Chapter Eight

For the half-dozenth time, his mother, through the buzz of grown-up talk, had turned her rather breathless face upon him and pantomimed Davey to go to bed. By mouthing back violently and stretching his eyes and doing somewhat fearful grimaces with his mouth to indicate that he was the reverse of sleepy, it was possible to appease her from time to time.

The supper-table had long since been cleared, and the red-rep cover back in its place, and the silver bowl supported by the silver cherubs, in its center. There were seven apples in it. They shone under the swinging-lamp that had the buckeye dangling from it.

Henry was speaking. The faces about the table swam in light. Mathilda. The Old Gentleman. Bek. Winslow. Claire. Emma. Phil. Henriette Simpson, who never missed her Tuesday-night dinner with the family, and who was a sufficiently privileged old friend to “sit in.”

The scene reminded Davey of something. Something too vague to capture. Flat on his stomach on the carpet-sofa in the corner, elbows propped and chin in palms, he regarded it, when he could keep his fascinated eyes away from the to-bed pantomime of Mathilda. Ah, he knew! It reminded him, that circle of conclave, of a picture torn from Redpath’s Universal History, that hung in Henry’s dusty little old office, up over Schlemmer’s Hardware Store on High Street, “Signing of the Declaration of Independence.” The solemn array. The women, by half-closing the eyes, could be made to look like men in wigs. Henriette Simpson looked like a horse. But a nice horse. Such a kind, slender, solemn horse. A brown horse with a braided mane. But she, too, by squinting, could be brought to look wigged. Only the Old Gentleman spoiled the illusion. He was peeling an apple. You could never conceive of so much meticulousness crammed into the peeling of an apple. He held it poised between thumb and forefinger, as a sculptor might carve a hand holding a pearl in that position.

It was impossible, after the introduction of the peeling of that apple, not to keep the eye riveted. Even Mathilda left off her pantomime to watch it, and rose once, tiptoeing to a cupboard for a plate, which she slid under, and which the Old Gentleman kept shoving away. He was removing the peel, after his habit, in a single long curlicue. The thinnest possible ribbon. Gradually the eyes of the entire group, with the single exception of Claire, who kept her gaze fastened on the weaving motion of her needle over the round of a darning ball, became focused upon the intact unwinding of that apple-peel.

Henry was speaking. He had a solemn, monotonous voice and to David, even then, a wise, intoning voice.

“It is unfortunate that Father did not consult with me before calling you all together at this time. I have never been anything but settled in my mind about it. In fact, the party has already had my written refusal for twelve hours.”

“Stuff,” said Phil, watching the winding of the rind, and his purplish face pursed as he leaned forward across folded arms. “A man can change his mind. I can have Senator Burton on the telephone and that letter in the waste-basket in five minutes.”

“You’re talking nonsense, Phil.”

“Why, any man they put up in your place will be a stuffed shirt! There is not another possibility in the state except you and Scott Baring, who’s never going to get out of that French Lick sanatorium unless on a stretcher.”

“That may be,” said Henry, in his dry way, and strumming with his dry fingers, and his eyes on the slowly unwinding rind. “But my mind is made up.”

“If it was me,” said Emma, in that airy, cozy way of hers, tapping her darning-ball and holding a red-and-brown-checked sock off at arm’s-length, “I’d take it, just to show those horrid old Democrats that this state has never really had a District Attorney before.”

This remark was deemed worthy of nobody’s rejoinder. Emma was seldom answered. Nor minded.

“Well,” said Phil, who kept wanting to shout but after the first word or two restrained it and toned himself down, “if you ask me, and you don’t, I’ll say it’s a dog-gone shame that the party comes into a Jim Crow town like Centralia to pick its man, does a Schuyler the honor to put him on the sure-fire ticket for District Attorney and....”

“You’re right, Phil, I don’t ask you. This is the kind of question a man has to decide between God and his own soul.”

“Yes, but what the dickens can your soul and your God find in a proposition like this except honor?”

“Son, take not the name of the Lord, thy God, in vain.”

“Excuse me, Mama, but, good Lord, look at the honor for himself and his family. It was enough turning down mayors’ committees, trusteeships, school-board appointments, and pretty nearly every honor the town has to offer. But when it comes to a big state job like this—’tain’t fair to us!”

“Sorry you feel that way about it, Phil.”

“I do. Mother and Father are entitled to a little something out of this game. I’m bringing up my little family to the best of my ability, struggling along to make good American citizens out of them. Bek’s got standing and children. Claire. Emma. Davey’s going to want the background of good, sound family-connections. No one person’s got the right to deprive an entire family of honor. No, by God, not even——”

“Phil!”

“Gad was what I said, Mother. Wish you’d try to remember that, Ma. No matter what I may happen to say—it’s ‘Gad’ I mean—no siree! Father here comes to this country a poor boy. Not much more than an ordinary farm-hand. Mother here a girl that had never been out of her Tyrol village——”

“Kufstein, son.”

“Kufstein, mind you. Well, what do they do, these two? Practically not a penny to their names. Strangers on a strange shore.”

“We were awful strange, son,” said Mathilda, and placed the tip of her handkerchief to a reminiscent tear.

“Phil should set this lyric he is singing to ‘Hearts and Flowers’, Mother,” said Henry, and slid one of his sly, wry winks to Henriette, who laid an admonishing forefinger against her lips.

“I think it’s beautiful, Phil—I love to hear it over and over—the coming to America of our Mother and Father. I just think it beautiful,” said Emma, leaning over her darning-ball, her soft, blue eyes filled with tears of melting dolly sweetness. “How was it, Mother, you and Father stood hand in hand when you got off the old coach at Centralia, all those years back? Tell it again. I love it. Father holding the carpetbag and your two precious quilts wrapped up in a huge sheet, and you clutching onto your great kerchief-bundle of clothing, with a pair of Father’s brogans joined by string flung over your shoulder. What a cute, adorable greenhorn you must have looked. I can just see you!”

“Your father was down to his last twenty dollars, son. At Ellis Island they wouldn’t let us——”

“Yessir!” cried Phil, warming. “There’s a picture for you. Scared out of their lives. Practically broke. What do they do? I’ll tell you what! After managing to eke their way out here just because a fellow named Hans Stengle from their same little village was living hereabouts, what do they do? I’ll tell you what——”

“When Puppa and I arrived greenhorns, and first set foot in Centralia, son, I can tell you, except for some few kronen inside my bodice and——”

“They come out here practically penniless and with their bare hands, and their courage, and their grit, they build up the name Schuyler to one of the most upstanding in the state. We’re not what you’d call a moneyed family, but by Gad, we’re as upstanding as they come. The name Schuyler has come to be in these parts synonymous with salt-of-the-earth. Those two little peasants that got off the coach here forty-odd years ago, have put their notch in what’s called the backbone of this country. We’re the backbone. You’ve got it in you, Henry, with your head on those shoulders of yours and your reputation for being a sort of Cincinnatus at the plow hereabouts, to make this here name Schuyler not only the salt of this here county, but salt of the earth the country over. I know I haven’t always done all the fine things I set out to accomplish, due to no fault of mine. I’m part boob, but you’re a big man, only you haven’t got the sense to show it. No siree, you haven’t got the right to deprive this family of adding inches to its stature. Why, man alive, men with no more brains to them than you’ve got have become President of these United States of America. Men with no more brains than you’ve got are sitting on Supreme Court benches while I’m saying these words. Fellows holding big office and with twenty times your money, and running to you for advice on the laws of the world, aren’t they?—No siree, you haven’t got the right to deprive the Schuyler family of being as big as its biggest man! No siree!”

Here was Phil, with the little roll of fat above the rear of his collar, bulging and apoplectic with purpose, and his two fists striking against the table again and again, making the apples in the silver-cherub bowl rattle, and all eyes slowly swinging away from the unwinding of the Old Gentleman’s perfect one-piece rind, to burn solemnly upon the speaker.

“Phil’s right, there,” said Bek in her square, even tones. “Leastwise, he’s right until we hear what you have to say in rebuttal.”

“Why, everybody knows Henry’s one of the smartest lawyers in the state. He could be in big-league boots today if—if everything didn’t always seem to seem funny to Henry, instead of worth wanting.”

Curious how even the occasionally pithy remark of Emma’s could go by unheeded.

“Hennery—it would be a fine honor for me and Puppa——”

“You hear now, how your Mother feels! It isn’t often she asks what she wants, in so many words. She just sits and eats out her heart.”

“Phil’s right, Henry.”

Here went Phil, soaring again: “Why, with your mind there’s no telling how far you can go. You read a valedictory on this here town’s high-school platform, when you were sixteen, ought to be printed and put in every boy’s hand in this state today.”

“Beautiful,” said Emma. “I remember I cried. And to cry on a hot night like that meant something.”

“You’re one of the biggest authorities on international law in this country, only you go holler down a well about it.”

“For God’s sake, Phil—let up!”

“Hennery!”

“Sorry, Mother.”

“Why, men from as far east as Pittsburgh and Washington have found their way to that little old dusty office of yours up over a hardware-store. What do you think it does for the rest of us having a man of authority in the family? Take the matter of a man’s credit. Why, just take a man like me. The difference it would make to a man like me in a town like Springfield. Family-standing. Brother of Henry Schuyler. Yes, I’ll say it right out. Selfish, maybe, but I’m honest, that’s all. I’m not afraid a fact will bite me if I say it out. Yessir, I believe in calling a spade a spade, and a big one.”

“Not much sense to calling it a steam-shovel, Phil.”

“That’s all right, Bek. I’m showing my hand a little bit plainer than the rest of you. Pull. Influence. Power. That’s what it will give the family. Not asking anything of him except honor for himself, and, what’s left of it, for us. Why, there’s no telling how far—gives me the shivers, that’s how far a fellow like him can go——”

“Me, too ... right down my spine,” cried Emma, and did shudder a little quite cozily, between her shoulder blades.

“Know something? Well, if you don’t, I’ll tell you. Man named Bill Slade down in our town, newcomer from Indianapolis; nice fellow, quite a promoter from what I understand, and bringing some good capital behind him for a garbage-incinerator project he’s backing, well, that fellow sat next to me at Business Men’s Club lunch other day. One thing brought on another and finally, talking over the Republican state ticket, this fellow says to me, he says, ‘You’re not by any chance related to Henry Schuyler, down Centralia, are you?’ ‘No,’ says I, ‘excepting he happens to be my brother,’ I says to him, just like that. Could have knocked that fellow over with a feather. ‘Well sir,’ he says, ‘there’s a fellow, they tell me, could have the biggest political plums in this state, if he’d a mind to. Why, I hear, if he wasn’t such a queer duck for hiding behind a bushel-basket—why, sir, they tell me that brother of yours, with his slant on things and his reputation for having been the inside brains on everything from water-power to franchise in the state for the last ten years, why, sir,’ Bill Slade says to me, ‘why, sir, a fellow like that there brother of yours, proper handling, can go far. Why, sir,’ Bill Slade says to me, he says, ‘What this state needs is more brainy men like him with hindsight, and fore. A fellow indifferent enough to glory to be able to refuse to let his party tweak his nose and lead him. Why, sir, a fellow like that, proper handling, can go far!’”

“Go far!” said the Old Gentleman, on a sudden snort. “It does me a lot of good if I enter a horse in a race that’s got it in his legs to win, only he won’t leave the post.”

The family laugh broke out on that, and Morton Milliken, entering in corduroys and hip-boots just in time to catch the drift, seated himself beside Emma and placed the large sprawl of his hand against her shoulder.

“What Henry needs is a little political catnip,” he said with the sort of disinterested amiability characteristic of him.

“Yes,” said Henry. “It’s a great game, if you weaken ... enough.”

“Oh well,” said Phil and pushed back his chair with a toss of his napkin toward the center of the table, which his mother caught up and neatly folded, “I don’t see why I am the only one seems to be taking this thing seriously——”

“No, no, son, we all——”

“What say you, Henriette?” cried Phil, suddenly finding her out with his bulging eager eyes, where she sat quietly, a little out of the group around the table, her chair pushed a discreet few inches to the rear, as if to suggest that even though she was a privileged friend of the family, after all, even so close a friend must know her place. “Seems to me, if anybody is entitled to a say around here on this subject, it ought to be you! What say you to Henry’s making little of everything big that comes his way?”

There was Phil for you! Every time! The family drew in a simultaneous breath of embarrassed dismay. Leave it to Phil to overstep. To go too far. The same bungling tongue that doubtless kept matting up his business affairs. The one wrong thing, here it came. The wrong thing that Phil could usually be trusted not to leave unsaid. Sooner or later he would not fail. The composite breath of the family was a pained and embarrassed one.

All except Henriette and Henry. Strangely enough the long, rather spinster-like face of Henriette was not unlike Henry’s in its lantern-like contour. A face shaped somewhat like the sole of a foot, and that even in its twenties had had no particular youth or age to it. At this time Henriette’s face was practically what it would be at forty-six, even to the coloring of the brightly brown bangs. Frizzed ones, worn unfashionably above handsome brows. There was about her, and remained even after she had ceased to teach, the odor of the fifth-grade schoolroom.[13]

Chalk-dust seemed to hang on Henriette’s skin, making it pale and brittle. And chalk seemed forever against her finger-tips, which made her brush them together lightly of a dryness that had a tiny harsh sound to it. She wore a shirtwaist dress of dark-blue silk, with polka-dot collars and cuffs; and a round bag made of tiny steel beads hung from her belt after the fashion of the day.

Except for the fact that she fumbled at this chatelaine, there was nothing about Henriette to denote the flutter of heartbeat underneath the blue silk at this spot light of a remark thrown suddenly upon what might be regarded as her equivocal position of intimacy with the family.

“If Henriette Simpson and Henry Schuyler aren’t engaged, they ought to be,” was about as far as local insinuation could possibly stretch to the apparently impeccable friendship of these two.

To the wrongness of Phil’s question, Henriette revealed an illuminating row of slim, beautifully white teeth.

“Seems to me, Phil,” she said, “that Henry is a pretty fair master of his own soul.”

“Staunch words, friend-ally,” said Henry.

“Who am I to match my judgment against his?”

“That’s what lots of us would like to know,” growled Phil cryptically.

There was a long, stunned moment after that, nothing said, except that over the back of Henry’s neck, so that he put up his hand as if to stem it, there rolled a flush.

To David, lying flat on his stomach, heels waving, and his bright, square gaze carefully averted from his mother’s fluttering one, that rush of red across the back of his brother’s neck was like the running-up of a flag. It was fascinating to have seen it happen. He bored with his bright gaze against the spot, waiting to see what next. When the red that did not belong there faded out, it was disappointing. It just blinked out. Like a light.

“... No siree—neither Democrat or Republican——” Phil was saying to more stamping of fist—“no siree—neither Democrat or Republican——”

“Nor,” said Bek.

“Henry,” said Dave in a shrill voice that he threw into the group, “to be a Republicrun, does it mean to run the Republic?”

“Davey, go to bed!”

Henry had a peculiar kind of ingrowing laugh. Davey loved to watch it. From the carpet-sofa, he could see it begin. Had he been silly? Well, to be a Republicrun could mean to run the Republic. Henry’s was sure to be a silent laugh, almost an imperceptible one, except for the heaving of the shoulders. There was something furtive about Henry’s laughter. There was something about laughter that seemed to make Henry ashamed. He seldom, if ever, showed his teeth. Curiously, again, they were strangely like Henriette’s in shape. Long. Only quite yellow and twice the size of hers. A clean old-ivory yellow. When he laughed, he kept his lips down carefully over them; and, as if from the effort, tears sprang into his eyes and the color dyed his face in splotches. It was altogether a sort of a contortion of a suppressed impulse. He laughed now until the tears in his eyes took form and began to roll, and he had to fumble for the rear trousers pocket of his nondescript gray suit and fish out the great square of cotton handkerchief which his mother ironed for him into the four large folds he liked.

It impressed the family to see Henry laugh. Because he laughed seldom. There was nothing about Davey’s remark that had appealed to the risibilities of any of them. It had only happened to strike Henry’s, probably tapping him of nervous strain to let it rumble out in laughter. Just the same, it was the signal for family-hilarity to mount.

“What’s the joke?” said the Old Gentleman, who himself loved to be the one to arouse family-risibilities and then pretend to feel aggrieved. “Here we sit! We’ve got a fine fifteen-hand trotting-horse, there’s the finest pail of water in the state before him. He won’t drink!”

“You can lead a horse to water,” cried Emma, leaping brightly, “but you cannot ...”

“Yes,” said Morton, and patted her hand.

“... but you cannot—make him drink,” she concluded, on a soprano shriek, and not to be done out of her bon mot.

Henry cleared his throat, and with head lowered, set his piercing eyes upon the Old Gentleman’s apple. The family knew precisely what the Old Gentleman was going to do about that now nude apple. He was going to plug it with his penknife as you would a watermelon, impale each segment upon its tip, and pop them, one by one, into his mouth, for short, audible mastications. The women hated the grinding sound he made, the men scarcely noticed.

“You’re exactly right, Father,” said Henry, strumming his fingers, and his eye unswerving upon the apple. “I’m not thirsty. You people make the mistake of reckoning without your host. Naturally enough, I suppose, under the circumstances. Except you, Bek. I should hardly expect this of you, after the number of times we have been over this sort of thing together.”

“This is different, Henry. This is big stakes. Not just local chicken-feed.”

“It isn’t different. It is just another plan to project me into public life.”

“Sooner or later, Henry, the world will find its way to your door.”

“If what you say is true, Bek, then it must do just that. I am not the man to run out into the public marts to meet it.”

“Man alive, who’s sending you out into the public marts? You talk like Julius Cæsar or one of those guys in a toga. The party for which you’ve never turned a hand comes to your very door to seek you out.”

“‘Know thyself’ isn’t just a copy-book line, Phil, that you used to write in Spencerian fifteen times after school. It’s about the darnedest good advice was ever packed into two words. I’m onto myself sufficiently to realize that my greatest service to my family, my state, my country, does not lie in the public service of holding office.”

“I’ll be dog-goned if it don’t look to me like your idea of your ‘greatest service’ is handing out free advice to everybody from a poor-white squatter who has had his hog poisoned, to a state commission which needs expert advice on a franchise situation. And a pin for your pains! That may be service all right, but its damned idiotic service. All that gives a diamond ring any value is the fact that there’s a price-tag stuck on. Start giving them away, and see how long they keep their value.”

“You’re right, Phil. But hang it, for the life of me I can’t seem as interested in intrinsic values.”

“For the life of you,” said the Old Gentleman, “is the best reason a man has got to be interested in values. In-trinsic—if it means what I think it means, is what you try to forget when you’re trying to sell a fellow a bronze medal.”

“Puppa!” bleated Mathilda.

“Pah!” said the Old Gentleman, dusting his hands free of apple. “Don’t worry. I’m not joking, Mother. If Henry chooses to live and die a poor nobody, that’s his own business.”

“It’s nothing of the sort, Father. It’s the family’s business, too.”

“Well, I’ve never asked any help of my children and I hope to God I’ll never have to.”

“There’s not one of us would fail you, Father,” said pretty Emma.

“I know that. But all the same, I hope to God I never have to.”

“There are men in life, Father, who belong on the captain’s bridge, and there are men who direct the course of a ship, and there are men who build ships, and there are men who raise money to create ships. My job is in the engine-room of a ship. As Phil says, these matters we are discussing are not my own business alone. I have you to consider. But I know myself, Father. I can serve you well from the lower decks of this old boat we’re bobbing along in, but not if you force me out of my greasy old overalls into brass buttons and try to proclaim me captain, when I have the heart of an engineer. I want to serve as passionately as you all want me to serve. But in my own way.”

“What way is that? Hollering down a well? Hiding behind a bushel-basket? Back-door diplomacy?”

“Phil!” cried Henriette, as if she could endure no more—“You don’t understand Henry—none of you—I mean—oh, I mean you can’t tamper with the course of a river or the course of the sun—oh, I mean—what do I mean?” and sat back with her knuckles pressed against her lips as if to stem what further might come indiscreetly rushing to them.

“What Henriette means,” said Henry, stepping in calmly, as if to build a wall of words between her and her flooding embarrassment, “is that my way is the way of a man, Phil, who knows the limits of his strength and the extent of his weaknesses.”

“A man, when the big men of his state and even from Washington look him up in his little office in a small town, don’t talk about his weaknesses.”

“But, Father, therein lies my strength. I am a spectator. I stand by. I can develop wisdom only by attaining knowledge, and my kind of a brain can achieve knowledge by contemplating from the side-lines. I’m like that old fellow Cincinnatus, Father, in one respect anyhow. I think best behind my plow. And my plow is that little old yellow desk up over a hardware-store. It’s the nature of the beast. Surely you must understand.”

“I understand that no one with the brains you’re supposed to have, would turn down the opportunity to put some of those brains to turning a wheel. I’m not saying the attorneyship in itself is the biggest plum in the world. It’s what it can and will lead to. Power, man. That’s what counts.”

“That’s Henry’s whole point, Phil, and as usual, you’ve gone elaborately out of your way to miss it. He’s just finished saying that his power, he believes, lies behind the machine of state.”

“That’s it exactly, Bek.”

“Pah, wouldn’t give a nickel for that behind-the-throne stuff. I’d rather have been Marc Antony than Mark Hanna. Believe me, the up-and-coming man of today is the up-and-going one. Get into big business, or politics. Not only get your hand on the lever that controls the machine, but be the machine. Huh—if I had your chance——”

“If ifs and ands,” said Emma, and smiled at her brother—“were pots and pans——”

“You want this town to furnish bond to secure factories and foundries, don’t you, Henry?”

“Yes, Centralia’s water-power warrants it.”

“Good. You believe that the grade-crossing conditions in this town are a menace to public safety and should be radically dealt with! You believe that outside capital should be attracted into the state. You believe, according to an article of yours in some law magazine called Civic Inventory, that Elihu Perkins quoted at the Chamber of Commerce, up home last week, that towns under half a million population, Centralia for instance, should be run by about twelve members of a board of estimate and apportionment. Well and good! You believe, according to that article, that in making a budget, the civic organization must be the hub, bringing all the civic interests together like the spokes in a wheel. Mighty fine way you put it, ‘The spokes in a wheel.’ Well, you try just blowing off steam about it in a magazine article, and then being in a position to pull strings, that can set some of those theories into practice, and see which gets you there quickest.”

“I know, Phil. Every man who shares Blue Plate luncheons with you at the Business Men’s Club agrees with that.”

“Bet your life they do, because they’re the go-getters without your brains to go-get! Yessiree, you disbelieve in capital punishment, don’t you? You say Prohibition is bound to come in this country, but you favor a light-wine-and-beer plank, but only one that the people themselves demand, don’t you? You’re watching that Hague show over there, aren’t you? They come to you to get your opinion on the Johnston extradition-matter, don’t they? You were the mainspring behind the Centralia municipal-bond issue for sewerage-extensions and additional fire-protection, weren’t you? You believe that the Taft administration is in a position to do important things for the country, don’t you? Well? Well? From up over your hardware-store, what wheel does it all turn? No wheel! You spend your brain-money like water, and the other fellow cashes in on it. Bah, that’s not even good Americanism!”

“Phil,” said Rebekka, regarding him with a slow, tired tolerance that made her eyes crinkle, “you’re a fool. Perhaps it is Henry, of all of us, who is truly American. Show me a man in this town, in this county, in this state, with enough idealism in him to turn his face away from the marts of men, if he had the ability and the opportunity Henry has. Would you turn yours away?”

“No, by God. Gad, Mother. Gad, and I’m not ashamed to say so. Maybe Father might. Hanged if I know. With all his shrewdness, I’ve seen him do sky-larking things in business that you couldn’t account for. He’d be a far richer man today except for those blind spots in his dealings, like staying out of the Fulton Market project that time, for fear of having a hand in damaging Milliken’s residential property along Third Street when there was a garage already horning in. That’s what they call in the classics, tilting at windmills. Guess you know all about that deal, Morton?”

“I do seem to remember something about it.”

“I never knew, Pap, up to a year ago, from old man Grokin in Springfield, that you went flat broke the year Bek was born, trying to save some low-down crook of a cattle-dealer, who had double-crossed you, from going to pen.”

“Why, Father, did you really?” cried Emma, her mouth falling open in easy surprise.

“Sure he did. That’s fine. That’s great. But it was tilting at windmills. Didn’t save the dirty little crook from dying in the pen, so Grokin told me, did it?”

“But I didn’t put him there.”

“Why, take Fulton Market today, what you bet, Morton, that your old man would think even better of Pap than he does, if Pap had jumped in and cleaned up on that deal.”

“I’ve never discussed it with Father, Phil.”

“Maybe Henry is a chip off the old block, eh, Pap?”

“Henry is chip off the old block, but the block is not me. It’s the block of his own hard-headedness. I don’t go into a deal that will shove meat-market business property next door to my friend’s residential holdings, and ease my conscience telling it there’s a garage already there; but I don’t hesitate over the difference between doing something and getting the honor for it myself, or doing it and letting somebody else get the honor for it. If it was me in Henry’s place, I would say to myself you’re a fool if you don’t take all the honors they pile on you.”

“Now you’re shouting, Pap!”

“But if I was in Henry’s place, and felt like he does about it, then I would tell the whole business of them to go straight to hell.”

“Puppa! Davey, go to bed!”

“You’re swell, Papa,” said Rebekka, winking broadly, brazenly and with an open grimace toward Phil.

That seemed to startle the family plumage. Clara, sitting forward on the edge of her chair, with her china-blue eyes dots of exclamation, and Emma looking like a broody hen that had suddenly been startled off her nest.

“All right, have it your own way, Pap, only I say again, Father ought to be as rich a man today as there is in the county, instead of just bobbing along, middling well-off and putting up what he can lay hands on as collateral to help somebody else get by.”

“That’s the least, Phil.”

“Easy enough, Henry, for a bachelor to look at matters this way, and regard money as only a secondary consideration. Guess if the truth is known, that’s the answer to the mystery why you stay bachelor.”

There was Phil again with his turtle-shot gesture of head toward Henriette! The family fingers curved inward, of instinct to throttle him.

“Yes siree, easy enough for a bachelor, but there’s not a member of this family with his head high enough above water financially to see shore. We’re a funny crowd thataway. I’m not here to talk about myself, but take me, for instance. You don’t need me to tell you, Pap, that with capital in back of me, I’d be in a position to ride in on a land-boom in my town that would put it on the map.”

“No, Phil, I don’t need you to tell me you need money.”

“There you go, always ready to dig the spurs into me. But look at yourself, Father. Generally acknowledged to shrewdest cattleman in the state, natural kind of smartness to you that can’t be learned in schools—what have you got to show for your years and years of rising at dawn, trapesing through snow and sleet and rain while other folks are asleep—what’s it got you, compared to what you ought to have?”

“I’ve got this much. I don’t owe a penny that I can’t show land-collateral for. I’ve got a name as clean as a whistle. I’ve got——”

“Of course you have, Father. That’s just the point. Here’s as straight-dealing a family as there is. Father’s word as good as his bond. Misses-out making himself a rich man in the Fulton Market deal, out of purely ethical consideration for a friend....”

“That’ll be about enough of that, Phil,” drawled Morton; “nobody’s contesting that point.”

“Sorry, Mort. No reflections on your old man.”

“It’s not considerate, Phil,” said Emma, and dotted the back of her husband’s hand with little pats from the darning-ball. “Father’s always been only too happy to go Grandfather Milliken’s collateral. Grandfather Milliken would do as much for him.”

“Mort knows his old man stands all to the good with me. I’m just pointing out that Father’s only well-off, when he ought to be rich. Land-poor, when he ought to be pocket full. Nothing personal in what I’m trying to say.”

“You are not so wrong there, son. Land sucks the money up.”

“Look at Bek. Best business man in this county.”

“I’m just one of the Schuyler boys,” said Bek, drily.

“That girl’s working the best farm within a hundred mile radius. Runner-up to the Howey place itself. With capital, she could make the Howey place look like a dime. Capital. That’s what she needs.”

“Capital is right, but I’ll compromise for the moment on those eight Poland-China sows over at Pemberton’s I’m trying to make him take my sixty-day note on.”

“Well, be as funny as you like, pigs is pigs. I know the power of money. I know that if Morton here didn’t have his inheritance from his grandmother tied up, he’d probably be building bridges instead of laying out the sewerage of the back streets of this town.”

“We can’t complain, Phil. Morton’s doing well, and his father is paying off the house for us.”

“Well, just the same, with the right kind of pull, he’d be in on the big plums.”

“A fellow can’t crash through the politics of this town.”

“Exactly, Morton! What this family needs is the kind of political influence that gave the Whittier family the position it holds. You don’t think Ephraim Howey would ever be where he is if Zach Whittier hadn’t happened to be his father-in-law, do you? You don’t think Ryan Whittier cleared a cool million on that Light and Power deal, do you, just because it fell into his lap? Every member of the Whittier family owes where and what he is to Zach Whittier. He went out for political power. He got political power. Long before Howey ever dreamed he could do more than polish the handles of the big front door of the gubernatorial mansion, Zach was throwing this and that municipal and state plum in his son-in-law’s way, so that he couldn’t get past without stumbling over them. That’s how the Whittiers became what they are today in this state. Zach Whittier had talents, and he used them.”

“That’s exactly what I’m doing, Phil,” said Henry, swinging his long, lean lantern of a face toward his brother. “Using my talents, such as they are, to their best advantage. God knows I wish it were in my power to elevate the family fortunes. But it isn’t, Phil. I’m not the stuff of which rich men are made. It doesn’t worry me, either, except when it worries you.”

“I’m not saying it worries me....”

“You are, Phil,” cried Bek. “You’re saying it for all of us. Well, it doesn’t worry me.”

“Nor me.”

“Me neither.”

“It doesn’t worry me neither, son, so much as the waste of the smartness. Your mother and I have no kick coming. I’m better on my feet today than any loafer I employ on the place. We’ve got a good administration in Taft. I see good crops and good times ahead, if not this year, maybe next. We’ve got our health. Our children, God forbid we should ever need it, we have around us in case of need. All we are asking now is honor. Honor is about to come to one of us. We want to honor back the country that took in two immigrants, all those years ago, by giving the best we got.”

“And that’s you!”

“We’ve got a little fellow growing up in this family Henry. It would be fine if he should grow up in a family that has been honored....”

“Davey, go to bed! I knew he’d fall asleep there!”

Bek leaned forward. “Father’s hit the nail on the head there, Henry,” she said softly, with her face carefully averted from the small, sleeping form on the carpet couch. “Supposing he were to grow up into a great successful family like the Whittiers or the Howeys, family that has an Attorney General in it isn’t to be sneezed at.”

“Don’t worry about Dave, Bek. I’ll lay a red chip on him. There’s quite a few little fellows have managed to grow up into a pretty fine manhood, in spite of District Attorney in the family, too. Don’t worry about Dave. Dave’s all right.”

Dave. Dave. Dave. The name kept flickering against his eyes, as he lay half-asleep round and warm, on the sofa, while the carpet-nap ground in against his cheek. He had been dreaming, ever so lightly, in between the little pecking admonitions of his mother and his own mouthings-back. His mouth ached a little from grimaces. The snatches of dreams had a to-be-continued quality to them, like the newspaper comic strips that he devoured from day to day. They were of Minute Men in knee-breeches, and three-cornered hats trimmed with pen-wipers.

Rub-a-dub-dub. There was a line of them, with short, white stiffish plaits of hair, like a sow’s tail when you hold it out of kink, marching down an old street in one of the gray-looking pictures that hung in Henry’s room. The Minute Men at Charlestown. The two foremost rows of them carried drums and short fifes. Poised against the drums were short sticks ready to r-r-r-rattle. Henry knew forty stories about them. “I’ll lay a red chip on him.” Now why did Henry want to lay a red chip on him? Tiddlywinks. There was an old set in the attic over at Dora Tarkington’s.

The Minute Men in their three-cornered hats marching past an old state-house with columns down the front like Renchler’s house—the Minute Men at Lexington ... don’t worry about Dave—Dave—Dave. The name kept flickering like a match before his consciousness. Who? Me? When he forced open his eyes finally, stretching his small body so that it rose in an arch off the sofa, there was the family of grown-ups, down among whose knees he lived, regarding him.

FOOTNOTES: