle tribal disputes by torture! What is it, Father, now that you have the tribe around the fire? On with the council-meeting.”

Poor Claire! At her uncle’s words, she crouched and sobbed the more, Emma fanning her with one of the Old Gentleman’s tape-bound, palm-leaf fans.

The Old Gentleman began to cry then, in dry sobs that split his voice. “A child of my family. A child of a family that has not so much as a speck upon its honor. Two children of my family.”

“Two children of your family what?” snapped Henry. “Swept off their feet by a law of life stronger than they are. Well, what’s to be done about it? Crucify them? Quit your crying, Claire. Come out here and face the situation. Come to a sane conclusion and end all this unnecessary and nauseating clan-panic. What’s on your minds about it all?”

“Answer Uncle Henry, dearest,” said Emma. “Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Open the window a little, Morton. I don’t feel right well.”

To Claire, whose worshipful admiration of her uncle Henry had long been a family-joke, the moment was simply not to be borne. Her lips shuddered up and down like window-shades sucked inward. Sobs came that made the noise of a window-shade flopping in high wind.

“I——can’t!”

“The thing in a nutshell is this, Uncle Henry,” said Steve, stepping forward and shaking the hair back from his sheet-white face. “It seems I’ve been a rotter.”

“You’ve been a low life,” screamed the Old Gentleman, breaking loose again from his daughter’s detaining hands.

“Father,” said Henry sharply. “One more outburst like that, and I’ll join Stevey and Claire and walk out, too!”

“Nobody’s to blame in this, Uncle Henry. But if the family insists otherwise, I’ll take it all.”

“You used to have her meet you secretly, Stevey,” sobbed Emma, “you know you did. I see it all so clearly now. My Claire away from home so much after her teaching-hours. You encouraged her to meet you secretly. Claire was not the girl to ever——”

“Oh, Mother, please! Please! Stevey never made me do anything I didn’t want to do.”

“Let’s not go into that now,” said Bek. “Whether Steve encouraged Claire is not the issue here, Emma.”

“But Bek—he did——”

“I take it that the point is,” said Henry drily, “Claire is going to have a baby. What’s to be done about it?”

At the brutality of that presentation, a series of bleats and short cries rose about the room.

“Henry,” said Clara, and made a dive toward Dave, “at least you might realize that a child is in the room. Davey, go out and help Leslie pick beans.”

“I won’t,” said Dave, and sat with his large, dark eyes on his nephew Steve, and his hands clinched tighter than ever into the footstool.

“Let him alone!” said Henry. “Good Heavens! why start out making shameful to him the most fundamental fact of life!”

“Oh! Hen-nery—son—shame—oh! oh!”

“You mean,” cried Emma, “you want to hold up to him the example of his elders as something noble!”

“No, I don’t mean a damn thing except that all this mewling makes me sick, and I don’t want to saturate the fact of birth for him with nastiness by being furtive about it.”

“Oh, Stevey, Stevey! Oh, Claire! How could you?” cried Mathilda suddenly, and began to clasp and unclasp her wisps of little hands, and to regard them with the tears running, “How could you?”

“Grandmother,” sobbed Claire, easily susceptible to the pitiable spectacle of the sobbing Mathilda, “we know it’s no excuse but we didn’t mean to—it’s not anything you think out, Grandmother.”

“God knows it isn’t,” said Steve, his pallor suddenly aflame, “or do you think we would have let ourselves in for this!”

“By Gad, if I weren’t hand-and-tongue-tied by women-folks,” shouted Morton Milliken, suddenly, the Morton who was so strangely subdued where a gathering of Schuylers was concerned—“if I wasn’t hand-and-tongue-tied, I’d horsewhip the cur who’s responsible for this—my daughter——”

“They get married,” shouted the Old Gentleman, wresting free of restraint this time, “before another twelve hours passes over the heads of this family. So help me God!”

“Father,” intoned Bek, standing like a mountain, “they’re first-cousins!”

“That’s what makes it so terrible, Father,” whispered Clara, to whom the situation was as fascinating as it was horrible, and her face with the scallops of chin seeming to shrivel into loose bags of flesh, “even if they want to do right—they’re first-cousins!”

“Cousins or no cousins, one sin has got to invite another this time. A grandson of mine who does wrong to a girl marries her, if she is cousin ten times over.”

“That’s terrible, Father,” said Bek. “That’s terrible.”

“It’s a sin, Puppa. A sin on top of a sin!”

“Cousins beget dwarfs—and monstrosities, and—and—oh, I don’t know what,” sobbed Clara.

“And hop-toads,” said Henry with solemnity. “And pollywoggles.”

“Henry!”

Seated once more in the window-frame, one knee high, the smoke he blew toward the kitchen yard curled off curled lips.

“Good Lord,” he said, and rapped his pipe empty, “one would actually have to sit in on this scene to believe it could happen. You people cling to a worn-out old superstition, when you could have a brand-new truth in exchange for it. Cousins! Suppose they are cousins!”

“Hennery!”

“Don’t you know that much of that is just old-wives’ tale! Go into any library and read even a fairly modern book on biology. Good Lord, what is so reluctantly accepted by the human brain as truth! Study your statistics on the progeny of cousins. Face facts. For a woman as up-and-coming as you are, Bek, and who’s had as much ordinary stock-breeding experience as you have, you amaze me. Poppycock, that’s what you’re all talking! I’ve no patience with old-wives’ science. Apparently the two youngsters love each other. It probably would not all have happened this undesirable way if they hadn’t been kept apart through ignorance and prejudice. Let them marry. There’s your problem solved. Come, I move that this unnecessary painful session adjourn.”

“But, Uncle Henry,” said Steve and shot to his feet—“but Uncle Henry,” his eyes rolling, like an ox in terror toward Claire—“I mean,” he said—“nothing”—and sat down.

“Why, Stevey, what?” cried Claire, her sweet, moist eyes roving and probing his face—“why, Stevey, what?”

“I—I—” said Steve and began half-rising again and wiping his dry mouth with the palm of his dry hand, in a way that was somehow horrible—“why, I’m nothing. I don’t want—I mean—we—not that!”

“Exactly,” said Claire by this time, whose blue eyes, as she regarded Steve, had grown suddenly black and round and flabbergasted, “if Stevey doesn’t want it—I mean if I—I—. If he doesn’t want it—I don’t want it either.”

“Doesn’t want what?” roared the Old Gentleman.

“Claire knows I’ll abide by any decision she reaches in this matter,” said Steve, standing very straight and very calm beside his mother. “And if Claire for one reason or another doesn’t want it—she—knows best. I understand——”

“Why, Steve,” said his mother, regarding him with her level eyes and her voice incredulous, “are you trying to let it appear that Claire is the one who doesn’t want—when—it seems to be you?”

“No, no, Aunt Bek. He isn’t. You see, Grandfather,” cried Claire, turning to him, her blue eyes very dark under the light tinge of her flaxen hair, “I—of course Stevey will go through with it if he has to—but, Grandfather—isn’t there some way—please—couldn’t I just go away? I could, Grandfather, if the family would only cut out the dramatics about it—us. Stevey doesn’t want—I mean I—I don’t love Stevey any more, Grandfather. I’m not afraid—alone——”

“You don’t what?”

“It’s a lie!” said Morton, rising with a stride toward Stevey. “She’s trying to save his damn hide.”

“It’s not a lie, Father!”

“She means, Grandfather,” said Steve, deadly white, “after all that’s happened—oh, what’s the use beating about the bush. Claire would rather go off and have the thing over without marriage, because—because—oh, I’m not hedging, Uncle Morton! When she came to tell me about it—I guess I—did feel pretty sick. I guess that scene down there in South Meadow the day she first told me about it—is what cured her of me—I’m a cad.”

“No, no, Steve!”

“I’m not the marrying sort, but not for a cad’s reasons——”

“By Gad——”

“Oh, hold your horses, Uncle Morton! I’ll go through with it. Simply trying to explain my position. I hadn’t wanted it to happen this way. Claire’s sake, more than mine. Mother and Claire know what else I mean—I’m not fit to marry any woman. Tell them, Mother.”

“Stevey! Stevey! I can’t bear it!”

“Aunt Bek,” cried Claire and beat her hands, “don’t you tell them that!”

“Yes, Claire, the time is here,” said Bek, in tones that were as monotonous as hoofbeats on wood, and pinioning Winslow, with that powerful, level gaze of hers into a huddle which might have been a faint. Whatever it was, it kept him crouched in a deathly pale silence back into his chair, until the scene wore itself out and Bek was daubing cold coffee on his forehead. “Steve and I have been fighting out something. We’ll win all right, but—in the light of events, best—you should know. You see, when Steve came home so suddenly from college—well, I guess a better way to put it is——”

“Oh, Mother, come out with it. I was fired from college for drunkenness, Grandfather! The dean stumbled across me under a bench on the campus one night—gollywogged. Spiflicated. Soused.”

“Steve!”

“First taste I got of it at college set me wild. Couldn’t lay off the stuff. Can’t always—now. Right here—practically under your very eyes, Mother has walked the floor with me night after night.”

“Bek!”

“Sister!”

“She’s written to Cures for me. She’s dropped the stuff into my coffee. I’m a rotten no-account drunk. I am. Now throw me into the gutter, if you’ve a mind to. I don’t care. At least, you must see now—Claire and I—can’t——”

With a cry that had been gathering in his throat as if to crack it, the Old Gentleman made a flying leap across the inert form of Winslow. “I’ll show him!” he shrilled, struggling again and again, only to be rudely pinioned backward by Phil. “He’s trying to think up a sniveling way out!”

“Good God!” said Henry, and rose slowly from the window-sill and stood looking at his nephew.

“Grandfather,” chimed Claire faintly, “if you go on like this—I can’t stand it. I’ve known that all along. It’s a fight he’ll win some day. I just can’t explain it, Grandfather, only—except that if he doesn’t want it—I don’t want it either. I just can’t explain.”

“I can!” shouted Morton. “I can explain. She’s showing him a way out. The damn white-liver. He’s resigning and she’s sheltering him behind her skirts—the God-damn——”

“And I tell you,” screamed the Old Gentleman, strangling, “that if he is fifty drunkards and fifty times more the low life that he is, no grandson of mine wrongs a girl and doesn’t right it!”

“And no son of mine!” sobbed Winslow, half under his faints as Bek daubed on the cold coffee.

“Before another twelve hours goes over his head, he rights it!”

“Are you mad?” cried Henry, “every blamed one of you!” his beetling brows drawing together like portières. “Here are two young people. One of them confessedly an alcoholic. And yet you want to tie them together under revolting circumstances to beget children that stand ten times the chance of being maimed that they would were they merely born of first-cousins. You dare to want to tie these two unhappy young people together for life?”

“Yes, by Gad, yes, just that! So help me, I’ll see them both dead, if they don’t make it right.”

“Then, Father, you and the entire family that countenance it are crazy criminals.”

“No Schuyler born out of wedlock comes into this world. We’re a family with strong honest roots down into the soil of this country....”

“Yes, yes, Father, we’ve been over that before. Don’t scream.”

“Let Father alone, Henry,” said Phil, trembling. “He’s right.”

“I will scream,” screamed the Old Gentleman. “I know I’m right. Those two have got to marry. I don’t want to hear the ins and the outs. I don’t care that they love each other any more, or don’t love each other. They should have thought of that first. That’s something that they’ve got to work out after marriage. You two marry! You two marry! You don’t pull the name your Grandmother and I have built out of our blood and our sweat down overnight. You two marry! You two marry!”

“I guess Father’s right, Steve,” said Bek, standing pale as a statue. “If you’ve lost your nerve, that’s your misfortune. It’s all too late now.”

“Yes,” echoed Emma, Phil, and Clara, “Yes.”

“Yes, by God!” said Morton, who was all sweating, and then over and over again, “Yes, by God! Yes, by God!”

“And I say,” barked Henry, “that to make these two children marry under these conditions is just as criminal as if you took their lives in your hands and broke their necks for their mistakes. Break their spirits. Break their morals. Break their hearts. By God, you get away with that! But I say you are just as criminal as if you broke their necks.”

“Those two marry!” yelled the Old Gentleman, whose shaking finger never stopped pointing. “You with your new-fangled notions that don’t fit in with the world you live in, are responsible for where you are today. A one-horse lawyer in a one-horse town, where you should be first in the state. No new-fangled notions here now! Those two marry, if I have to drag them to it through the streets of Centralia to have the ceremony performed.”

Through the tenseness something snapped into the expression of that circle of faces. Relief. As if a verdict, dreaded, had none the less brought solution by the very virtue of being pronounced.

Even Claire, slipping back, almost as nerveless as Winslow, seemed to relax to the sentence. Even Stevey, who stood facing his grandfather without blinking.

All except Henry.

“Well,” he said finally, knowing how complete was his defeat in that circle of acquiescence and giving out one of his short, sardonic laughs, “maybe it’s for the best. Doubtless you two are sufficiently cowed to the yoke of the fear-of-living to adjust yourselves to the servitude you have just had sentenced upon you today. But this fact still remains. The scene that has taken place in this room today in this year of our Lord, is as mediæval as hell——”

“Hennery!”

“Excuse me, Mother.”

Suddenly David, most undramatic of youngsters, who had been seated crouched to his footstool like a bit of lichen, ran toward his nephew Steve, and pulling him by the wrist toward the languid figure of Claire, crouched back in her mother’s arms, tried to weld their clammy hands in a clasp.

“See!” cried Bek, struggling to keep her voice dead-level, and regarding Henry a little triumphantly, “even a child would lead them—together.”

“And a little child shall lead them,” said Phil, on a snigger. He had not meant to snigger. The sound had just jumped off his lips. Tension, perhaps, but to horrified family-ears the room seemed to roar of that snigger.

From his long, lean height, Henry stood regarding his small brother, a slow laugh shaking his shoulders.

“Maybe you’re right. The kid’s got the trick-combination of leadership. Imagination tempered by a level head and a level heart. Man-of-the-people stuff!”

“What’s man-of-the-people stuff, Henry?” piped Dave.

“You!”