Chapter Twenty-two

When Dora Tarkington was on the threshold of her ’teens, she was about an inch and a half taller than Dave, with long honey-colored curls that lay in a wide fan across her shoulders and a curved fringe of bangs. These bangs, old Mammy, whose hand quivered, invariably cut a little crookedly, because she kept one copying eye glued to a lovely daguerreotype of Dora’s mother propped on the washstand beside her.

Dora used to study that daguerreotype herself. The sweet, straight eyes, the elaborately high, honey-colored hair with the curve of bang that Mammy tried to imitate. The fitted basque, with the heavy festoonings of gold chains and brooches. The tapering waist, supporting the little, urn-shaped swell of bust and shoulders.

Dora was of sturdier heft than this mother who had died at her birth. There was more of her father in the molding of her longer, lither legs and torso. But at eleven, the bright gold prettiness of the mother, who had dashed through her youth on the spirited horseflesh of a Kentucky farm, lay over Dora like pollen, conjuring memories before her father’s eyes, in a hundred ways.

Every year Dora had a birthday-party and a cake with pink candles and colored-tissue caps that popped as they were pulled open. For these occasions old Mammy, relic from the days when the girl in the daguerreotype had ridden bareback through Kentucky grass, made large batches of cup-cakes with pink icing; decorated the round birthday-cake in “red-hots”; froze the vanilla ice-cream in a home-made contrivance of galvanized bucket and chopped ice, and then set about fluting Dora’s neck-ruffles and cuff bands, as well as the edges of her own cap and apron, with a hot-point iron.

Dave had attended these annual events, up to the time the Schuylers moved to the Igrotte house.

He had been meticulously invited to every subsequent one, in fact so meticulously that to Mathilda, unreasonably enough, the courtesy savoured of patronage.

Dave was never to attend one of these functions after the move from the House on Sycamore Street. To begin with, he had a particularly fierce kind of pride where Dora was concerned, and besides, his mid-afternoons, those subsequent years, were scarcely a matter of girls’ birthday-parties and candles.

Then, too, since the crash, the Old Gentleman had taken on what amounted to an unreasonable animosity to Len Tarkington. A resentment that the gentleman-farming methods of his old neighbor should lead to the gradual growth from the scrawny acres Len had inherited from his grandfather, to the present more than triple and vastly prolific pasturages.

It was the Old Gentleman’s contention, never beyond his own fireside it is true, that Len Tarkington was “God’s laziest white man,” working three hours a day as compared with his own fifteen.

Len’s doings rankled in the Old Gentleman. His politics! He had never forgiven him for voting Bryan in 1896. Len was a negligent farmer, an indifferent judge of cattle, and notoriously slow pay. One of those devilishly likable fellows who get results out of two-thirds personality and one-third efficiency.

Beware of a man who lets his rail fences go; who votes a mixed ticket; who will borrow your pipe off you; who could sit on his side verandah and whittle a clothes-pin into a doll for his daughter, with his hay still outlying, and clouds lowering.

It rankled to have Dave help at Tarkington early-morning chores, except that the deal was one strictly between old Nemo and the boy and there was no getting around it—that eighty cents a week helped!

That, probably more than any one other thing, was the realization that used to cause the Old Gentleman, lying beside Mathilda in the ponderous old bedstead that filled their room, to hide his screwed and suffering face into the crook of his arm and lie with his toes climbing over each other with the pain of frustration, until the crack of dawn, when he rose. Eighty cents a week mattered!

At the first of her birthday-parties that Davey did not attend, Dora had clouded up and cried tears all over her birthday prettiness, while Davey, with a throat that hurt him the long afternoon through, went about the business of leading a foal, for a consideration of fifteen cents, from one pasture to a two-mile-distant one, for a petty farmer known as Rocky Toe.

It was the following week that Davey, emerging from the Tarkington barn on Saturday morning, from helping Nemo at currying, beheld her making grimaces, by darting her little pink adder of a tongue in and out, as she stood on the safe side of her hedge, and struck outlandish attitudes at a boy called Desmond Riley, whose father was new superintendent of Giles Tool Works and who had just moved into the neighborhood.

There was, about Desmond, a precision both of manner and of dress that was antagonizing. That verdict, after his first weeks in the Centralia Second District School, was the cruelest of all for a child to bear.

What antagonism Desmond excited was the kind to relegate him to oblivion. Desmond became what you might call permanently unnoticed. The children shunned his selfish little moon-faced complacency. Not a boy offered to fight him.

The awful failure of obscurity was his.

Not so passive, however, was Dora’s animosity. His sleek, brushed, brown ball of a head sat in front of her throughout the school-day. He chose the best pen-points and wet sponges, just before the monitors reached her. Desmond had fat, soft little cheeks that quivered like jelly; and that too, infuriated her.

She was sticking out her tongue to the jell of those cheeks the morning that Dave beheld her across her hedge-top and paused, as if to study the facial contractions by which she achieved her magnificent effects.

“Dare you to wallop him!” cried Dora to Dave, as the small, square figure hove in sight. “Land him one for me! Dickery, dickery, docks, his mama makes him wear socks!”

So she did. Tan ones, with plaid tops that reached just below the knee!

“Dare you, Dave—wallop him! One for me and one for good measure.”

The wallop had its time and place. Somehow, Desmond, standing there hypnotized and not belligerent, offered neither.

“Aw—no!”

“Scared? ’Fraid-cat. If I was a fellow and afraid to wallop another fellow!”

Bitter. Bitter. Standing there, barefoot, his fingers curling into palms, anger smote Dave. A slow anger. Not at Desmond. But at the shrill little voice of his tyrant. If she were a fellow and afraid to wallop another fellow. What kind of talk was that? Why wallop Desmond? His animosity would not rise to it.

“’Fraid! Snidey! Poof! ’Fraid. Poof! Poof! Poof!”

Suddenly Dave’s arm shot out and banged Desmond one in the stomach so that he doubled and ran.

The wallop had not been for Desmond at all. But for the circumstance of naughty, adorable Dora up there, meting out injustice. That was the dreadful part. The blow had been for Dora.

And before he could rush to Desmond, to right it with him, there was the wonder and the glory of small Dora screaming upon him from her vantage. Having goaded him on to attack the stranger, and now turning on him with a fury that had probably never had counterpart in her small breast.

“You didn’t need to hit him thataway. In the stomach. Oh, you! Oh, you! Why didencha listen—I only meant—just to hit something. Not him. I meant—hit out against what’s no good—oh, I don’t know what I meant, but why didencha listen?”

Suddenly, in the blind rage of relief and the shock of the identical quality of their impulses, he was over the fence and pummeling Dora until her teeth shook. Until her eyes popped and saw twice.

“You—you!” she said on the breath that was jerked out of her, and sat down flat, like a doll-baby.

And yet, in the end, that scene confused David.

Dora had a mind of her own only where trifling things were concerned. She would wrest from him an inch of concession, and then, with her matchless capacity for sweetness, give him back an ell.[33]

The second time that Dave did not show up at her birthday-party, it was almost six of the hard and wearying months since they had met.

She had run out one lovely clover-smelling summer dawn, while Davey, in denim jumpers, and Nemo were currying down a filly which Tarkington sometimes still drove before a light gig.

She was in her nightgown and bare feet, and she and another girl, named Minnie Ryan, who had been spending the night with her, were tearing out toward the clover-field for the early-morning lark of a dash through the dew.

That was the phrase Dora had drawn from a fortune-telling gypsy girl, whose green parrakeet on a stick had plucked the slip of paper from a box.

Dora and Minnie craved beauty and a sweetheart true.

At the sight of Dave, currying away there at the near flank of the horse, the two girls turned squealing and scurrying back toward the house. Dora last, her lovely long curls flying back in a banner, her body flashing, and the rosy soles of her feet repeating themselves again and again as she fled.

This was the most disturbing thing that had ever happened to David. His heart seemed to fly out of his chest, leaving him standing like an empty meal-sack. Then the rest of his body seemed to rise to his throat. To congest his breathing and blind him so that the currying became merely a series of strange motions over which he had no control.

Once, on that run down Sycamore Street beside the boys that were marching down it into the lanes of war, the blood had beaten that way in his ears. But to the roar of drums and of hoarse throats shouting.

It was probably the beginning of the normal adolescence of his awareness of Dora. Suddenly, just Dora, who was undoubtedly the nicest of all girls, but who could stick out her stomach and make ugly grimaces and slide belly-buster down a hill, was something as lovely, as remote, as an angel on the merit-card you received in Sunday-school if you were Desmond Riley. Flash of Dora in her sweet muslin nightdress, with her hair flowing and the lovely insinuation of her rosy young body flickering through.

And yet she was not as remote as one of those picture-card angels with trumpets and soaring bodies that rise on a slant through ether. Dora was warm and beautiful and naughty in an adorable way that was not angelic.

Dora was beautiful. The soles of her pink, flying feet that you saw over and over again as they flashed, were beautiful. There was something sweet and rosy about them. They were Dora’s.

That was the way his adolescence came in. A fastidious worship of the beauty that flashed to him that dew-drenched clover-smelling sunrise. It was to remain that. A curiously delicate and perfect love-life for a man born to a destiny of tempestuous and dramatic and world-shaping events. But withal, a man born into his time as snugly as a bug into his rug. Forward-looking. Backward-heeding. Un-neurotic. Normal.

Cross-currents aplenty were to riffle the course of the true love of David and Dora, torturous ones, but from the day that he was thirteen, and had looked upon that flash of the innocent sweetness of Dora-in-nightdress flashing from his sight, she was installed and remained the woman of his love and his life and his reverence.[34]

For a six-month after this morning apparition of her, with her loveliness across his eyeballs as he went to sleep nights, and his first waking-thought of her, he did not so much as again clap eyes on Dora face to face. Dodging her, if he happened to be errand-bent in Centralia and saw her coming down a street, avoiding the lanes she frequented and attending the little Sunday-school at Seven Mile, sooner than run the risk of encountering her in town.

Countless the asafœtida-bags that Mathilda hung about his protesting neck these days.

Dave, with the immemorial gesture of young love, paled, and secretly observed but outwardly ignored by Henry, retreated uncommunicative within himself. Took on a pinched look about the mouth that prompted Bek to comment privately and worriedly to Winslow, and acquired a nervous habit of cracking his finger joints that was enormously irritating to the Old Gentleman.

The change of Sunday-school was a matter of some argument, since, on fair Sundays, the Old Gentleman and Mathilda rode into Centralia in the phaeton, hitched to a pasture horse rented from Rocky Toe for fifty cents the morning, to Second Avenue Rock Church. For thirty years the Schuylers had paid pew dues there, and even now, when those dues were no longer sent by check, but sparsely dropped into the contribution plate, they occupied the same seats by the insistent courtesy of everyone connected with the church.

But Dave, privately conscious that his shoes, even when blacked, were nicked, had reached the stage where for want of long trousers, his legs felt long and gawky. Besides, Dora with her hair in the spread of curls and a red cap that had a pompon, rode to Second Avenue Rock Church, either in her father’s light spider-gig, or in the new Chevrolet roadster.

That in itself, made one feel more of a gawk than if she too had just walked.

So in the end, every day of the six-month that intervened, Dave, with the torment of the desire to see her hot within his heart, carefully avoided her.

Then one day, crawling out from under a runway in the hen-house which he had been whitewashing for Nemo, bespattered, even his heavy thatch of hair with a white smear across it, he came upon her, face to face as she came out of the kitchen door with a small pan of fine white-bread-mash for her sick pet of a hen, a prize leg-horn “Smooty,” which her father had once brought her from the Lexington County Fair.

It was ignominious beyond anything he had ever dreaded, her unexpected dashing out in this fashion from the house. Scarcely a day that he did not reckon with the possibility of her happening to rise at five of a mornning, timing his appearance meticulously to avoid its happening. And now here he was on all-fours, calcimine-stained, daub-faced, crawling out from under, like a rabbit from a hutch, into the very path of Dora, so fresh in her blue percale with three white bands of tape around her slim waist and the hem of her skirt, and all the morning-light there was, caught in the curls that lay along her shoulders.

“Smarty, Smarty, gave a party, and nobody came,” was the incredible, the panicky phrase that flew from his agonized lips, while Dora, with the pan of warm mash in her hands, toppled a little forward, of naughty, simulated surprise, as if she had not expected him there.

With what was more of a reflex than a desire, she shot her tongue at him in reply to this, and her stomach too, in the old absurd contortion. Dora, who was almost thirteen now and would no longer shinny trees, for fear of showing her panties.

“Smarty, Smarty, didn’t want you nohow at my party.”

There was a stunned flash of silence between these two, to whom David’s absence from that party had been, to each, a little agony; a flash of silence filled with the noise old Nemo made pouring water into a pig-trough, and with the floating fragrance of Mammy’s breakfast bacon, and with the echoes of Dora’s mockery. For six months she had been slowly gathering courage to burst this way upon David. And now, the whirlwind of that ruse accomplished, there she stood puckering, and trying not to cry.

“Out in county school, where I used to go,” said Dave, “you skip stocks and bonds and then go right from algebra to geometry.”

“Honest?” said Dora, as if his remark were relevant to her innermost thoughts.

It was a master-stroke. He was never to know, delving into his psychology later, just how he achieved it. This bit of floating information, springing full-grown to his rescue at the moment of his almost complete immersion under lime and humiliation.

It broke the ice. It broke the ice of Dora’s startled, frozen lips. It broke the ice of the long months that had lain chilled, without the sun of her presence, against his heart.

“We’re on the Monroe Doctrine,” said Dora.

“The Monroe Doctrine,” began David, his eyes focusing as they always did from his trick of visualizing the page from which he memorized, “is the principle of non-in-ter-ven-tion of European Powers in American af——”

“Oh lookie, Davie, you’re all tangling yourself up in Queen Anne’s lace handkerchief.”

Wretched David. It was his ruse, standing there spouting his erudition, to kick, as if casually, the frail, pale stuff growing in profusion outside the barn door, in an attempt to cleanse his bare legs of the lime.

Who could have thought, after the years of childhood they had played through together, Dave most of the time in a single garment of blue jumper and Dora with her neat skirts flying to reveal her little pantie-clad legs, that lime spattered across Dave’s legs could matter so to him. Matter so that his tongue began to dry and swell in his mouth like a rusk.

“I work.”

“That’s nothing.”

“’Tis, too.”

“’Tisn’t.”

“’Tis.”

“Puf!” She was still flushed with shame at the atavism of having stuck out her tongue and her stomach.

“I know something I could tell if I wanted to.”

“What?”

“About ants. Me and Nemo watch ants same as you and Henry.”

“Me and Henry have a red-ant-hill now! You know what, there’s a species of——”

“There’s ants in our pantry. Mammy can’t keep sugar there any more.”

All this, savoring doubtless to the uninitiated of slight irrelevance, had bearing upon hours they had spent in the days of the House on Sycamore Street, lying belly-flat, with their noses close to the performance of ant-hills. Sometimes Henry, who had a magnifying glass that stood on a little tripod, had come down under the grape-arbor and observed with them, and read aloud out of a book called Communism Among Ants.

Davey knew those ants to the habit, many a time remaining stretched on his stomach long periods after Dora had danced away home. Now it was her little device for wriggling her away back into grace on this particular one of his hobbies.

“The little ants in our sugar haven’t got any an-ten-næ at all.”

“They have so, Dora!”

“Well, anyway, none that you can see without Henry’s magnifying glass.”

“I work,” resumed Dave, stubbornly, and still kicking into the Queen Anne’s lace handkerchief.

The reiteration scarcely penetrated her conciliatory zeal.

“We’re on frogs in physiology, Dave. If you pull one leg, the other thinks it’s getting pulled too. Toads give warts, frogs don’t.”

“I work.”

This time, her sweet eyes glittered at him, making his eyes seem to smart, as they did when he stared at the sun.

“I work, or I’d ’a’ come to your party.”

“I’d rather had you at my party, Dave, than anybody.”

“Would you?”

“I cried.”

How sweet she was in the early morning of that beauty of hers; a freshness of beauty which the years were to find absolutely unquenchable. The sparkle of world-sweetheart was over her that day.[35]

“I cried, honest.”

“Dora! I—oh—last tag!”

Presently they were tearing through the Queen Anne’s lace handkerchief, as if into foam.

At home, in the Igrotte barn, a half dozen rather scrawny rams were pressing their none-too-finicky noses to the crack of a door, bleating and waiting for their young shepherd to release them to the joys of pasture.

Finally, the Old Gentleman, who was weighing a heifer on a scale, had to hobble and do it himself.

“Drat that boy, where is he?”

Davey was wooing.

FOOTNOTES: