Chapter Thirty-three

For thirty years, the Howey family, with a wealth of social and intermarriage connections that extended beyond the state to the Eastern seaboard and Europe, had exchanged the niceties of Christmas puddings, cider and Thanksgiving, walnuts off the Howey trees, and minced meat out of Mathilda’s larders. And every fall, up to the year of her death, Kate Howey had sent Mathilda the first cuttings of dill from her kitchen garden. A custom which Shirley, the eldest Howey girl, Princess von Windigger now of Vienna, kept alive, along with others of her mother’s homely habits, cabling instructions to the caretaker of the old homestead.

Every Christmas, the Governor, who was indebted to Henry on a hundred counts (not least among them the hushing-up of an ugly land-deal involving Loring Howey the Governor’s second son) sent him, whether from Madrid, Washington, Paris, or Buenos Aires, where Loring now had headquarters, a box of fifty Habana cigars and a gray-silk muffler.

The remaining two Howey boys, Tom and Weston never failed to drop into the office above the hardware store on their infrequent visits “back home.”

There existed a rather formal entente cordiale between the home-grown Schuylers and the globe-trotting Howeys.

A Schuyler was always sure of a gracious reception from a Howey. A Howey was known to cater to a vote long after the immediate need for it was past.

This relationship had never been tested beyond this insular one of the neighborhood. Bek Schuyler and Shirley Howey were within six months of the same age. But while Shirley had been educated in Switzerland, Bek had attended Centralia public schools. Henry had attended the state-endowed university, and Tom Howey, who was also a lawyer, Yale.

The Howeys respected the Schuylers. Although not one of them would admit it, except perhaps Emma, who was a family-joke on the subject, and to whom a Howey was a Cabot, every Schuyler secretly nourished a wistful kind of admiration for the Howeys; an admiration that dated back somewhere from childhood. The preponderant magnificence of gubernatorial prestige. The fine old Howey homestead. The debonair habits of wealth. The comings and the goings of the Howeys in motor-cars, years before the Ford and the tractor had inundated the countryside with the fecundity of locusts. Shirley Howey was the first woman in the county to ride a horse astride. Loring Howey laid out a nine-hole golf-course along the left flank of his father’s estate, years before the Whittier Country Club was even dreamed of. The Howeys dressed for dinner. With the exception of Henry, a Schuyler had never owned a dress-suit.

A Howey was perennially exciting to a Schuyler, exotic, mysteriously and a little splendidly, alien.

Claire cut out Spur and Vanity Fair photographs of Shirley von Windigger, and every other imaginable snapshot of her she could lay hands on, and tried, with her own pale and fluffy hair, to imitate her sleek-groomed coiffures, and from one photograph of her, with her two little girls, charming in their Kate Greenaway dresses, proceeded to dress her own little girls in like manner.

A Schuyler just naturally revered a Howey.

Another favorite family-joke was to get Phil, who was Loring’s age, started at defending the rather notoriously black sheep of the Howey family. They had been boys together during the period of a scrum baseball-team and swimming-hole days, before Loring was shipped off to Grout’s Academy in Pennsylvania. Phil could be bitter with loyalty to Loring.

The Ex-Governor, who at eighty-seven still had the aggressive bison-like lunge of head that had crashed him through two of the most tumultuous terms in the history of the state’s legislation, was seated, the night Bek arrived on her mission, in his small study of red leather and mahogany, that was dominated by an oil-panel of himself, painted by Sargent, the year of his election to second term.

It was little more than an anteroom, and smelled of camphor and slip-covers. Except his bedroom, it was in fact, the only room there had been time to unwrap for him on the heels of his wire, announcing his coming.

The old Ex-Governor who had dined alone off a small table drawn up before the fireplace, greeted her with his inquisitive, appraising eyes, in a face more shrunken than she recalled it, but their alertness and their shrewdness undimmed by the years which had got at his body so and gnarled it.

“By Gad, Bek, you haven’t changed a hair in the last ten years,” he said, and lied gallantly and with the politician’s reflex for the diplomatic word at any price.

Bek had gained thirty pounds in that period. And knew it.

“Nor you, Governor,” she lied back. “Where do you get your own special kind of immunity from the years?”

“Don’t!” he said, with the shadow of almost his only fear flickering across the uneven surface of his face. “I’m a goner, Bek! Angina pectoris. Fatal as hell. Two years at the outside will see my finish.”

“Nonsense!”

“How’s your father?”

“Father holds his own, considering.”

“Ever get a penny out of that hound Milliken?”

“He died two years ago, intestate, so far as we were able to find out.”

“And his son?”

“One of the heaviest tax-payers in Toronto.”

“One of the orneriest scoundrels ever came out of his state.”

“They’ve made it hard sledding for us, Governor.”

“Hit the whole gang of you, eh?”

“Yes, we seem to be like that. As my brother Phil puts it, united we stood and united we fell.”

“Phil’s the third one, isn’t he? How’s he doing?”

“Well, Phil’s the kind of fellow, Governor, good head on him, but somehow always standing just on the verge of something big that never quite comes off. As a matter of fact, he hasn’t done much more than make a living since—since our—crash. But I understand he’s got some right good prospects now on some sort of an airship deal a group of Springfield business men are trying to negotiate with the Government.”

“Wish it to him. And Henry? Still trapesing along, wasting himself on a one-horse town? There’s a fellow could have brought himself and his state glory, if he’d had guts. I was never so fixed, you know that, Bek, what with conditions I had to contend with in office, that I could throw as much in his way as I’d liked to, but he knew, from me a-telling him, I’d have backed him for anything within reason.”

“Henry Schuyler, Governor, is a big tragedy to everybody in this state except himself. And, possibly—me. No man is a failure, Governor, if he has eyes that er—a—as we say it in elocution—see the glory of the coming of the dawn. Henry wouldn’t turn a hand to earn for himself some of that glory—but he sees it, all right.”

“Well, all that’s pretty fine for the hymn-books, but where’s it got him? One-horse lawyer to every two-by-four case in the county. All right for a man to sponsor the under dog, so long as he doesn’t weaken his power for helping by remaining one of the under-dogs himself.”

“Lot in what you say, Governor. Here’s Henry, who’s probably handed out back-stair wisdom in every important case in this state in the last twenty years, barely eking out a living for himself and for the fund we somehow manage to keep going among us children for the old folks, without their knowing just exactly what it is keeps them going.”

“Old Gentleman won’t stand for any out-and-out hell from his children, eh? I’ll wager that. Great character there. Stuff that the salt and the magnesia of the earth are made of. Old fellows like him are what the language manipulators, down Washington, are always referring to as the bulwarks of society.”

“If ever a man stood for just that, I guess it is Father. Pretty much of a crude proposition on the outside, but at heart, he’s the most uncompromising idealist I know. Father’s been a rich man and a poor man in his day but the one quality in him that hasn’t swerved with his fortunes is his integrity. He hasn’t got much of any thing to show for it in a worldly way, but Father’s far from a failure in my eyes. He’s lived what he believes.”

“Well,” said the Governor, with his eyes suddenly seeming to shrivel into two scars, “maybe he hasn’t got much of anything to show for the years, and maybe he has. At least he hasn’t got a brace of sons that have taken his life’s blood. You don’t need me to tell you Bek, the pretty penny my two boys have cost me since the day they were born, to say nothing of—of—keeping one of them out of penitentiary.”

Bek didn’t. Her knowing it so well, and his referring to it at this time, made what she had come to ask the harder.

“I understand Governor, indeed I do. No, Father’s not had what you’d call a particularly brilliant brood of us, but—well—our boys have spared father much of what you’ve been through.”

“Spared. Your father has a fine bunch of men to show. How’s the after-thought the Old Gentleman sprung on us some years back? That boy ought to be along in his teens now.”

“Davey’s—let me see—going on eighteen——”

“You don’t tell me! Lord, don’t a fellow ever get old enough to get over surprise at the way time sneaks up on him. I remember meeting the Old Gentleman down at the bank, day or two after the boy was born—‘Hi, Schuyler,’ I said to him, ‘hear you been doin’ some tardy propagatin’ of this here vale of tears. Don’t you know there’s a birth-control bill up in this state?’ ‘Birth-control,’ barks the Old Gentleman, ‘birth-control poppycock! All that’s the matter with propagation is the quality. More and better propagation is my slogan.’ There’s a card for you, if ever there was one. ‘More and better propagation,’ he says to me. ‘Well, sir, I hope that last kid is more and better propagatin’.’”

“Davey—well, Dave’s a peculiar child, Governor. Coming along as he did, so long after the rest of us—growing up alone, you might say—Mother, bless her heart, treating him more like a grandchild than one of her own, most of his uncles and nieces twice his age, war coming along right in the middle of his childhood, Father’s reverses, well—somehow, never has seemed to me Dave’s had a ghost of a chance.”

“You mean he isn’t ...”

“Oh, he’s got the levelest head of any child you ever saw. Good bit of a dreamer, too. Dave’s the kind of a child you can’t tell much about while he’s growing up, and, all of a sudden, he turns out to be—a something or just—just a kind of nothing. Know what I mean Governor?”

“You mean, if he’s a dog, he’s a dog, or if he’s leopard, the spots haven’t come through yet?”

“Sort of. I just mean Dave’s what you might call still-water in a way, but I’ve the feeling about him that he not only runs deep, but that he runs wide. A regular little Mississippi.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Well, I guess you might say, not much of anything That is—I think what I have just been telling you is why Dave isn’t doing more than he is in a—a regular sort of way, I mean. Dave’s had no schooling to speak of but Henry’s influence, I always say, is more than a college certificate. Dave’s got curiosity, Governor. ‘Intellectual curiosity,’ Henry labels it. Nothing satisfies that boy short of learning everything there is to know about everything.”

“What did you say he’s doing now?”

“Oh, well—truth of it is—Dave’s just around the farm yet. No job in the regular sense. The Igrotte place isn’t much more than kitchen garden, but—well it’s just as I say, Governor, Davey hasn’t had the deal the rest of us children had. He just growed, like Topsy. Father’s needing him most of the time for herding and chores. Course he’s had Henry. Even without what you might call proper schooling, that’s an influence not one boy in a thousand comes under.”

“Great deal in what you say.”

“Except that Henry’s not what you’d call, in this age we live in, much of a live-wire. It’s made Davey kinda what you’d call a stagnant little fellow. Hope to goodness it don’t mean he’s going through life thataway. It’s the wrong age to be born into, if you’re slow-going. But unless I miss my bet, Dave’s the kind that spends his time growing cone-shaped, and then watch your cyclone. Not that I mean—well, I guess about all I can out-and-out say to your question, Governor, is that, at present, Dave’s tinkering around the farm.”

“Humph!”

“Just the same, his information for a boy is surprising. He can tell you the distance of a star or recite the Fourteen Points, or, all of a sudden, tell you something out of Greek literature. He’s got one of those curious combinations of conservatism and imagination, if you get what I mean.”

“Humph! Guess you’re about the pick of the crowd, Bek.”

She sat before him, with the scarf fallen back from her large, capable face, her hair with the gray in it straggling a little from under the plait of it on top of her head, and her square hands clamping down tightly on each knee.

“Coming to that. Fact is, at this moment, I’m the failure of the family, Governor,” she said, forcing his gaze to meet hers, squarely, “and you know why.”

“I’ve never talked over our business arrangements with you, Bek, knowing that’s all fixed between you and my overseer, but you know that I know, from what he tells me, that you’ve done as well with High Ridge as anybody could—considering two droughts, hoof-and-mouth disease, and bad crop-conditions the last five years—all things considered——”

How shrewd he was. As if he had not scanned to the penny the detailed fidelities of her annual reports. He knew to precisely what extent the High Ridge was a going-concern, and to what extent its expert first-hand control had enabled it to yield richly on his investment Sly old rogue. He knew, and his old eyes slid under her square gaze for the moment, but she captured them fast again with her own.

“All things considered. You mean High Ridge hasn’t paid?”

“Not exactly that——”

“I can show you, Governor, a five-per-cent yield even on your war years.”

“Five per cent to a man who makes his money earn almost twice that, isn’t such a hell of a good investment my dear Bek, if you’ll pardon my ‘hell’.”

“As a matter of fact, Governor, the average of the last four years had been considerably over that, if you figure——”

“In total, perhaps, but the alfalfa fiasco——”

“You know how I advised against that.”

“Whatever the situation was—and mind you, in any other hands than yours, there is no doubt but what the case would have been much worse—the total results from the farm haven’t yet averaged a particularly good return for my money.”

He lied down her own knowledge of her own figure without as much as the batting of an old crocodile eyelid, and lying, knew that she knew he lied.

“You’ve averaged over six per cent on your money,” she repeated, standing her ground with a cold and even voice.

“Wrong, there. Can show you the figures. What with the cost of upkeep. Now if we could cut down on the expense of operation——”

So that was what made the old Governor so cagey. Fear that she had come to demand an increase.

“Governor, you feeling as you do, listen to this. Here’s a proposition. I’ll buy the place back.”

“Eh?”

“I’ll pay you seven per cent on your money.”

With the lightning perception that his great age had not dimmed, he saw his trap almost before she had the words out, and with the same lightning perception, saw its cunning mesh.

What a woman! Damn fine shrewd old girl. Should have been a man. Worth the whole bunch put together. And as the situation flowed over him, he began to laugh until his bent old figure rippled along his blue brocade dressing-gown.

“So! So!”

“With that three-acre triangle just below Algahr’s, and not counting the artesian well in the drilling, and the two tractors on order, and the electric milkers, I’ll pay you—forty thousand dollars. Exactly twenty-five per cent more than the last mortgages I held from you on practically the same property. The matter of the slightly above the usual six per cent will be a private matter between you and me. Six-year term of mortgage, subject to extension for same period.”

“By Gad, I——”

“It’s my land, Governor. That farm’s my child. My very roots are down in that soil. That’s why, since I’ve lost the land, it has been as if an arm or a leg of mine were buried somewhere, and keeps hurting even though it is no longer part of me.”

A curious, half-fanatical flame crept along Bek’s face.

“Sell me back my farm, Governor,” she said, and thrust her burning countenance closer and closer to his vision. “You’ve so much land. To you, land is just so much income. So many bushels of wheat. So many heads of cattle. So many mowing-machines to make it yield. But land, to me—that land, of that farm, to me—it’s a bosom breathing, Governor!”

“Come, come, now, Bek. Not like you to talk business on a woman-basis. That’s woman-bosh. If this farm that you know from A to Z is worth that much to you why isn’t it worth that much to me?”

“I’m glad you asked that Governor, because I can tell you why. It’s because, with all the conscientiousness in the world, I can’t make it worth that much to you. Why? Because I’ve lost the creative thing in me that made me mother to that farm. I’m just its wet-nurse now. God knows, I’ve given you just about one hundred and one cents on the dollar, Governor. No glory to me but just on the principle that I’d go the limit for a child of mine, even though I’d given it out to another family for adoption. But just the same, Governor, I’ve lost the fire in me that made me the creator of that farm. I can’t fight for her while she’s not all mine. It’s not in me. I’m hired. Sell me back my farm, Governor?”

“You are prepared to buy a forty-thousand-dollar farm?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

She looked at him, aware that her face must be pulled to reveal a terrible state of eagerness which she did not want revealed to him.

“Right big business, Bek. Forty-thousand-dollar deal! What’s your proposition?”

“I’ve given it to you.”

“In detail?”

“I’ll pay you out, Governor, barring the first year for breathing-space, on any—any conditions as to time and amount you think—fair.”

“How much down?”

She captured his gaze again, squarely to the center of his eyeballs.

“Come now, Governor.”

“Fair question.”

“Nothing—down.”

He drew on a beautifully colored but draughty old meerschaum pipe, with two ivory antelopes with locked horns on its hump, and laughed softly, so that the brocade rippled again.

“You’re the best business man in this room, Bek.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised, Governor.”

That tickled him more, so that he laughed out into a high thin, very old man’s cackle.

“But it takes even a smarter man than you to get curd-and-whey out of water.”

“You’ve nothing to lose, Governor, by taking a chance on my legerdemain.”

“Why haven’t I?” he barked.

“Why, if I don’t meet my obligations—the mortgage is in your hands—as before——”

“So you propose to meet those obligations on a zero foundation?”

“The moment I become even theoretic owner of my farm once more, my foundation ceases to be zero.”

“How do you mean?”

“I’m a Samson shorn of my locks now, Governor. I’m tied hand and foot. I’m a hired-hand.”

“Who tied you?”

“You, Governor. Not in so many words; but with somebody else’s property, one goes safety-first. I’ve had half a dozen schemes in the last five years I’d have put into practice, if I’d been risking on my own. On one of my schemes alone, I’d be in a small fortune now. I’d have gone in for sheep-raising on a new scale hereabouts. I’ve an experimental-dairy idea that’s been brewing for years. I see money in alfalfa. Not under the conditions you made me plant three years ago, but according to my own theories. Remember, I wired you and you vetoed? I’ve an idea up my sleeve that’ll turn those acres of corn-fields into quick-turn-over money. Experimental, perhaps, but a person will experiment with his own, when he won’t take a chance for another.”

“Something in that.”

“As long as I’m working for you, Governor, I’ll give you the best there is in me. But the very best isn’t there. I’m a dead thing. My vision and my imagination and my courage are in my shoes. Sell me back my land, Governor. Take a sporting-chance on me and I won’t fail you.”

“I won’t live to see whether you do or not,” he said, drily, his eyes going dull, as if they were mirrors and someone had breathed on them.

“Sell me back my land, Governor. It’s part of my state. It’s part of my country. It’s part of me.”

“Don’t know but what I will,” drawled the Ex-Governor and sat back in his leather chair and pulled hard on his pipe with the two ivory antelopes. “Rotten bad business tactics, but, by Gad—don’t know but what I will, Bek.”