Chapter Thirty

There followed days and weeks, and then months, when the fervor for his father’s patch of farm became an obsession. The security of long days, sunk up to the aching arm-sockets in chores that had to do with a clogged water-pipe, milking at dawn, currying for Nemo, sheep-driving by starlight, manure that steamed as he pitched it, pip among the wyandottes, new tin rain-gutters along the house, corn-shucking, sheep-dipping, hay-pitching, well-digging, sheep-herding.

Then long, secure evenings of further escape from the reality of humiliation. Flat on his stomach, his aching feet bare, his candle burning softly through hours of boring concentration on the book in hand.

During that winter, aided by Henry’s shelves, the Centralia Public Library, the motley universes of land and sea and firmament jammed up that little slapsided room under the eaves. Prehistoric monsters out of Java larger than the Igrotte house itself, performed the miracle of squatting within its walls. China seas swung within that room, firmaments wide as Galileo’s, winds spiced in sandalwood.

Pages. Pages. Pages. Wealth of Nations. Spencer’s First Principles. Les Miserables. History of the Aztecs. Karl Marx. Sinclair’s The Jungle. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Famous Speeches of Famous Men. The “All-Boy” series. Romance of Pocahontas. King Arthur’s Round Table. Tales from Shakespeare. History of Colorado. Ivanhoe. Conquest of Peru. Tariff and Its Ramifications. Governors of Utah. The Growth of Illinois Transportation. Industrial Development of the Middle West. Territorial Period. Life of Anthony Wayne. Hiawatha. Vision of Sir Launfal. Sea Reptiles and Mammals of South America. Life of Cecil Rhodes. Peary’s The North Pole. How to Build Your Own Hydroplane. Gem Collection of After-Dinner Stories. The Five Years Antedating the Russian Revolution. Compleat Angler. Vanishing Rights of the State. Raffles. Shandy. Japanese-American Relations. Two Boys and a Raft. Adonais. Cellini’s Autobiography. War and Peace.

He was sealed up that winter, all right. Silently. Something fierce about his kind of silence.

Henry, who sometimes sat abstractedly in his office or room thinking about it, said nothing.

Mathilda went up to him sometimes, as he sat at table finishing his meal, as if she would place a hand on his shoulder and get said the question that seemed perpetually hovering along her lips. Or often, as he was climbing into his reefer for his dash out into the sleet-bitten days of that long, cold winter, she would kiss him timidly on the forehead and bleat of castor-oil.

Strangely, the Old Gentleman, not given to reticence, and communicative enough, dear knows, on any number of controversial subjects those long evenings indoors, lapsed into a silence not only toward, but concerning his youngest. Not an ill-natured silence. Except suddenly the subject seemed to have lost the power either to interest or irritate him. Strange wisdoms sometimes were his.

There was about the box-shaped little house during this winter that lashed it constantly with high winds and blew the dry snow in tall, uneven drifts about it, a curious kind of abeyance. As if, by unspoken assent, the moments, as they passed, must be sufficient unto themselves.

Sometimes, usually with a book open to a chapter that had stumped him, David crept down to Henry’s room, invariably sure to find him awake and reading; his feet wrapped in an old gray blanket against the creeping cold of the house, and his body hunched low in the chair beside his reading-lamp. Then, for more hours with David huddled alongside of Henry on the arm of the Morris chair, they pored, and sometimes read aloud, alternately.

Long, rich, slow evenings, without once a reference to anything except that which pertained to the world of ideas and homely chores into which David was so obviously and hermetically sealing himself.

If the family discussed among themselves this prolonged, this somewhat startling state of hiatus in the case of Davey, it was among themselves, and then usually not in the presence of Henry.

One day, Bek, striding into the Igrotte house in one of Winslow’s ulsters, collar turned up and her skirts tucked down into her knee-high boots, inquired from her mother David’s whereabouts, and then strode off into the barn where her young brother was fitting an improvised rope halter across the horns of a young steer.

“Where are you going, Dave?”

“Down to Herkhimer’s with this here steer. Father’s traded him in for two red sows.”

“Good! I’ll hike along. Old Herk’s got some money coming to him for putting those Howey red terriers to stud last spring. I’ve got two pretty sick ewes and a ram over at the farm, Dave. Mind coming back the long way and stopping to take a look at them? You’ve luck with them.”

“Sure, I’ll come.”

They started off through an afternoon the color of wet slate. Banks of low snow-clouds, full-looking as udders, blew along. Gusts of damp air, like wet cloths, flapped against the face. A chilled gray waste of an afternoon, farmhouses, that could gleam in sun, absolutely shrunk and huddled-looking, and the back road writhing along in two frozen wheel-ruts.

Suddenly Bek stopped, and with a lack of diplomacy that characterized her, tilted back David’s face with her large, mittened hand.

“What’s the matter, Dave? Bilious or in love?”

He jerked away sore and hurt.

“Quit!”

“I’d much rather it was your liver than your heart, Dave.”

“Fine way to talk.”

“Why?”

“There’s some things just aren’t talked about.”

“What? Livers?”

“No.”

“Hearts?”

“For goodness’ sake, Bek—honest—such talk makes me sick.”

“But, at least, if it’s the liver, you can talk about it in terms as definite as calomel. Is it, Dave?”

“Honestly, Bek, if that’s what you’ve come along for ...”

“I’m a great believer in preventive medicine. But if it’s heart, there’s not much to do about it but let it run its course, and kill or cure. My own experience, and my children’s, have taught me that.”

“Well, then—well, then—it’s a good thing to profit by experience.”

She touched his cheek lightly with her mittened hand. Poor old Dave!

The rushing sensation was immediately behind his tonsils again, and the appalling fear that, behind his high-power glasses, tears would spurt; and, that these might not, he broke into a laugh. A laugh that cut against the grain, because it was so absurd and young and pain-addled. It moved his sister to want to put out her hand and tuck him somewhere close inside Winslow’s ulster. But she did nothing of the sort. Instead, she swung a little ahead, level almost with the steer’s lightly roped horns, looking quite away from him across the stubble of corn-fields that were stiff with old runts, and rattled.

“Life isn’t so black as it can sometimes seem at seventeen, Dave. As a matter of fact, fellows like your brother Henry and Phil were pretty confirmed misanthropes before they were twenty. Are you at that stage Dave?”

“You’re always tabulating people, Bek. A fellow can’t pass an ordinary remark without you trying to fit him into one of your pigeonholes of life.”

“Adolescence pigeonholes rather easily, Davey.”

“I’m not talking about adolescence, I’m talking about life.”

“It’s adolescence makes you talk that way about life.”

“Well, any blamed fool can sing a song of sixpence about it. What’s it to sing about, anyways? The poets are your truly sensitive spirits. ‘Things are not what they seem, life is but an empty dream.’ Know that one? It’s by——”

“And you’re the boy who used to talk to me about the men who fly and the men who explore and the men who rule and the men who do! Why, you used to act as if everything mattered to you so terribly, that you couldn’t make up your mind which mattered most.”

“Then and—and now are two different matters.”

“How different?”

He turned on her a pair of scarred-looking boyish eyes that scowled and blinked behind their glasses.

“Don’t!” he said.

“Don’t what?”

“Quiz—please——”

They marched through the soupy gray in silence, except for the clopping hoofs of the steer and the low moan of wind rattling the corn-runts.

At the Herkhimer farm, a mean one, of squat building and outhouses, Gramaw Herkhimer, a furiously old walnut of a woman, in a perpetual gray head-shawl against neuralgia, came limping around to the barn at sight of Bek; and nothing short of coffee in her small and spotless kitchen, and chunks of corn-bread, just from the hot stove-top, would do. Dave, and one of the Herkhimer boys, a great loutish fellow of twenty, of the group who told sickening stories about country-bumpkin girls, must come in too, and take their coffee out of great, ironstone, thick-lipped cups, into which the corn-bread “dunked” deliciously.

A coal-range of magnificent draught roared in one corner, and a huge pan of Gramaw Herkhimer’s dough, rising to the yeast, overflowed its sides like a fat pig. A warm, sour-smelling little old kitchen, which Bek seemed to cram to the raftered ceiling with her enormous presence.

Her incredible capacity for detail with these people! No subject too small to snag her interest. Gramaw Herkhimer’s tatting. Old man Herkhimer’s chilblain. Chest-protectors for Herkhimer babies. There were three of them lying asleep alongside her ailing daughter in another room. Woolen wristlets. Geranium-cuttings. Drunken son-in-law. First-communion veil for little Maggie Herkhimer. Bacon-cracklings. Then nothing would do but a jar of apple-butter to be wrapped and sent home to Winslow. Back in the old days, High Ridge Farm had practically fed the Herkhimers. Maggie Herkhimer, gaunt and pale, and interminably tall in a mother-hubbard that hit her above breast, elbows, and ankles, came in, all rumpled from napping, to thank Bek for the loan of a small crutch for her second boy, who had broken a leg, in almost the identical position Stew had at that same age. They had gone to school together, Maggie Herkhimer and Bek. They both looked their age. The one rather magnificently. Maggie, as if the years had hamstrung her.

It was a warming, heartening, little interval. It made the walk back to Bek’s farm silent, this time, because facing the wind, it caught at the breath and shortened it, seem not so penetratingly damp and cold.

The two ewes and the ram, sunk in clean straw, went in the smaller of the two splendidly-equipped barns. Their nozzles came up softly; and just as Dave was putting aside the medicine-dropper, after having ministered to the shivering creatures with a curiously adhesive touch of hand that was never to desert him, this overwhelming thing happened:

Bek, who had gone directly up to the house, came into the barn, Winslow’s reefer removed now, and a white sweater hanging across her shoulders.

“Dave, I wish you would wait a minute.”

“Mother needs wood——”

“——and walk Dora Tarkington home as you go back. She’s spent the day here, helping Winslow paper the dining-room in that pretty grass-cloth they’re using now. Paula sent it. I wouldn’t let him touch the Howe walls, so between the two of them, they’ve made a set of panels that fit on. They say at school, Dora’s that tasty she ought to take up interior decoration. It’s long walk, and those snow-clouds make it seem dusk so early. Here she comes now, Davey. Walk her home.”

The figure of Dora, in a woolly white sweater and woolly white cap, and her short, pleated skirts flying, came down the walk.

“Why!” she said, and stopped short, the light popping out in her eyes and her cheeks, “I didn’t know—Dave was here.”

“Didn’t you?” said Bek drily. “Well, he is,” and walked off toward the house, and slam, bang, into it.[51]

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