Chapter Forty

The impending event of conclave shone in the Old Gentleman’s eyes all through the hours of serving, of eating, of the rushing of the women hither and thither of the tilting of the pitchers of cider, the ladling of the gravy and the vegetable-dishes, of the high, querulous voices of the children, grand and great-grand; through Mathilda’s fluty voice, importuning her young, her very young, and her middle-aged to partake more freely, or not too freely, of the bounty she quivered and fussed and rushed to place before them. Platters, held high to avoid spill and collision, clicked with narrowness of escape. Rose the rich, hot smells of winter foods that had simmered in their juices. The spice of cider. The flicker of blue flame across the dome of suet-pudding. The popping of the toy balloons that Winslow had ordered Bek to order by catalogue. And through all this charivari of the Schuylers, the Old Gentleman, his grandchildren from time to time crawling over his legs and matting up his beard, looked out upon the scene and waited. Waited while he joked with his daughters, rebuked, dandled, teased the youngsters, put out a sly foot to trip his Bek, as she slid her large frame into the narrows gauge between tables to remove plates.

“Father, that’s just terrible to do a crude thing like that! Bek might have fallen. Besides, I don’t think it’s a bit funny to do before the children either,” remonstrated sweet Emma in her treble.

“Aunt Emma is mad at great-grandpa,” said the Old Gentleman, mushing his lips against the soft, yellow hair of Steve’s eldest little girl.

“Puppa,” quavered Mathilda faintly, “a little dignity before the children, please!”

“Dignity comes cheap. Cigar-store Indians have it.”

“Well, we won’t argue it, Father,” said Bek, “only please don’t trip up your stout, middle-aged daughters as they try to serve you candied yams. It just isn’t done.”

He leaned back in his chair to regard her, his sly old face foreshortened and his eyes creased into a sucking swirl of wrinkles.

“My daughter’s been a good son to me.”

Almost without precedent for her, she leaned over and pecked a kiss on the wrinkled old mat of a face.

“Not one of us is good enough, Father! Hadn’t you better clear out the youngsters? They’re getting restless.”

It was then that the Old Gentleman brought down his fist as if it were a gavel.

“Clear out the children and close those folding-doors. Dave, sit over here.”

Conclave was on. Not a Schuyler but knew the call. A Schuyler about to be born. About to be praised. About to be rebuked. About to be reminded that the stern ideals of the House were the stern ideals of the Mosaic Law. Commandments. To be written on the tablet of the heart. A humble house, but one that already had plunged root deeply and proudly into three generations of the soil. The same soil that had first fostered the Old Gentleman with the straight bolt of duty for a mouth, and the pallid Mathilda, whose eyes were no less steadfast than the straightness of that mouth.

Bek bundled off the last of the grandchildren.

Finally, the doors closed, the shades drawn, the ugly little Igrotte dining-room cleared of the extra table and jammed with the Schuyler faces, every member of the family knew, without the first word having been spoken: that this wasn’t really Henriette’s and Henry’s day at all.

This was David’s conclave.

He sat on the arm of Henry’s chair, a lank fellow of square, white face that flickered behind his spectacles with a nervous batting of his eyes; and, above the soft blue collar of the adult shirts he was beginning to inherit from the well-worn stock of Henry, his Adam’s-apple rode like a buoy.

By now, there was a marked Schuyler-cast to his face. The something in the bone-structure of it that made it four-cornered. Cheek-bones strictly vertical above jawbones. Brow that was set across with the perfectly horizontal adjustment of a key pediment.

The Old Gentleman and most of his offspring—with the exception of Steve’s little boy, who was Mathilda all over again, and Emma, who was like a big, flowering Viking out of nowhere—had that rectangular type of face.

A great-grandfather, named Hans Milton Schuyler, who had been his own plow-ox on a Swiss farm sixty-eight years before, had been known as far as Engeborg and as wide as Saalsberg, as “Breitgesicht,” which in Swiss means “square-face.” It was just about now that David, ceasing to gangle his way upward into greater height, was to begin to settle tightly into the squat hewn and thewed look of face and figure that was to make him even more susceptible to cartoon and caricature than Roosevelt.[66]

He might easily have been the son of Henry, as he sat there on the arm of his chair, dangling a long, loose leg and batting his nervous eyelids under the circling buckshot of Schuyler eyes that were slowly swinging into tribal circle.

Conclave was on, and it was characteristic of the Old Gentleman not to bandy words.

“Dave, come here!”

His mother flung up a protesting flutter of hand against her throat, as if a pain had smote her.

The boy strode immediately beside his father, the dignity of his swift, sure obedience blurred a bit by the batting eyelids and that violent thing, his Adam’s-apple, beating relentlessly against his collar.

“Phil,” said the Old Gentleman, taking his youngest’s hand and swinging his quizzical old head round to where sat his rotund second son, “Dave’s made up his mind to go to Springfield.”

“That’s all right with us, Father. Isn’t it, Rita?”

“Indeed it is, Father Schuyler.”

Rita, who always wore large, pink pearls in her ears and against her soft and fat white neck, had an invariable gesture of seeming to protect the beads against the tugs of her youngest child. She was a soft, voluble little person, prematurely gone fat, given to a certain amount of self-pity but outstandingly generous in her sympathies toward others. The too-ready tear, the too-ready laugh, hung on the brink of Rita’s eye and lip. All her life, small partridge of a person that she was, she was destined to be interrupted in the middle of a sentence. They came so volubly. In such quick succession. So sure-fire commonplace. Even her children had a way of chopping her off along about the middle of the predicate.

“As I always say to Phil, we haven’t got much but, what we have got is ...”

“I think Dave has made a pretty good decision, Father. Maybe you wouldn’t judge so from my present performance, but what I said to him a year ago, holds today. Springfield hasn’t licked me yet by a long shot. It’s a live town for a live fellow.”

“St. Louis is a good town,” interposed Clara into this concatenation of family-events. “If Sam had only had the gumption when he was a younger man! Why, most of the men in the big wholesale-shoe crowd on Washington Avenue started in as city-salesmen!”

Years of bitterness on this subject had worn down Clara’s voice to a whine when she broached it. St. Louis, which she chose to denounce upon every occasion as a city which had throttled her dreams and initiated her into the scrimped existence of the wife of a city-salesman, had long since shed its first years of strangeness to her. Now, after eighteen years, it was secretly near and dear to her. But she still nagged persistently to Sam, that life there, so remote from her home and parents, was a meager and thankless affair.

As a matter of fact, at the close of the first few days of her annual visits home, an actual nostalgia for the scenes and friends of the city of her constant denunciations began to set in. Her eldest daughter was already a prize pupil in the third grade of the St. Louis public schools and Sam practically a pillar, by now, of the Second Presbyterian Church. They shared the upper floor of a “St. Louis flat” with a family who owned a Buick sedan and was generous with it. Clara herself belonged to a sewing, a bridge, and a window-garden club, and was beginning to enjoy contacts with the wives of men who were in business for themselves.

Clara’s Mecca. Business for themselves! Sometimes to Sam, who was a steady, plodding man of modest desires, that phrase could close like a tomb around his contentment. “Business for himself.” That phrase was a din in his ears.

“I’m a great believer that the boy who starts out in life with his eye on getting himself into business for himself as soon as possible, is the one who will escape the rut.”

Clara’s relationship to David was something as baffling to her as it was abstruse. Eight years after her marriage to Sam and her subsequent removal to St. Louis, David had been born.

He was a perpetual shock to her on her return visits. For the life of her, she could not associate him with her girlhood background.

Her own children were full of curious questions about him that she could not quite answer. It smote her one middle-of-the-night that he would be great uncle to her first grandchild, and she wakened the snoring Sam at her side to put the fantastical idea before him.

It is doubtful, if in all, Clara and Dave had ever exchanged an hour’s talk, and that never sustained beyond the casual. And yet here he was, this remote brother of hers, who might have been son, needing something she felt it part of her tribal responsibility to be able to give him, and feeling somehow, a smoldering anger against the absent Sam.

“If only Sam were in business for himself, instead of a man on a small salary, Dave could come to us and learn the wholesale shoe-trade. Sam says St. Louis is the coming shoe-center of the—whole world!”

“Know what I was thinking the other night, Henry? S’pose you double the grazing-area of this country by raising reindeer in Alaska. Well, double the grazing area and see how it affects the leather-industry——”

“Well, I don’t know anything about that, but I do know that if Sam had been the man to push himself——”

“Your point is well taken, boy,” said Henry, and the large, slow smile began to shoot in wrinkles from his eye-corners—“well taken, but out of order, I should say.”

With a sensitiveness to the slightest rebuke or poke of fun from Henry that was never to leave him, the sides of David’s head seemed to lighten suddenly with the flash of two pink ears, and a flooding flush of embarrassment ran down into the soft, blue, attached collar of a shirt that had already served Henry and served him well.

“It just kinda came to me, all of a sudden, is all I meant.”

“That’s exactly Dave’s difficulty,” said Bek, her eyes, that always flowed beneficence for him, full of a mock despair. “I’m sure that right now he’s standing there trying to decide at the last minute whether he’s starting out to be an astronomer, a taxidermist, or a——”

“God forbid!”

“A policeman, a Senator, a veterinary, a bank teller, a sheep-herder, an explorer, a wholesale shoe-merchant, a doctor, a lawyer, a merchant, a chief, or a——”

“Many the good veterinarian that has been sacrificed to the United States Senate.”

“Hennery!”

“Well, we don’t need any veterinarians in the family.”

“Better in the family, Bek, than in the Senate!”

“Nonsense, a veterinarian in the Senate is worth two in the family.”

“What’s all this talk about a vegetarian in the family?”

“A veterinarian, Father!”

“What’s the difference, they are both for letting the animal live, aren’t they?”

Paula, who outside of her teaching had started a batik, painted-shoe-trees, character-doll, telephone-doll, hot-muffin, jasmine teas, book-ends, art-smock, and candied-praline shop in Cleveland, in partnership with a teacher in night school (who had advanced the initial two hundred dollars), leaned over to her brother Steve.

“Isn’t the darling priceless? I could get him big time in vaudeville.”

“Or Sing Sing,” laughed Steve and laid a friendly and conservative wallop across his grandfather’s shoulders.

“At my age,” said the Old Gentleman, “I don’t expect big time any more. In Sing Sing, or out of it.”

“Puppa!”

“Guess, Mother, why my life is like a tail.”

“Puppa!”

“Because it’s all behind me. Sometimes I think it’s ahead of Davey, but like a tail, too, and one that he’s trying to put salt on.”

“Father—don’t tease!”

“But, Father—my mind’s made up for sure—this time!”

“That’s a fact, Father, all joking aside. Dave’s been over this thing with me same as he has with you. That’s the hurry idea of putting it up to Phil and Rita now. Dave’s missed three weeks of the evening law-session down Springfield now, as I understand. Dave’s come through about this present plan on his own voluntary decision. Isn’t that about it, Dave?” said Henry, fixing on him the eye of an ally.

“That’s it, Father,” said Dave, on a gulp, and looking around at the fortress of friendly faces, began to bat his eyes. “Not much to herding—is there—for a fellow like me——”

“There’s not much to herding except to a fellow that was born to be a herder.”

“Be surprised, though, Father—fellow learns a lot about how ants and sheep and butterflies and chipmunks and field-mice and skunks manage their world.”

“Skunks,” said Phil, “that’s a mighty helpful part of a fellow’s education!”

“Mebbe, if it helps you recognize a human skunk when you meet one. The world’s full of them without the smell.”

“Puppa!”

“Yea, and watching butterflies—they’ll get you pretty far, Kid, in the world you happen to be born into. Try concentrating on cream-separators or garbage-incinerators. They’ll get you further.”

“Oh, Phil,” cried Rita, with a ripple across a face that was seldom marred by petulance. “What’s funny in that? Can’t you let the boy alone?”

“I knew a fellow once, up St. Louis way,” said the Old Gentleman, “made a fortune out of some sort of a dredging-machine. Got the idea from lying on his back in the park zoo Sunday afternoons, watching the rhinoceros dig himself out of some Missouri mud they’d spilt in his tank.”

“Dave’s got more information,” said Henry, “up there in that kinda blockhead of his, than you’d think, offhand, Phil.”

“Don’t I know it? Can’t anybody around here stand a little kidding?”

“Cut it out, Henry. I don’t need anybody tooting my horn.”

“You see, Phil, the boy’s idea in going to Springfield is a sound one.”

“Sure it is. I’ve been after him to come to us for a year. Springfield is a live town, and a boy in a wholesale grocery-firm can work his way either in or out of it.”

“Exactly, and as Dave has figured it out, what with your offer to roof him, it’s as good a place as any, and maybe a little better, to—get his start in.”

“Better, I’ll say!”

“Exactly. To get himself a law-education evenings and at the same time scrape together his meal-ticket on a daytime job. That about it, Dave?”

“Yes,” said David, and stood up suddenly with a click of his muddy heels, in the attitude that was to be so characteristic of him on rostrum and lecture-platform. A rather defiant, inelegant throwback of figure, elbows hugging his sides, head tilted, and his legs in the attitude of a trained runner about to swing into motion.[67]

“You see, Father, I’m no good at inventing or engineering or exploring or any of those things that some fellows have done to move the world along. But Henry and I know that as sure as we’re standing here, the time is coming when aeroplanes are going dipping around the world just as plentiful as trains. No man-control at all, but operated by wireless. Well, that’s the way I feel about a job. I’m no good at inventing the wireless, but if I could get a job where I’m the wireless-apparatus itself ... that’s where I’d come in.”

“Times are better for a young fellow now than they were when I first went to Springfield,” said Phil, with sagging, disappointed lines springing about his mouth. “It’s the age of nerve and it’s the young have the most of it. Take the building-trade in my town. I took my plunge just ten years too soon.”

“I think I’d like the building-business, Phil! You know what? Henry, I was thinking. Take the lay-out of towns today. The whole system has got to change in the next twenty years. People ten miles out won’t be in the suburbs any more. They’ll be ten minutes by plane from....”

“The building-business, eh? Well, how would you like to go into the automobile, Oriental-rug, the ladies’-wear, the coffin-manufacturing, the vacuum-cleaner, the banking, the baking, or the breeding-of-tadpoles business? Or would you compromise on taking a twelve-dollar-a-week job licking stamps for a fellow named Ox White, whose got a mail-order business, selling radios?”

“I’d like that fine, Phil! Funny thing, but I was thinking to myself last night in bed, know something that will save a lot of time and money for the Government? Get before them, so they see what you’re talking about, the idea of the further development of the C.O.D. mail-delivery and it’s going to revolutionize——”

“Save it, or try it out on Ox. He’s a great one for ideas and cigar coupons!”

“Phil!” called Rita, and looked with her sweet eyes at Dave, as if she could cry for him.

“Oh, let me alone, can’t you, Rita? The kid’s got to get practical sooner or later, doesn’t he?”

“Oh, I know what I’m up against, all right.”

“I wonder!” said Bek. “I wonder!”

“He’s never had advantages like my other children,” suddenly bleated Mathilda, coming up behind the chair of her youngest. She was like a wraith of hunger, of yearning, and of torment of self-indictment. “He’s had just scraps all his life.”

“Nonsense, Mother!” said Henry, frowning. “What the rest of us had in advantages, he’s made up for in his way, and don’t you forget it! The boy’s all there—a little nutty on the speed-age, it’s true, without ever asking himself where all this speed is going to take us!”

“But, Henry, you’re the one who sees it as much as I do. More!”

“What if I do? Whither, is what I’m asking—now that we’ve got it, what are we going to do with it?”

“Davey!” There was his mother’s hand on his shoulder again. It was light as a leaf. It was lighter. It was as veined and as palsied as if a wind were trembling it. It made him want to cry. The lightness, the timidity and the fact that even with its frailty, its callous places hooked onto the nap of his coat. How doggedly and persistently, ever since he had known those small, claw-like hands, they had poured out twice the strength of which they seemed capable.

Her children like to tell of her, a little wistfully and a little humorously, how she had once lugged a kicking calf who had poked his luckless head into a hornet’s nest, moaning and plunging, the two miles from the ravine where she found it, back to the Igrotte house, where she deposited it in the barn and fainted.

The odor of lye and soft soap hung chillily about Mathilda. Every day that Davey had ever known her, the gray wisp of her figure had lumbered through the dawns, bent at some chore too heavy for her. The bluish smoke of frying foods enveloped this sudden heart-hurting procession of his memories of her, as her hand lay like a flake upon his shoulder. She was forever at doing things that curved her thin back into a hook. Winding a windlass to raise a bucket of water. Stooping to draw her pans of well-risen bread out of the oven. Sweeping out a hen-roost, her head wrapped in the blue bandanna kerchief that hung behind the kitchen door, waiting for her.

The bandages she had wound! Not only around Davey, but around the quinsy sore throats, the cut fingers, the twisted ankles of farm-hand, neighbor, man, woman, and child. The liniment she had rubbed! The ducklings, the bulls, the rams, the ewes, the kittens, the colts, the calves, the chickens, she had ministered to, moving through the soft or freezing dawns, as the case might be, barn and barnyard flickering to the swinging of her lantern.

Once, when Dave was eight and had a diphtheritic sore throat, and hoof-and-mouth disease was among the cattle, and a cow with calf was giving dangerous and premature birth, she had fluctuated, the night through, between helping the Old Gentleman in the barn, returning to the house every so often to strip off her clothing for garments that had not been exposed to the cattle; then to the swabbing of David’s throat and back into the gray slip of a cotton dress with the blood-spots on it; out once more into a blackness that seemed to cut her in two as it struck her on the walk from the kitchen across the chicken-yard to the low, red building that was filled with the sobbing of a cow in labor.

There was no attitude of a human being in toil or fatigue that all through his life was not to suggest to David, his mother. A figure lugging a pail of water across a field as his train sped by. A sway-back woman with her arms filled. A head lolling on tired shoulders. A pair of knotted hands that, in repose, were stiff and ill-at-ease looking.

How frequently she went about her service, drawing on the secret spring of her strength, her large, milky eyes tired, yet full of the strange exultation of self-torture.

The way she pressed food upon her menfolk, almost with the fanatical zeal of one whose own hungers could be vicariously assuaged by the sight of their indulgence.

For years the Old Gentleman had wailed, “Mother, stop watching me eat! Come eat with me!”

When her children, including Dave, had grown in years and weight to an age where she could scarcely bear up under the burden of lugging them in arms, she had continued to carry them, glorying with perhaps the inner exultation of sacrifice, in the burdens that her Lord had seen fit to bestow.

She was like a stone at the heart of her family, Mathilda was. Every one of her children, and the Old Gentleman as well, was sooner or later to come to know the bitter sweetness of heartache for Mathilda.[68]

Her relentless industry. Her fanaticism for service. Her mute power of reproach. Not reproach against those she served, but because under her very feet, as it were, her world, that she labored so to conserve, ran away from under her like sands.

Her hands were not only horny, but empty. She had gathered a harvest by their productivity, and the reproductivity of her body, only in order that she might lose it.

The granaries of her house and her heart were continually emptying themselves faster than they were restored. And now David, who had come into her autumn and was leaving her in the dead of her winter.

It was not merely as if the hand on Dave’s shoulder pressed against the nap of his coat and the nap of his flesh, it was more as if it melted and ran along through his veins, into their stream and pumping through his heart, made it ache.

Bek knew precisely what David was feeling then. That same pain racked her most when she woke up during the low-ebb hours of the night, with a troubled awareness of that small, shriveled figure of her mother lying two miles away in the Igrotte house.

Henry knew the ache that went with contemplation of his mother. It made him sometimes brusque with her.

Clara too, to whom events back home, as she viewed them from St. Louis, were somehow as through the wrong end of the opera-glasses, and Phil, who took the background of family too much for granted to notice, did regard his mother, once in a rare while, with something of an indefinable pain for the manner in which the years had gnarled her.

Mathilda somehow had grown old in the way of a fruit tree that had borne long and richly.

Emma sometimes frankly cried to Bek, asking passionately and rebelliously what Mother ever got out of it, she’d like to know.

Why—why—nonsense, Mother got plenty out of it.

The Old Gentleman, who loved her, and who was slightly afraid of her terrible meekness and the hint of hurt disapproval that it shrouded, thought too, when he thought about it at all, which was seldom, that Mathilda had got plenty out of it. Love and fear of her Protestant God. A good wifehood. A superb motherhood. A family consistently striking deeper and deeper root into a soil that had fostered it.

The Old Gentleman could strut of this sense of his Americanism. Probably once a year he got his yellowing citizenship-papers out of a drawer in his desk he kept locked, and with his steel-rimmed spectacles low on his nose, reread them. It pleased him to think that his children had never one of them set foot out of America. Americans all.[69]

Henry was the only possible exception. But as the old Ex-Governor had once put it, he was perhaps the best American of them all. That he dared, benignly, to challenge the cardinal virtue of patriotism, one-hundred-per-centism, Protestantism, Rotarianism was Henry’s way. Not to be taken seriously.

Mathilda herself never challenged. She was only hurt, deep down into the very sinews of her being, with the pain that she carried about with her into her barnyards. To her churning. To her perpetual task of laying patches against men’s clothing, and opening the squeaking beaks of poultry to the medicine-dropper.

It was as vague, this pain, as her sense of the surface of her body. She could not have analyzed it. But it was what her young son, standing there in the abashed throes of family-analysis, seemed to feel melting in the shape of her hand through his coat, into his blood, and washing painfully around his heart.

“It’s not easy for a boy with no advantages these days. Our Dave hasn’t had them....”

“Mother,” he cried, and turned passionately toward the hovering gray of her figure—“quit saying that, can’t you? I’ll get on all right. I’m going to get me a good job in a good town.”

“Attaboy, Dave,” cried Phil, “the boy that starts right in that town today, can clean it up and run it—I came ten years too soon.”

“Sure I am, Mother.”

“Attaboy,” cried Phil, and whacked him on the back so that his spectacles jumped.

“Quit!”

Mathilda regarded her youngest with eyes that seemed to crawl out toward him with their love and gratitude.

“I’ve got you ready, son. Six as new shirts as a boy ever left home with. Flannels and middle-weights. There’s a patch had to be laid on the blue serge, Dave, but it’s an excellent suit for every-day—with overalls, for sweeping out office of a morning. You can travel in it, son. The patch won’t show up, son, if you’re right careful about your stoops.”

“Mother,” cried Dave and sprang back from the stroke of her thin hand, “not that old serge to travel in! What if Dor—what if somebody’s down at the train to see me off. Wouldn’t I be a pretty sight—backing away? Gee, a fellow’s got to look right, traveling, Mother.”

“You can have my middle-weight gray pants,” said Henry, rising as if to conclude the occasion. “You’re right. A fellow on his way to the conquest of Springfield is entitled to a pair he is not ashamed to turn his back on his home-town in.”

“Hen-nery!” fluttered Mathilda, “be refined!”

FOOTNOTES: