Chapter Thirty-five

Lopsidedly, the rust-colored, pot-bellied stove in Henry’s office had whirred through its twenty winters. Second-hand originally, in setting it up the fourth leg had come off, so that from the beginning, it had stood propped on two wooden blocks. Its hoarse, hurried whisper was indissolubly associated with that flimsy-walled room in one of the few frame buildings that remained on High Street.

It was probably the only coal-stove left in a High Street office. It had a gaseous, soft-coal breath that hovered over the place even when August crowded its humidity into the little room. Its soot lay along the mountain-ridges of the relief-map of North America that occupied one entire wall, like the grime in the wrinkles of an old gypsy’s face.

There was never a time within Davey’s recollection, when the Socrates on the bookcase had not grime in the curlicues of his hair or along the deep sills of his eye-sockets, or when the top of Henry’s yellow oak table, that served as desk, was not gritty to the touch. Usually Henry sat in a swivel-chair, with one bony knee crooked against the table-edge, and foot dangling free of the floor. Except when a client was present. Then it was his idiosyncrasy to seat the client in the swivel-chair, where the hard light from the window fell upon his face, and himself occupy the casual straight chair alongside.

It was a motley, ill-ordered table-top. For as long as Davey could remember, a horseshoe had dangled from a nail at one end, and to which nail the countless zigzag rents in Henry’s seersucker coat bore witness.

Briefs piled in stacks had slid down along themselves. A magnificent plaster-of-Paris Holstein-Friesian bull, of the vintage of a Nineteen-Hundred-and-One State Fair browsed in the center of a litter of ink and mucilage pots. Above the table was a flecked picture of Abraham Lincoln, that had once been given away, on his birthday with a Sunday edition of the Kansas City Star. An excerpt from his Gettysburg speech was pasted alongside:

... that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

It might be said of Henry that he dallied for hours in his swivel to the rhythm of that segment of the speech. Not consciously. The text of it was almost part of his very texture. In that speech was Henry fluttering for flight. In that speech his cry, his plea, his dread, his hope, his passionate yet passive caring about men and their emancipations. Tilted in his swivel for hours, he could regard the bit of print, without actually seeing it, but soaked in its rhythm, which was the rhythm to which he swung his knee and tilted in his chair and passed his days. Alone. As much as they would let him be. Flies had specked it, and a celluloid campaign-button, from the first Howey campaign of 1896, was dug into one corner.

There were road-maps and wavy stacks of books, half-a-man high, staggering from the floor above the table-top; an engineer’s map of the plan of a proposed spur-railroad off the main line from Centralia to Springfield; a blue-print of a thirty-mile stretch of a new state highway; a plan of a negro-shanty, where a murder had been committed in the name of chicken-thievery. A black-and-white print of President Wilson. Charts for a proposed clearing of a swamp known as Nigger Hollow. A hand-made map of the States of Ohio and Indiana, with red-headed pins outlining sources of water-power. A photograph of Phil Schuyler’s one-time pretentious home in Springfield, with Phil and Rita and the children seated on the porch rail.

A country-bumpkin of an office. Probably the only one of its kind left in a small city that now boasted its Chamber of Commerce, two ten-story, fire-proof skyscrapers, a Federal bank, the largest tool-works west of Massachusetts, two five-and-ten-cents stores, a daily Blue Plate Business Men’s lunch served in the Rotarian Rooms, two radio-shops screaming out onto the sidewalks, omnibus-service to Seven Mile, Cottage Corner, Tallahassee Dam, and Middleton, and a bill pending for the inclusion of Seven Mile within the city limits, thereby adding one-fifth to the population.

And, curiously enough, in that antiquated office over the hardware-store, from his tilted swivel up there, where for hours on end he could make chapel of his ten fingers, and gaze with mild, amused, sardonic eyes upon the flow of High Street, it was Henry Schuyler who had his long, lean finger in all of these pies of progress.

A finger that never bothered to draw out a plum.

There was something inscrutable in this smile with which Henry surveyed the scene from his window. The hurrying clang of bright new street-cars. He had been instrumental in wrenching a franchise from political interests. The new concrete viaduct jerking Seven Mile greedily closer to the flank of Centralia. The machinery of the appropriation for that considerable piece of engineering had passed through his hands. The World War Soldiers’ Memorial Park that had threatened to take the form of a block of marble, until he had intervened. The distant shine of the Tallahassee Aeroplane Field and hangars, which he had influenced old Hiram Tallahassee to endow in his will.

The town, bustling, banging, rattling in its small way with the things that mattered to it. Its increasing and growing canning- and foundry-industries, attracted by bonuses that Henry helped appropriate; its modern pressed-brick schoolhouses, with sunlight-factory exteriors and every modern device for the presentation of not-so-modern curricula. Its paved highways for easier and swifter mileage, its cinema-houses for surcease from the too crushing reality of days filled with the quest for more capital, more speed, more lust for water-power, horse-power, candle-power, man-power. All this spread itself before the mild, sad eyes of Henry Schuyler, like a satirical play in which he had unwittingly collaborated.

“These first twenty-five years of this century are undoubtedly the greatest in bulk of achievement in the history of the world,” he used to say. “Of course, it is true that invention makes history. For lack of a telescope, Aristotle’s astronomy is a tissue of childish romance. For lack of a microscope, his biology wanders endlessly astray. It was her low power in industrial and technical achievement that kept Greece below the general standard set by her unparalleled intellectual achievement. And yet, here we are in the age that excels along those lines, skimming under seas and over mountains, and annihilating distance with the jerking of a lever. What bothers me a little bit, though, is, whither? Is the aeroplane going to do as much for humanity as Socrates did, who sat on a coping in his home town most of his life, and thought out loud to folks who had the time to listen to him? Where are we rushing? Strikes me we’re all dressed-up and no place to go.”

Henry was not dressed-up. His office was pretty much his coping, in which he sat, in seersucker, intoning to his world, which he seemed to regard as infinitely younger than he. Inviting definition from all with whom he came in contact, but usually ending by giving it himself.[54]

In the swivel, before his brother’s littered table, the light from High Street hard against his squaring young face, and Henry seated by in the casual attitude of visitor, David faced his brother, the morning following his encounter with Dora in the wind-swept twilight. They might have been father and son, but in the largely impersonal way that Henry somehow seemed paternal to the world he lived in.

There were small, rigid places at the edges of David’s mouth, occasioned by a sort of misery at what he was doing. He was asking of his brother a loan; and knowing, as he did, his financial status, the moment was pretty obnoxious to him. Furthermore, sitting there stammering out his request, his eyes fixed unhappily upon a sheet of paper sprawling on the table before him, suddenly, as he stammered along, the blur of typewritten letters shaped themselves into words, and the words into meaning.

It was a letter from a firm of solicitors in Middleton, holding to account Henry Stephen Schuyler for the sum of four hundred and fifty dollars, for which he had gone bond for a young farmer named Edwin Penwhistle, who had defaulted payment by disappearing from the state two days before said moneys fell due.

It made the hard, jade-white areas along the side of David’s nose quiver and flatten as he limped along with his recital. The snagged places on Henry’s shabby seersucker coat too, kept hooking onto his hot and tortured gaze. Not that under conditions of the most fantastic: financial well-being could he imagine his brother in an unsnagged seersucker, but just the same, those little repetitious triangles kept jerking up his words, making him stammer and stumble, and finally end up by just sitting in the middle of a sentence and regarding Henry with stinging, miserable eyes.

“—hate like the dickens ... come to fellow like you for a loan—but it’s the poor help the poor—money don’t seem to mean much to the poor.”

“Something a little wise in that, boy. The poor remain poor, as a rule, because they spend easily. They’ve never known the gloating of watching a bank-account grow.”

“It’s asking a lot, Henry. Two hundred. You see, though, that could tide me over the winter-tuition. I can’t very well ride Phil, the way he’s got to hustle to make their ends meet—his kids and all. Looks like you’re the only one, Henry, a fellow can sort of turn to. You couldn’t see your way clear, could you, Henry, to let me have that coupla hundred? If I’m going to do the law nights, I’m already three weeks late for the beginning of the term.”

“What determined you, boy, so all of a sudden?”

“That’s why I caught the milk-truck in, so we could talk in town. Private.”

“Quite right. But last time we tried to get anywhere, talking this matter over, Dave, you were all heated up about the Wheeler book and had decided to devote your life to zoölogy, and then Arabia Deserta and Stefansson got you het up about reclaiming the waste places of the earth, and it looked like engineering or Cecil Rhodes empire-stuff; then, if I remember rightly, Wilson’s perplexities got you thinking about international law, and then forestry seemed a good bet, and then, ’long toward the last, wasn’t it ovibos-breeding, Antarctic exploration, ornithology, banking, lumber-jacking, astronomy, shipbuilding?”

“Of course, if you’re going to rub that in....”

“Now, old fellow, don’t go getting sore. I think the idea of taking that job Phil can swing for you in Springfield with a grocery-firm, where you can dig into the law nights, is bully.”

“Then why the dickens didencha say so?” said David, his dry lips lifted back off his dry teeth and his eyes seeming to push up close to the lenses of his spectacles.

“Well, I just do kinda say it now. It’s a darn good decision. A job by day, and a law course to keep you out of mischief nights.”

“Law’s something a fellow can fasten his teeth into, Henry.”

“Knowledge of the laws men live under, Dave, even if you never do much more with it than—well, I guess you’d have to do more with it than I have, or strike a mark below zero—me being the zero—but what I started to say, boy, knowledge of the laws men make for themselves to live under is one way of getting at the knowledge of the kind of fellows human beings are to have made them just that way.”

“That’s it, Henry. Even if I wasn’t ever to actually go out and practice law—like you——”

“God forbid!”

“Sometimes, Henry—know what?”

“No, what?”

“Well, just a little turn of the wheel, and, all of a sudden, a fellow’s got his bearings. Know what I mean?”

“Think I do. All of a sudden, well, just all of a sudden, something hit you. That about it?”

“Exactly. Nothing so much in a grocery-job, but it’s wholesale, and, anyways, Father’s always said he didn’t care so much whether he had all silk purses in the family, just so he didn’t have any sow’s ears.”[55]

“I’d like mighty much to see you surprise the Old Gentleman with a hundred-per-cent silk purse.”

“He’s a silk purse himself.”

“No, the Old Gentleman is more like the honestest woolen sock in the world.”

“A sock that Mother knitted.”

Out of their laughter, a shadow fell across Henry’s face, as if a shade had been lowered.

“Tenacious old folks, ours, Dave. Such old-fashioned and relentless ideals as toil and integrity and loyalty are pretty much out-of-date. Father yells and hollers about it all, but he’s the tree and root and the sap of the soil all right. It’s fine to be an acorn off that kind of oak. That’s what you are at your age, Dave. An acorn crammed with future.”

“Remember what you said to me once, Henry, when you were reading Aristotle to me? Inventions make history, but is history worth the making? That wasn’t nice, Henry.”

“Of course it wasn’t, and of course history’s worth the making. The hominy must have been scorched that morning for breakfast. What I probably meant was something like—well, to make history really worth the making, the age of invention should have preceded the age of thought.”

“That’s what I say, Hen. What could those Greek fellows be expected to know about some of the most ordinary facts of the world they lived in, when they had no way of getting around it? No wonder old Aristotle was way off on his astronomy. Didn’t even have a pocket telescope like mine. Know what, Henry?”

“No, what?”

“Well, sir—looka this country. If Greece could do what she did without inventions, what do you think we ought to be able to do, having them? Looka the aeroplane. Didn’t we invent it? A pair of fellows right here in the Middle West? And here’s France and all those countries getting more use out of it than we are. What’s distance or cold or heat to us, or any of the things that have kept other nations down? Yes, siree, if I was practicing law in a live town like Springfield, living say in a little attached house with a front yard to squirt evenings with the garden hose, and plenty of time to think things out—oh, say—oh, say—well—just ’oh, say,’ is all I got to say.”

“Yeh!” said Henry, fumbling among the litter of his table and reaching across the body of the boy toward the far end. “Hand me that check-book, Dave——”

It was a scrubby affair through which Henry’s wetted forefinger rustled.

“How’s a hundred and forty-three dollars and fifty-six cents on account, boy?” he said, after some figuring on a margin, “That’s fifty-six dollars and forty-four cents shy of the two hundred, but——”

“You mean, Henry—that’s all you’ve got?”

“I mean nothing of the sort. There’s always more coming in somehow. Fellow up here in Tole County blew in last week and paid me seventy-five dollars for a fee he’s owed me nine years back——”

“But——”

“Take it or leave it,” said his brother, scrawling on the check and jerking it testily out of the book.

There was always in Henry’s manner toward his money-affairs, and in his response to any and everybody’s inroads upon the notorious generosity, a manner apt to be embarrassing to even the most hardened collector off his bounty.

He treated money with the tip of a somewhat contemptuous finger.[56]

The canny, the meretricious, the sycophants, and the needy, who at one time or another passed in almost constant stream about that white-pine table, sensed it even when Henry himself was most unconscious of the trait.

His scorn for money. It made even the hardened recipient of his largesse shrink a little as he left his presence. It made Dave, to whom money had suddenly and for the first time loomed with importance, feel sticky-fingered at the savage generosity which made his brother, as if angrily forestalling more ado, thrust the check into his hand.

“Henry, you’re just about the best friend a fellow ever had.”

“I’m just about the best boob a fellow ever had. Keep me in front of you, boy, for your ‘Don’t’ slogan. Look at me, and pretty nearly everything you see me doing, don’t do. And above all, don’t laugh at the age you live in. Laugh with it. That’s not my idea so much as the laughing philosopher’s, Democritus. Whatever you do, don’t, like gloomy Heraclitus, shed tears about it. Shed your illusions if you must, and then fight like hell to recapture them in terms of reality. Don’t keep your tongue in your cheek. Just poke it in occasionally. The pupils of Socrates, you remember, were divided into cynics and Cyrenaics. Don’t let the stale apathy of cynicism get you, ever. It takes a clever man to turn cynic, and a wise man to be clever enough not to.”

“Is that one of those eppy-grams, Henry?”

“No, only a rather dull truth. A wise man lets his mind ferment, Dave, but never turn to vinegar. You’ve got a level head on your shoulders. Keep it there. Don’t let it get caught in the rut between your shoulders. The sixth human sense, Dave, is a sense of humor. Care passionately about everything, Dave, using your sixth sense all the while, and see to it that almost everything is worth caring about. Then curb your passions.”

“I can care all right, Henry—now!”

“Don’t march ahead of the band-wagon. They’ll stone you, boy, if you do. Ride with it, but keep your eyes ahead. If you see Light, guide them toward it, only in the name of Heaven, don’t let them know they are not seeing it for themselves.”

“You know what you should have been, Henry?”

“Yes, I know what I should have been, Dave. I’m one of those fellows who, by making a few wise cracks to the not-so-wise, gets the reputation of still water running deep. As a matter of fact, still water doesn’t run at all. Yes, know what I should have been? I should have been Diogenes with a radium-lantern. I should have been Socrates with the wing of an aeroplane for his coping. I should have been that fellow Teufelsdröck. Who was Teufelsdröck? Quick!”

“Oh, I know! He’s the old chap in Sartor Resartus who——”

“Good! Well, I should have been him, spending my days in the tower of a two-hundred-and-ninety-eight-story Woolworth skyscraper, playing marbles with the stars. Or maybe, by Jove, I should have been a third-rate country-lawyer trying to sprinkle salt on the tail of the comet I inhabit, and preaching to a small brother, to be able when he reaches my age, to sum up his life in terms of ‘I am,’ instead of like me, ‘I might have been.’”

“Well, allrighty, you mighta been—allrighty—you mighta been——”

“I mighta been, allrighty——” said Henry, looking out upon the tide of High Street, his eyes seeming suddenly to be the wise, tired, prophetic eyes of what he “mighta been.”

There entered, unannounced, as everyone entered that office unannounced, the hurried, perspiring figure of Steve Renchler. In spite of the fact that he had come in out of the thin-aired bluster of November, there were moist little places out under his eyes and along his upper lip; and although he wore a sweater-waistcoat (a handsome slip-over, of a variety which Claire could knit so skillfully that a Springfield department-store purchased her output), his coat was jerked back, and his derby hat was along the back of his head, pushed there by a mopping handkerchief.

There was little resemblance left to the dark, tortured boy and dreamer. It was a fed face. The face of a man of strong, healthy appetites, and strong, healthy gratifications. If the mere smell of alcohol could turn Steve pale and gone-at-the-knees, the delights of the table had done their measure, and apparently were not without compensations. Steve’s clothing bore the horizontal creases of a man whose legs bend heavily. There were dimples out along the backs of his hands, set in little cushions of fat. The tailor, in taking his measurements, had to throw the tape-line around his waist.

Right in the town of Centralia, hundreds of replicas of this derby-hatted Steve were meeting their life-insurance endowment-policies, being fairly true to their wives, reading their Saturday Evening Posts, Literary Digests and comic-supplements, mowing their front lawns, paying their installments on loud-speakers, eating their Blue Plate luncheons, dodging jury-service, reconciling themselves to bob-haired wives, driving their family sedans, having their children’s tonsils out, purchasing Frigidaire ice-boxes in fourteen monthly payments, attending the cinema-houses, tuning-in before turning-in, struggling to relieve financial strain, staving off blood-pressure, subscribing to fifty bricks, at a dollar a brick, in the new municipal hospital, scheming to turn in this year’s four-cylinder model for next year’s six, dreaming of college education for the children, struggling for Country Club membership, “now that the children are growing up,” hoping for that raise, dreaming of the trip to the Canadian Rockies, spoiling their children, hating, indulging, loving, or spoiling their wives, achieving nervous indigestion, joining the boosters’ club, stifling another old dream, climbing after new dreams, voting the full Republican ticket, flying an “excuse my dust” pennant from off the old sedan, teaching son to salute the flag, doctoring income-tax.

The stamp of his times was on Steve. His was the rather flabby figure of a man with a body still fairly adapted to the lugging of water and the killing of game but who finds himself instead, turning spigots, and picking up the telephone-receiver when he would eat red meat. He read two newspapers a day. A local morning-sheet controlled by Republican interests and a Chicago day-old pink evening-sheet controlled by capital and designed to meet the mammalian needs of who runs as he reads the-syndicated-universities of Frank Crane and Parkes Cadman, Eddie Guest, Beatrice Fairfax, Bud Fisher, Glenn Frank, comic strip, and baseball brevities, and such of the financial, industrial, governmental, international, and political fluctuations as were deemed digestible for a barley-watered public. The newspapers were as doped for public consumption as many of the foodstuffs and drink-substitutes that found their way down the naïve palate of Centralia. A press that was free to mix, dilute, pervert truth to meet the demand of politics and policies, hurled its vitiated and vitrioled facts in twirled newspapers against the front doors of Centralia as the carrier passed down the streets in a two-wheeled cart, from which he was crack sure-shot.

Steve read his morning-paper propped up against the sugar-bowl as he dipped up his nationalized cereal, and then left it at home for Claire, who read the death, marriage, advice to-the-lovelorn, and Lost and Found Departments.

Claire, however, also read Mencken and Sherwood Anderson and Cabell at her Saturday Morning Literary Club, considered them terribly interesting, and “Mencken a scream. I just love his way of writing. He sees right through everybody—and don’t hesitate to say so.”

There was an uncut volume of Prejudices, First Series on the center table of Steve’s reception-hall, and an unthumbed edition of Winesburg, Ohio, inscribed “To Claire Schuyler in recognition of her loyal presidency of the Saturday Morningers,” and in a neat row, between bronze-elephant book-ends, such miscellany as Burns’s Collected Poems, The Winning of Barbara Worth, Girl of the Limberlost, Ingersoll’s Collected Sermons, Stella Dallas, Guide to Bridge Whist, Motion Picture Classic, Watch Your Calories, Adult Book of Knowledge, Child’s History of England, Kathleen Norris’s Mother, Ben King’s Verse, A Thought a Day, Owen Meredith, Ethan Frome, Papini’s Life of Christ, Innocents Abroad, The Iron Woman, Garden of Allah, Mary Page, by Leroy Scott, One Hundred Famous Quotations, and Friendship and Flower Book.

When Stevey waited for his barber or dentist, or took a train to Springfield, the Literary Digest served him one news-concoction after another, as quickly as an Automat....

News-reels flashed to him, from his favorite motion-picture theater, such items of the day as were considered good for his American well-being. Such as the Soviet scenes that could instruct him only in the dangerous and unsuccessful aspects of the gigantic world-experiment. Political slogans put forth by this and that “interest.” Propaganda. Publicity. Advertising.

If the thousands of half-doped Steves abroad over the land ever paused to think about Russia at all, it was in terms that had been doled out to them in careful rations from a careful Press, of a terror-ridden country lying prostrate under the savage and kicking heel of crazed and delirious labor.

At the same time, the headline-story of some creedist in Vermont being thrown into jail for protesting against jury duty, scarcely indented itself with any of its monstrous and satiric import into the anesthetized brains of the Steves.

Birth-control, book-censorship, Eugene Debs in jail, Tea Pot Dome scandal, lynchings, child-labor, Lawrenceville Kansas, or any of the acid awarenesses of things current that had cut the lines of pain and cynicism around Henry’s mouth, flashed across the less-sensitized, half-doped Steveys who mutely accepting their God, their food, their censored motion-pictures, books, and politics in the tabloid form rationed out to them in the interests of the greatest good for the greatest number, were mute indeed.

The Steveys were the doers, not the thinkers. They bought their tinned propaganda, theirs not to reason why. They read the Tea Pot Dome scandal as news, and not an outrageous infringement upon their own rights. They let their propaganda-logged eyes skim Eugene Debs headlines, and said “Serves him right.” “Tarring and feathering is too good for those anarchist fellows.”

They squealed a little when the shoe pinched their own particular foot, or when a case of local or municipal graft touched their particular pocket-nerves. But otherwise, except for nervous indigestion, the infernal high cost of living, the appalling and expensive precocity of children, the wife’s mounting demands of budget, the daily grind of office and high blood-pressure and self-playing piano, the bad street-car service and the unendurable tax-burden, the growing difficulties of labor-unrest, the high cost of production and college education, of butter and life insurance, coal, children’s shoes, tires, tonsil operations and dining-room rugs, life was a charivari, merry enough in its way, of radios, electric signs, aeroplane-races, baseball series, Armistice Days, lodge meetings, and making ends meet.

Steve Renchler had been caught up by the rhythm of the machine. He ate his morning cereal and slightly-watered milk with the newspaper-spokesman of that machine propped up against the sugar-bowl, and suffered no more than the normal indigestion due to overeating. Cereal and watered milk, news that the Ku Klux had tarred and feathered a negro, a college professor dismissed for free speech, Mexican unrest, Rockefeller’s dime-gesture, private ownership of railroads, were as normal to the digestion of the Steveys as seal meat and frozen fish to an Eskimo.

The stomach and the brain can be trained to overcome any initial aversions to certain foods and learn to assimilate them.

Steve had assimilated. At thirty, he had practically passed the danger of thinking, hurting, or rebelling against any social, aesthetic or spiritual shortcomings of environment, except where personal struggle for existence, and sweet butter and life insurance, coal, children’s shoes, tires, and dining-room rugs had kept the mind competitively keen as a blade. Due to the exigencies of the age in which he lived, the chief of his sensory organs which he had developed was the eye. The motion-picture, the rotogravure, the observation-car, the motor-car, had developed a visual age. Stevey thought mostly with his eyes.

What he beheld first-hand, with the evidence of his own eyes, stimulated him. The Tallahassee Aeroplane Field and Government experimental shops, practically adjoined the Tool Works where Steve was by now department-manager.

In the beginning, it had been necessary to use disciplinary methods with the foundry employees, and even with the office-workers, to keep them from flocking to the windows every time a flight or even the most casual hop-off took place.

The curiously exultant roar of a mounting machine had long since become a matter of course, scarcely causing the lifting of a head. Except to Steve. The excitement of that living, throbbing note of release, as steel and timber took flight, never ceased to thrill him. In spite of the need to be exemplary to his men, it was practically impossible for him to remain away from the window when the song of flight began to hum its way above the din of foundry.

Frequently, instead of lolling his lunch period at home with Claire and the children, or stretched on the flat of his back beneath his five-passenger sedan, he spent it among the men on the field. Government inspectors. Mechanics. Pilots. Once, unbeknown to Claire, he had made a short flight. He was even versed in the phraseology of a new, strangely buoyant, etheric world. Air-pockets. High-pressure areas. Angle-of-drift.

With something of the old inchoate yearnings which had stirred the dark and nervous boy, this present goose-stepping Stevey, snatched back to normalcy by what was probably an inherited capacity for it that was stronger than even his weakness was weak, must have felt something of those remote old stirrings. But felt them safely.

The air, particularly after his first flight, interested Stevey principally from the vantage of his two feet on the ground.

Here was a new world of navigation, of commercial possibility that soared beyond credulity. New undreamed-of lanes of transportation, unchartered. By Jove, the day those two Ohio fellows flew at Kittyhawk, had unroofed the world! There were fortunes in those new lanes up there as yet scarcely trammeled by competition.

Here was a means of communicability as yet unchartered to any appreciable extent by “interests.”

Steve meant to be a ground-floor man, so to speak, in the new etheric zones of air commerce.

Men’s creative brains had wrought the miracle of the flying-machine. The brains of practical men must launch it.

Air commerce. Air franchise.

Steve’s dreams as a family-man began to weave about this idea. His ambition for position. A large and beautiful home for Claire. Heavy insurances. A new battleship-gray limousine with balloon tires. A thousand-dollar radio and loud-speaker. That see-America-first rail-trip, celebrated in a folder that he and Claire liked to pore over. Niagara Falls. Yellowstone Park. Seattle. Banff.

Suddenly, to Stevey, who paid forty-two dollars a month house rent; doctor, music, dancing, school fees for the children, clothing for two adults and three youngsters; laundry, gas, gasoline, fuel, lodge, fire, automobile, and life insurance, special tutelage for his child Henry, who stammered, and miscellany ad infinitum, on a salary of forty dollars a week, had come a chance which brought him pell-mell, and with a speed that caused the caves of perspiration beneath his eyes, to that haven of the needy and the desirous, his uncle Henry’s office.

“Uncle Henry, must see you. Right away. Alone. Sorry, Dave—get out—there’s a good kid. This is the only time I can get away from the office.”

In a slow-mannered sort of indulgence, Henry regarded his nephew without uncurling his posture.

“Hold your horses, Steve. Me and Dave are having a talk here that about amounts to what you fellows would call a ‘conference.’ Everything in the world excepting time and a bad egg will keep on a day like this.”

“I’ve only about forty minutes, Uncle. I wouldn’t butt in this way, if it wasn’t important.”

His uncle rose, his great length of body unwinding in slow good-humor.

“Of course, if it’s something special.”

“It is, Uncle. As special as anything that has ever happened to me.”

“I see. Well then, Dave, shall we give way to your nephew a bit? Guess we’ve about said it all for the present, anyway. We’ll let the universe rest as is.”

Dave rose and began rolling his cap. A conference was something inviolate. And here was Stevey crashing selfishly, inconsiderately, domineeringly, through the very warp and woof of an hour of interview with his brother, so privately his own.[57]

“Well, one thing,” said Dave defiantly, folding his check and slipping it into his trousers pocket with the long down-gesture of a man now of pocket-affairs, “if I’ve got to shove my way in this world, I’m going to shove it with my head, and not my shoulders.”

Stevey, far too hurried to be amused, cast a perspiring look at the rangy figure of his young uncle.

“Snap out of it, Dave, and don’t be a fool.”

“Dave’s in nobody’s way. Out with what’s on your mind, Steve.”

Steve slapped down his hat and, straddling a stool, jerked it to him until he was up face to face with the lean lantern from which Henry’s eyes looked so humorously.

“I’ve got the chance of a lifetime, Uncle. And I need two hundred dollars to grab it.”

It was Steve’s pronouncement of himself as a crisp go-getter man of affairs. Bandier of no words. American business man tactics. Straight from the shoulder. Right to the point. Efficiency.

It was Dave who half leaped forward, not Henry, who sat with his slow, contemplative thumb and forefinger, stroking his slow, contemplative jaw, and his other hand, with pipe that always smelled, held equally lax, as he tapped it against the table.

“That’s not such a large order, Steve, provided the fellow you’re striking for the loan has the two hundred.”

“Well, you have it for every Tom, Dick and Harry, Uncle!”

“You may be right, Steve,” drawled Henry, “but fact remains, I haven’t got it—now.”

“He hasn’t,” yapped Dave. “Henry’s no mint.”

“Keep out of this, Dave! It’s the first time, Uncle, I’ve ever come to you for the loan of a penny! I’ve worried along on my own pretty steadily. You’ll have to grant me that. But there’s nobody I can turn to, between heaven and earth but you now, Henry.”

“That’s what we all say. That’s why he’s the hounded one of the whole fam——”

“Shut up, Dave. I only need a couple of hundred dollars, Henry. My whole future depends on those few paltry dollars. If I’m ever going to be anything more than a two-by-four cog in the wheel of a man-eating iron-foundry, you’ve got to advance me the few dollars to pull myself and my wife and kids out of the rut that’ll close us in, sure as fate, if I wait much longer. I’m borrowed to the hilt, as it is, on my insurance-policies. My Buick isn’t even paid for. Let me have that couple of hundred, Uncle. You can. You must. I’ll give you my note on any terms you say.”

“That’s not fair, Steve. Henry’s not got it.”

“For cripes sake, keep out of this, I say, Dave. It may do you some good to listen to some of the things I’ve got to say. They may help you to get a move on.”

“Steve! That’s no way to talk to the boy.”

“Opportunity is knocking at my door, Uncle. Oh, I’m not whining, but if you stop to look at my life for a minute, it—it hasn’t been all beer and skittles, Uncle. I—I’ve had a fight every inch of the way through two or three kinds of hells that—for what I’ve got—out of it——”

“I appreciate that, Steve,” said his uncle.

“You should, Uncle, because—you—helped.”[58]

“I do understand, Steve, more, perhaps, than you realize.”

“Well then, Uncle—you know better than anybody—the everything of what I’ve been through. I’ve worked my way along pretty steadily these last years, grant me that.”

“Indeed I do. I’ve man-size respect for the struggle you’ve made and won, Steve.”

“Well then, prove it. Opportunity bobbed up for me today. Out of a clear sky. Opportunity’s knocking at my door. For two hundred dollars I can open it.”

“I tell you he hasn’t got it. Is it always going to be like this for him? First me. Then you. Tom and Dick and Harry? I’ve just borrowed his last penny off him. If you don’t believe it—here—looka this check—then looka his stubs. What are we around him, anyway? A lot of bleeders? Henry hasn’t got it!”

“Not so fast, Dave.”

“He’s got to have it. It’s my whole life, Henry, getting my hands on this money today. There’s a half a dozen can grab this chance away from me if I don’t.”

The narrowed look had come into Henry’s face. A tired look. An old look.

“Mighty ’fraid Dave’s right, Steve. Fact is, I haven’t got it.”

“All you have to do is look at his stubs, Steve! If it was for anything else except getting me out of the way and started toward something, I wouldn’t take it, either.”

“Borrow me that money, Henry. For God’s sake, get it for me.”

“Why, boy, I can’t borrow the price of a bus ticket from here to Middleton. Everybody in this town is onto my way of borrowing from Peter, so Paul can borrow it off me.”

With a quick fist flashing down over David’s wrists, Steve jerked his young uncle toward him, so that his spectacles jerked off one ear-lobe and hung dangling across his face.

“Dave, let me have that money.”

“Steve!”

“He’s only a kid, Uncle. Whatever he’s going to do with it now, he can do later. I’ll make it up to him. This is my chance, Dave. You’re eighteen. I’m nearly twice that and where am I? Tied to a snide job in a snide town. Opportunities like this don’t come twice to a man like me in a town like this. You see, Dave, I’ve got a family and kids. I’ve got a mother—your own flesh and blood sister, who deserves, if ever anybody on God’s earth did, to have me make good. All right, call it sniveling if you will, but let me have that money, Dave.”

“Steve—shame!”

“Why, Uncle? A man with sense will go any length to throw a sop to opportunity, if she’s pausing outside his door. I wouldn’t ask Dave if I wasn’t so sure. It’s a turning-point in my life. It’s now or never.”

“What about Dave’s life, Steve?”

“He’s a kid.”

“Yes, but Dave’s been what you might call grist between the mills of poverty and war, pretty much since he was born. He came along just in time for his father’s bad financial times to set in, and then what did he do but run into a world-war during the years he was growing up.”

“He’s got life before him.”

“That’s where it will remain for him, Steve, unless he begins to encroach upon it.”

“My life’s as important to me, as yours is to you, Steve.”

“I know that, Dave. But what you’ve got to realize is this. You’re a bright kid in your way. Maybe a slow way, but you’ve got something to you that I won’t have, if I live to be a hundred. May not get you anywhere—much—unless you get a hustle on you. But you’ve the makings, Dave, of quite an unusual kind of fellow. Don’t know just what kind—but—but life’s full of opportunities for you. Scientific farming. Or maybe big business. I’m just a regular, every-day fellow, Dave, with a nose for the opportunity when it comes along. And I tell you this is opportunity.”

“Might I ask,” said Henry, tapping his dry teeth with a pencil, and regarding his nephew with a frown over-hanging his eyes, “the nature of this er—a—mysterious opportunity?”

“Indeed you may! That’s my best selling-card, the nature of the project. You’ll be the first to see the thing, Uncle. The idea sells itself to a fellow with vision....”

“Well?”

“The birth of the air-age is taking place right under our eyes. I want to capitalize that fact. I want to ride in on it. Me and a fellow at Tallahassee Field, Eugene Bymore, a crack pilot and a fellow that knows the air-game, A to Z, can buy up a plane out of that Smoothfield wreck you read about the other day for a song. This is all inside stuff that comes to Bymore, who’s the Government aeronautic engineer. Took a fancy to me. Anxious to meet you, Uncle Hen. Knows about the family and all. This plane can be bought, Uncle, for the price almost of so much junk. Nothing much the matter with it that a fellow like Bymore, who knows the plane through and through, can’t handle in a jiffy. Me and this fellow—funny, Uncle, the way he took a fancy to me—we’ve got an idea for starting a parcel-delivery service between here and Chicago. Over a known lane that Bymore’s flown himself for off and on of two years in mail-planes. Idea looks so big to me, there’s just no stopping it. Somebody’s going to hit on it sooner or later, certain as fate, and it might as well be us. It’s coming, just as sure as there’s express trains this minute running between here and there. Only, it’s coming in a bigger fashion than anything we’ve ever dreamt of.”

“You’re right there, boy, but many a good man and good plane have gone down to prove what you’re saying.”

“The way we’ve worked it out, on the principle of what Bymore calls the aerodynamic safety in transport-aviation, there’ll be minimum chance of a good man or a good plane going down.”

“It’s gambling with tomorrow, Steve, but tomorrow’s coming, sure as hell.”

“I knew you’d be the one to see the can before the can’ts. That’s what makes you the darnedest fellow, Uncle.”

“You mean, Steve,” said Dave, with his spectacles thrust forward along his nose, and his head thrust forward on his shoulders, “you mean you’re starting in the aeroplane-delivery business?”

“Exactly. Parcel-delivery by air, just like the Centralia Parcel Delivery by wagon. When the Chicago Motor Company needs a bale of special screw eyes from the Giles Tool Works, double-quick jiffy, we supply the double-quick jiffy. When Cincinnati needs half a gram of radium for an emergency operation, and that half a gram happens to be on a shelf in Chicago at nine A.M., Cincinnati is going to have that tube beside the operating-table forenoon that same day. Let us deliver your ivory, apes, and peacocks by air! Express by air and save ten hours delivery-time between Centralia and Chicago. Nothing in time or space can stop us, Uncle.”

“It’s big, Steve. By God, nothing should stop you!”

“I won’t stop you,” cried Dave, and slapped down the check on the table. “Yes, sir. Looka. Looka what the Zeppelins are doing now! Why couldn’t it be the same from Hamburg to New York and New York to Bombay? You can have this here check, Steve—reckon that’s all right with you, Henry?”

“You reckon right, boy, only how are you going to tunnel out, boy? Dave was going to Springfield, Steve, on that money to commit the well-known turning-point-of-his-career act.”

“You won’t be sorry, Dave. You and Henry can regard yourselves as partners in on this enterprise—stock-holders or anything you say——”[59]

“Gee, Stevey, you fellows get the world small enough, and there’s not going to be any more distance!”

“Righto, Kid! I’ll be in a position to pay you both back, tenfold, some day—mark my word——”

“Cut out distance—kinda get the whole world to draw up its chairs in a closer circle and get acquainted, and you cut out a lot of misunderstanding between fellows and countries, get countries to feeling friendlier, and——”

“Righto, again, Kid! This here initial money doesn’t mean capital—it just means if we can get enough fellows interested in the cost of laying an air-line between——”

“What’s that you were saying Dave—about drawing up chairs closer——”

“What I was trying to say, Henry, was—cut out the strangeness between men, so’s they understand each other better by sitting in closer, and there aren’t going to be so many wars, and—and—now my idea is this——”

“Yes, Dave!”

“Say, the kid’s right bright! It’s as Bymore says, Uncle, if we can go to a bunch of fellows and say, look here, we have the——”

“You were saying, Dave?”

“Nothing, Henry, except——”

“This check means more to me than you’ll ever know, Dave. It’s going to put a crimp in your plans, but——”

“Crimp, nothing, I’m going anyhow.”[60]

FOOTNOTES: