Chapter Thirty-two

Every evening, after supper, Winslow started at carving his picture-frames out of an excellent grade of soft white pine that, for fifteen years, Bek had purchased from a lumber-dealer in Middleton. It was scarcely a purchase, but a trade in the literal sense. A two-gallon crock of Bek’s piccalilli could keep Winslow supplied in picture-frame lumber for a year.

There was something grateful about the litter of wood-carving and the slithering little noise of the sharp knife rushing down into the pine and the clean, dry smell that rose off.

Over her account-books, at the green-baize desk in the corner of the dining-room, wanting her farm back, scheming for her farm back, contriving for her farm back, or poring over farm journals, with that same eye to winning her farm back, or darning heels of socks and stockings over the ridge of a great wooden ball, as she dreamed of winning her farm back, Bek liked the consciousness of Winslow, pipe drooping low, and absorbed in turning a difficult corner in the wood, or scooping out an ailanthus leaf.

Leslie liked it, too. He would sit among the litter of the curly white chips, splashing among them and letting the shavings cling to his beardless chin.

There was something so dreadful to Bek in this last. Leslie simulating manhood. She wondered if Winslow ever noticed, and contrived not to let him.

Sometimes Winslow leaned over to bestow upon Leslie a particularly handsome shaving. With sufficient of these he could weave a garland for his mother, which he placed across her brow as she sat at work, giving her the look of a tipsy Cæsar.

Dozens of Winslow’s water-colors, prettily framed in the carved, gilded, and sometimes polychromed woods of his handiwork, adorned the walls of the house; and the attic-studio was hung in three rows of them, that touched edge on edge.

The copse of willows behind the barn, in every conceivable mood and perspective and light and shadow. The cow-pond, with Howey Holsteins standing knee-deep, in study after study of the same quiescence, same shadows draped painstakingly into their flanks and down into the water that opened about their knees. The distant rise of the hills that sloped toward the Igrotte house, with the magenta tinges woven into the purples, that no one in the family would dare admit never being able to discern. South Meadow in bright clover. The slant of red roof to old Jessup’s shanty, showing through the stripes of the plane-tree boles. Sheep, at evening, meandering homeward, with their heads low. There was always a human figure injected somewhat timidly into these. A lanky gawk of a herdsman, with little more than the scissors-like attitude of the legs to distinguish him from the tree-boles. Indeed, the casual observer was scarcely able to discern at all this lone foray of Winslow’s into the realm of human anatomy. To Winslow himself, this figure was Dave, to the eyelash.

The year that David was born, a water-color of Jessup’s red roof, seen through the tree-boles, had been sold from the window of Hessy’s art-store in Middleton, to a Sandusky bride and groom on their honeymoon. Eleven-seventy-five, framed. Ten per cent commission. On the strength of it, one or another of Winslow’s had hung in that window ever since. Every Christmas, Bek sent a two-gallon offering of apple-butter to the Hessys. And at Thanksgiving, a jar of mincemeat. But the Sandusky bride and groom remained Winslow’s sole patrons. Dozens of his efforts adorned walls of Whittier and Wayne Counties. Birthday, wedding, Christmas, and anniversary gifts from the Winslow Renchlers. And meanwhile, undaunted in output, Winslow’s power of production went on. There were rows of his pictures, in framed stacks, with newspaper in between, on the floor and shelves of practically every cupboard in the house.

Winslow still painted away the major portion of each day, the same technique, perspective, foreground, horizon, chiaroscuro, overtones, scale, proportion, continuing to absorb him for long, squint-eyed periods over the top of a horizontal pencil.

Paula, who now taught history and first-year botany in Cleveland; belonged to a little-theater movement, and was secretary and treasurer of a large teachers’ organization known as The Scribes, once winked at her mother across the top of a sheep-and-landscape her father was showing her, upon one of her Easter visits home. Such a scorching flame of anger and rebuke had leaped into Bek’s face, that Paula’s air of indulgence toward her father’s work had been promptly nipped in the bud.

For over a period of twenty-two years, Bek had not seen to the impregnability of Winslow’s art against any possible family-facetiousness, only to have Paula wink it down.

Even the Old Gentleman, torn between secretly despising the non-producer and admiring Winslow because he was Bek’s choice, continued, in the years that one or another of Winslow’s water-colors had been gathering dust in Hessy’s window, to refer to his “artist” son-in-law.

Yes, Bek saw to that. Fiercely. Her subtle classification of Winslow held. Centralia, the family, the county, nailed by Bek’s glittering eyes, came gradually to take Winslow at her valuation of him. A woman who marries an artist, she was fond of saying a little proudly, must learn to cope with nerves and temperament. Once you understand them, geniuses are the most lovable creatures in the world.

To listen to Bek, Winslow was that. A genius. Too indifferent to the world to reach out a hand to stay its heedless passing-by. A recluse. An inspired eccentric. Unappreciated by his contemporaries, but posterity to be his beneficiary.

Bek aided and abetted this psychology of her own building. Winslow’s bottle-green velveteen coats, soft collars, and flowing ties were not his preference. On the contrary, in the beginning he had demurred.

“These long ties are a nuisance, Bek! They flutter and get in a fellow’s mouth while he’s trying to paint.”

Bek knew better. They were not in the way of the special dispensation of public opinion that she sought for him, and missed but by an ell.

Even Paula, who belonged to the little-theater group in Cleveland that produced Synge, and who sent Christmas-gifts of Jurgen to her friends, returned from those Easter holidays with a couple of her father’s framed landscapes in the top of her trunk.

One evening, in the large cretonned room in a “private house” that she shared with another school-teacher, she removed the chafing-dish from the cretonne-covered top of her trunk, unearthed them, and began showing them around as some “rather good bits of Dad’s.”

A young secretary of a philanthropic organization and a teacher of English in a High School regarded them with squints and slants, and secretly nudged each other.

Paula sensed rather than saw the nudges and with some of her mother’s stubborn kind of indomitability hung one on each side of her dressing-table, but with discretion, so that they were out of line of vision of her roommate, who knew a Monet from a Manet.

Sometimes, covertly watching Winslow over the top of her mending or reading, a sense of the security into which her vigilance had tucked him, smote Bek with some of the warm thrill of gratefulness she felt when regarding Leslie. The sweep of her passion for Winslow had probably never been more or less than just that. He was someone whom she had tucked into the cove of her heart, to protect there, justify, elevate to a plane that however make-believe it might have been, was not make-believe to Bek.

Then, too, there was the curious compatibility of their opposing temperaments. His fastidiousness. His recoil from the sweaty chores to which she bent her wide and willing shoulders. His inability to cope with the conflicts in which she reveled. His spiritual distaste for barter, where she moved quick and sure through stockyard, cattle-pen, and sty, keeping to the shrewd side of the bargain. In Winslow, was something preciously apart. Hers. To be kept in its cotton wadding; to be mounted as you mount a jewel against the proper background.

It was the mother twice over, who sat these evenings, wanting back her farm, while her husband whittled, and Leslie, her perpetual baby-son, grown now, sat among the shavings, fashioning garlands with which he fantastically bound all three of their brows.

The lean years of servitude to the Howeys had squared Bek’s face and grayed her hair. The lean years had scarcely touched those two there. Thank God! Nor Paula, who had flown the nest wisely and soon. Nor Steve. Again, thank God! Thank God! Safe in a nest of his own feathering.

How securely she had kept the world of mean detail from Winslow’s reckoning. His face, with the soft smile, would have been a jerked and nervous face had she not kept it tranquil. His long, facile hands that she loved for recoiling at the chores she could tackle. His soft, fastidious air of isolation from the barn-and-sty—worlds through which she sometimes stalked knee-deep.

Bek would no more have permitted Winslow to behold her breaking open the mouth of a horse in the cattle-marts, or bartering in the clinical phraseology of the cattle-pen over bull or stallion or sow.

A secret sense of spiritual refinement at being the wife of an artist had been awake in Bek from the first, when as the smart, eldest Schuyler girl, she had gone off to Middleton one morning, with Henriette Simpson for companion and witness, and barn-and-sty worlds married Winslow Renchler, son of a Presbyterian minister up Ideola way, who, at twenty-six, had never done anything more than clerk in a haberdashery by day and dabble away his evenings in a rigged-up studio over his father’s barn.

There had always been, to Bek, something a little Robert Louis Stevensonian about Winslow in appearance. The nervous kind of slenderness. The white, thin-skinned æsthete’s brow. The full, rather beautiful lips, behind a brown mustache. Winslow had first pointed out the likeness. After that, she read Treasure Island and hung a print of Stevenson in the parlor.

There was so much one could do for Winslow.

Now with Paula, it had been so different. If there seemed to be between Bek and Paula a certain outward incompatibility, it was probably because of the too perfect similarity of the two. At bottom, there existed a passionate admiration of each for the other’s power of dominance. In spite of it, they clashed constantly. Paula made no evasion of the fact that life in the same house with her mother was impossible for her. Their wills met and tilted. Since she had been seventeen, and out of Centralia Normal School, they had lived at sufficient distance to keep those strong wills in respectful leash in the comparatively brief periods of Paula’s vacation-visits home.

There was so little one could do for Paula, who was so capable of doing for herself.

With Steve, it had been different. No one but Bek would ever know how much there had been to do for him.

For Winslow, sitting there in the lamplight, at his whittling, there had been so much to do. So much! And for Leslie.

Regarding her twenty-year-old son, with his delicate, listening, beardless face, and the look he had of knowing minute, woodland things, there was the old streak of pain across her heart, that could feel to her exactly as if it were bleeding. And then, combined with it, a secret sort of exultation that shamed her.

He needed her so.[53] She still undressed him at night, and sat on his bed-edge to tell him his choice of the legend of the Golden Fleece, the story of Esau, Peter Pan, and a folderol chant about Chanticleer which ended in a loud crowing that invariably sent Leslie off into long and repetitious mimicry. He played a flute, one that Winslow had improvised for him out of a reed, down where the cattails grew. He came crying to Bek when it became clogged, even though it was his father who had fashioned it. He cried to her when it rained, and looked to her to cause the sun to shine. She did, by a contrivance of electric light with a reflector behind, which she had rigged up in the attic, against the curious effect of depression and actually impaired digestion, which weather had upon him.

There was a tune, a concoction of her own that still sent him off on his afternoon nap, his hand in hers. She knew his sometimes bafflingly inarticulate names for favorite trees, and his bird-calls, and could sit patiently on the outside of the minute woodland life that could cause him to break into soft and private laughter.

How snug he was in that strange world where the tragedy of her life had tucked him. Sometimes, when her thighs flamed of fatigue, and the world of accounts and hoof-and-mouth disease and locust-scourge and drought, and the constant carping grief for her farm was too much with her, again and again the consolation of this thought smote and half-shamed her.

How secure Leslie was in the world back there in the hinterlands of maturity, in the land of fantasy from where he had never crossed the frontier into reality.

Leslie, whose eyelids were still hung with the shining scales of illusion. How safe he was from the realities that could beset and become grotesque, when she woke at night to find them sitting on her chest. Realities like her chronic dread of Winslow’s deep-seated lungy cough. The never quite realizable calamity that the farm was no longer hers. Her parents scrimping themselves into old age. Paula, whom she loved, so strangely remote in her associations and preferences. That blighted potato-crop. Life-insurance policy to be met. (Heaven knew how.) Phil’s apparent inability to regain his business feet. Strangely persistent adversity. His first years had shown such business promise. Rita was looking peaked, too. Was another baby coming? Of course, it would be fine if the doctors had been wrong—except for the strain—the financial millstone that seemed around the neck of the family. Sometimes Clara, off in St. Louis, on the modest certainty of Sam’s salary, seemed best off of all. But with her children growing up—what prospects, what future? All the panorama of these realities could seem so grotesque at night, or rather toward morning, when she awoke, as was her wont, of a heaviness at her chest. The squatting realities. David, a curiously thoughtful boy in his slow, observant way. What private panorama moved behind his square, calm imperturbability of face? If any? Was the lethargy into which David seemed locked just inertia that characterized the type of boy slow to get his bearings? Or was he the kind of boy, almost extinct now, who would stick to the farm? Or was here another Henry? Dreamer. Yearner. Spectator. Idealist. Genius? Failure? Or just David. Any boy. Good boy. Slow boy. Thoughtful, deep, rather intellectual boy.

The peaked expression that for the first time was coming through her father’s face! That sunken area about the mouth. Almost the way he was going to look in his coffin. Ugh!

But it was only in that curiously corpselike hour before dawn that such drearily hopeless thoughts could beset her. Sitting there over her accounts that evening, Bek was scheming and contriving. And now, after secret years of the slowly planned project, the sudden return of old Governor Howey from two years abroad, had ripened the plan into action.

“I’m going to walk over to the Howey farm, Winslow. And see the Governor,” she said, slapping a last account-book shut and pushing back from her desk.

“Better let the old man get his travel dust off, hadn’t you?” he replied, without glancing up from his whittling.

“He’s been home two days. Besides, I need to see him.”

“I suppose he’s holding you to an accounting for your loose management,” said Winslow with an elaborate gravity.

“Why should he?”

“Oh, I thought he might be inclined to fire you for a more competent overseer.”

“Stranger things have happened,” she said, getting his point and smiling back at him.

“Maybe, but not much,” said Winslow, whittling away on a staff of long, white-pine.

“The Governor has early supper same as always,” said Bek, winding a knitted scarf over her head. “I’ll get there just about as he’s finishing. It’s as good a time as any to buttonhole a man you’ve business with. Thursday’s corned-beef night at the Howeys, and if I do say it, I’ve never corned finer for them than the piece he’ll be cutting into this evening.”

It was a good two miles to the Howey place, over country it would never have occurred to her to fear. Country which she had stalked, after dark, times too countless to record. And yet she stood waiting, wanting Winslow to fear for her. Wanting to be worried over. Secretly resenting not being feared for, and yet everything, in her bearing, forbidding solicitude.

“Think I’ll need a lantern, Win? Looks like snow.”

“Nonsense! There may be a flurry of sleet, but it won’t amount to much. There’s a moon due in an hour.”

She walked over and kissed Leslie on his long, palish brow.

“Mother will be back in a little while, Leslie, to put you to bed.”

He held up a half-finished garland to crown her.

“Father says there’s a moon tonight, Leslie. I’ll tell you the fairies-and-elves story when I come back. Bank up the furnace, Win, but keep the third flue open. Never mind! I’ll go down and attend to it myself, on my way out.”

She left them puttering among the shavings and at whittling in the warmly lit dining-room.

In the basement, the coals made a rumbling noise as she dove in with her shovel and lugged and relugged more shovels of them to the greedy, red mouth of the furnace.

“Don’t bank her up too tight, Bek,” called Winslow through the dining-room register. “Shouldn’t be surprised if, after all, we do have a flurry of snow.”

“Yes? Then maybe I’d better not—go?”

There was no answer to her pause, because Winslow, who had been at the window to peer, was out in the pantry pouring himself cider into a pewter mug.

“Oh, Win——”

“Yes?”

“Think I’d better not venture? Don’t think I’m apt to be caught, do you?”

“Nonsense, you won’t mind a flurry, even if it comes.”

“No—I won’t mind—but if you’re going to worry about me——”

“Be sure and leave us plenty of heat, Bek.”

“Yes.”

Outside, a half-clear and listening kind of night met her, the same lowering beauty of snow-cloud edged in sunset that hung over David and Dora as they dallied together further along the same road. A moon, about to rise out of the cloud-mass, cast its brilliance ahead in a rim of silver.

There was a hog, with a rip along its flank from an encounter with a barbed-wire fence, to be glanced at as she passed down the cinder-path to the open road; and, for the life of her, Bek could not pass a barn door without a dragging-back of bolts for a precautionary look-in.

A chorus of whinnies met her, and the lowing sound of bulls. There was a new mare, with a vicious snapping-habit, standing muzzled in her stall. She loosened the strap slightly and rubbed a flank or two as she passed along.

It was full-dark, with the moon slid like a coin into a slot of cloud, as she fiercely struck her pace out on the road. A swinging pace as free as a man’s, and with her heart beating high from the excitement of her purpose, the cold air beat against her face and left it flaming.

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