Chapter Twenty-three

Farm-hands were scarce, that winter of 1917. By 1918, with ten thousand troops a day, for over a period of five months, being transported, it was practically impossible to get men to handle the heavy chores.

It was said of Bek Schuyler, and she did not deny it, that for want of herdsmen, she personally drove as many as a hundred head of Howey cattle to Ivorydale, which was within a dozen miles of The City, by night, appearing tailor-made and in the stern habiliments of the kind of togs she affected, at the Statfield Hotel for breakfast the next morning.[36]

Dave had accompanied her on several of these night-drives as far as Ivorydale, taking a local train back to Centralia, after he had given over his horse to one of the men who came from the Yards to meet them. Then Bek, and the small wicker suitcase which she had carried like a pack on her horse, continued via an early-morning trolley for The City.

Nothing to suggest in the big, tailored woman having a generous breakfast in the spacious dining-room of the Statfield Hotel, that she had ridden horseback the night through behind a drove of cattle.

They were memorable rides alongside his sister, those winters when the farms were stripped of men and the foundries were humming to the strange, new tune of the manufacture of munitions. Her great figure was like some heroic study in bronze of horse and rider, as she loomed behind the dark, moving cloud of the cattle.

She taught him to swing his whip lariat-fashion, and to curl, with a quick turn of wrist, the rope over the horns of a steer. She taught him the secrets of good points in cattle, how to estimate within a pound or two the heft of a sow or a bull, and some of the laws of breeding her observation had taught her.

It is doubtful if she had ever heard of the Mendelian theory, or of de Vries, but she expounded with beauty and accuracy to Davey, as they rode through those strange and often resplendent nights, to starlight, distant baying of dogs, lowing of cattle, and the dim, etherealized outline of farmhouse, hedge, and tree. Expounded, in the terms of her own observation, of certain pure breeds of live-stock; of mutations in the peach, the chestnut, the strawberry, the sweet potato, without her ever knowing, probably, the meaning of the word mutation, much less of its technical application.

Asparagus-cutting, reproductive cycle in the rabbit, analysis of certain pure breeds of live-stock, heredity and milk-yield, cross-pollination, inbreeding of dairy-cattle, inheritance of black-stripe in China-Poles, inheritance of shorthorns, elementary evolution, dairy-cattle, breeding, genetics, were the tune to which some of these night-rides were taken.

It was out of these long discourses with his sister, that his early inclination veered first toward biology, then natural history and for a brief while, medicine.

The great natural fount of Bek’s unerudite but accurate first-hand observations poured itself in long, lucid strain through these nights. Some of the glory that was the old Bek’s might have disappeared with her pride of ownership, but none of her kind of mental magnificence.

She sat on her idea as squarely as she sat astride her horse. It was generally said of her, and always refuted by Henry, who would never grant you that mentality had sex, that she thought like a man.

Be that as it may, restricted to the penny, stripped of every freedom of action that might have corresponded with the scope of mind, her mind’s eye continued to sweep the horizon in the manner of one who reckons in big stakes.

“If I could lay hand on five hundred or a thousand acres, Dave, then I’d show you a thing or two about stock-farming!” Or, “See old Conrad Gronauer’s place over there? Falling to pieces of dry-rot. I wrote in my diary about him last night, and I’ll say it to his face. Gronauer stinginess and lack of vision are to blame.”

“Does stinginess mean lack of vision, Bek?”

“Most of the time. If old Bek Schuyler had Gronauer’s place, mark my word, it would be a going concern in three years. I’d have five thousand bushels of potatoes off it the second year.”[37]

“Gee, all that in potatoes?”

“Never play small stakes, Dave. The reward is proportionately small, and a small loss hurts as much as a big. Play the game high and straight.”

Those were strangely exhilarating rides. Pearly, quivering horizons. The sense-of-power of his mount under him. The cloud of the cattle thundering softly to the crack of his whip and his will. Bek, seated so squarely on her enormous sixteen-hand-and-a-half chestnut.

It was as if the soil had its beginning in the heart, and then flowed through one, and then on out from the horses’ hoofs and became meadow and dale, hill and meadow.

Something in Dave, kinship of the flesh of his body with the flesh of the land that was warm with the thunder of their passing, would seem to unlock, and out of the secret and reticent places of his mind and heart would march the desires and unsaid things, made suddenly sayable.

“Geeminee, Bek—the stars! Those little fellows up there are as big—as big as anything! And we little things are more wonderful than they are, because they can’t think and we can.”

“That’s right, Dave. The stars never make me feel little and insignificant the way they do lots of folks. They just make me feel wonderful, for being made by the same divine hand that made them. Do you ever think of God, Dave?”

“Aw—yes. Sure I do. Say, if I could be a star, guess what star I’d want to be?”

“Don’t know as I even know the names of enough of them to venture a guess. Morning Star? Evening Star? North Star?”

“No, Vega.”

“Vega. That’s a new one on me.”

“She’s not out now. Vega’s the one toward which the whole solar system is supposed to be traveling.”

“Great human qualities, like strength and courage and loyalty and wisdom, can be lights that attract humanity just as much as Vega attracts the solar system, Dave.”

“That’s what I mean. I want to be wise. Henry’s wise.”

“Yes, but Henry is a little too wise for his time, Dave. To be a little too wise for the times in which you live, is as bad as not being wise enough. They crucify you for being too far ahead of your time, Dave.”

“Henry says most fellows would rather face the machine-guns over there than face a new idea.”

“It’s all right to be wiser than the fellow next to you, Dave, but just enough so as never to let him know that you are wiser.”

“Is Woodrow Wilson wise?”

“I’m afraid he is one of those whom they crucify for being too wise, Dave.”

“Is Teddy wise?”

“Just wise enough not to let the other fellow know how much wiser he is than the other fellow.”

“Know what, Bek?”

“No, what?”

“I’d like to see an elephant-stampede.”

“Kipling says it’s one of the sacred sights of the earth.”

“Know what, Bek?”

“No, what?”

“I’d like to be a policeman at Loop Square in The City.”

“What on earth put that into your head?”

“He stops everything with a lift of his hand. That’s more than Woodrow Wilson is doing. He can’t stop the War.”

At the mention of war, Bek’s throat had a habit of beginning to beat.

“Wish to God, dear, he could.”

“Stevey is in the Argonne.”

“Yes, Steve is in the Argonne.”

“There’s five Schuylers in the War now, counting Uncle Phil at training-camp.”

“That’s the law of war, Dave. To give.”

“If I was old enough, you’d give me.”

“Thank God you’re not.”

“I’d give myself.”

“Surely.”

“Is there a law of war?”

“It seems so.”

“Who made it?”

“Human nature.”

“Is it better to know the laws about human nature—or the kind of law in books, like Henry?”

“That’s one of Henry’s difficulties. He knows more logic than human nature.”

“Ain’t human nature—logi-cull?”

“You cannot build up theories, like Henry does, on the assumption that it is, because it never comes out that way. Everybody agrees with Henry that war is sin and evil. But there’s one big element in the way of making it practicable.”

“Human nature?”

“Yes.”

“Henry says....”

“I sometimes suspect your brother, Dave, of being a great person with his eyes gazing too far ahead of the ship to see the immediate reefs. Those kind of people don’t get anywhere in life.”

“How do you get yourself anywhere?”

“By being true to yourself, of course.”

“Henry’s true!”

“Yes, but don’t you see, Dave, Henry happens to have the kind of self that he can only be true to at the utmost pain and suffering to himself and those who love him. Henry lives in one kind of world and behaves as if he lives in a much more idealized one. A true leader of men, Davey, must be just far enough beyond the foibles and weaknesses of the average man to understand, not to despise him.”

“Say, Bek, you know what?”

“Don’t begin every sentence with that, Dave.”

“Well, do you know what?”

“What?”

“When I’m big—I—when I’m big——”

“Yes?”

“Aw, I can’t say it.”

“Say it, Dave.”

“Well, when I’m big, you know what?”

“Didn’t I just tell you not to begin every sentence thataway, Dave?”

“Well, you know what? You know the way Ulysses rode at the head of the Trojan War and all in Henry’s Odyssey?”

“No.”

“Didn’t Henry ever read it to you?”

“No Davey, your brother never reads to me out of the Odyssey.”

“Well, anyways, when I’m big.... Oh, I dunno, I can’t say it—but when I’m big....”[38]

“Go on, say it, Dave.”

“When I’m big—I—aw—can’t. Lookie—oh, lookie, quick! There went one of those ’possums I was telling you about, Bek. That’s one of those woolly kind that have no pouch and carry the little ones on their backs. I think that’s pretty funny, don’t you? You know what, Bek? A ’possum is a marsupial. Know what a marsupial is? Well, Henry says——”

“Curve in those heifers, Dave. Here’s Ivorydale.”

The dawn began quivering up above the horizon in a fancy little shimmer of silver.

FOOTNOTES: